Its first
year has been a tough one. Voters will make up their own minds about some of the tougher and more obviously unpopular policy decisions the Government has taken, including cancelling the iRex ferry replacement project, scaling back the new Dunedin Hospital rebuild, trimming the deficit at Health NZ, and cutting spending across the public service. But it was probably wise from a political management perspective for the coalition to frontload the bad news, clearing ground for green shoots to emerge closer to the election.
Act leader David Seymour was also right to point out to 1News that given the current economic climate, tonight’s lukewarm, six-seat margin for the Government isn’t actually anything to sniff at, given how closely support for the Government tends to track economic sentiment. The election isn’t being fought on the economy of 2024, but the economy of 2026, when according to several key metrics, things are likely to be far better than they are today.
The Reserve Bank’s most recent Monetary Policy Statement (already superseded) forecasts continued rate cuts. There’s nothing quite like low interest rates and rising house prices to ease an incumbent Government back into office and on current forecasts, the coalition will have a convenient monetary policy tailwind in 2026.
Today’s numbers are much closer than they appear – and this should concern the coalition.
NZ First at 5% is sitting on the 5% threshold, which is dangerous not just for the party, but for the coalition. A plausible worst-case scenario for the coalition would be for NZ First to slip ever so slightly, crashing out of Parliament and taking 4% of the vote with it.
If this were to happen, whoever were to snatch that 1 point of votes from NZ First would win the election.
The opposition has an inbuilt advantage here in that Te Pāti Māori is almost guaranteed to win an electorate seat and therefore enter Parliament, something NZ First has struggled to do recently. If the opposition were especially lucky, Te Pāti Māori would trigger an overhang, handing it an additional advantage of an extra seat.
The 5% threshold means a vast sloshing of votes from right to left isn’t required to change the Government — only a fraction.
It still seems more likely than not that were NZ First to get unlucky in 2026, the coalition parties would probably be the biggest winners. The NZ First voters of 2023, which elected a party that campaigned on an unprecedented ruling-out of Labour based on its policies around co-governance, seem unlikely to prop up a leftwing coalition propped up by Te Pāti Māori and the Greens.
The leaders of both major parties need to reflect on their Chris-tastrophic drop of 3% in the preferred Prime Minister poll, with National’s Christopher Luxon falling to 25% and Labour’s Chris Hipkins falling to 15%.
After decades of relatively popular leaders in at least one of the major parties (from Clark to Ardern), we appear to be entering an era where both the contenders for the office of Prime Minister are viewed with little enthusiasm by the electorate.
In Luxon’s case, he appears to have difficulty explaining the Government’s harder decisions with the ease some of his predecessors had. Decisions around spending cuts, particularly in health and education, are always going to be unpopular on their own, but they needn’t dent the Government’s popularity in the way they appear to have done here.
In the midst of the fairly serious fiscal problem in which the Government finds itself, there is a case for trimming spending to ensure those services are sustainable in the long term (if, that is, the electorate decides it does not want to pay more tax to fund them).
Former National Party leader Sir John Key had a gift for making convincing arguments in favour of unpopular things, defending unpopular positions on high minimum wage hikes, asset sales (an issue on which he lost a referendum), smacking (again, on which his position was on the losing side of a referendum), and zero budgets. The only thing Key appeared unable to explain was his vexillological poor taste. Along with his most immediate predecessor Helen Clark, he proved that explaining isn’t always losing – in fact, if you’re able to explain why your opponent’s policy stinks, explaining can be winning too.
Alas for Luxon, his pre-programmed answers to questions, which occasionally reduce his interactions with the press gallery to a game of human bop it, seem to lack the explaining gift, and his polling, it would appear, is suffering for it.
