Chris Luxon’s car flub this week is why the National Party is still polling neck and neck with Labour.
It’s obviously not just that single incident. It’s because that incident keeps repeating.
National should be polling well ahead of Labour given what the governing party’s fighting: rising grocery bills,rising power bills, dropping house prices, rising mortgage rates, Labour forcing through its unpopular policies.
And yet the parties remain close in the polls. Talbot Mills has National on 35 per cent, only one point ahead of Labour on 34 per cent. The Taxpayer’s Union-Curia poll has National on 38 per cent, only three points ahead. The Newshub-Reid Research Poll that put National on 41 per cent - nine points ahead of Labour’s 32 per cent - feels like a rogue, again.
Chris Luxon personally polls much lower than Jacinda Ardern. That’s expected. PMs mostly outpoll their rivals. But his trend is the problem. He’s going backwards. From a high of 28 per cent mid-year, he’s slipped back to around 21 per cent.
National and Luxon make voters nervous. His flub this week is a case in point.
In a regular telly appearance this week he let slip that, if National won the election, it would keep the Government’s clean car discount scheme (the ute tax and Tesla subsidies). That was a surprise. National has railed against it.
Later, he clarified that he’d misspoken. National would still repeal the clean car discount scheme. But then he let slip it would keep the clean car standard scheme (the pinging-car-importers-for-dirty cars scheme). That’s also a surprise. National has railed against that too.
Confusing the names of the two schemes is not a biggie. Accidentally revealing a u-turn is a bit bigger.
That’ll make voters who want a change of government feel nervous. Especially, because it’s not Luxon’s first flip-flop on policy. He’s done the same on the co-governance referendum and the ankle bracelets for 10-year-olds. National has billboards promising to repeal Three Waters, but admitted this week it doesn’t have a policy on what replaces it.
Constant flip-flopping and uncertainty warns voters that National is still firming up its real position and so everything they’ve said previously might be changed. It causes voters to wonder, if National has changed its mind on clean car standards, what else has it changed its mind on?
Voters can’t answer that question. National has revealed barely any policy.
For voters hurt by Labour’s reforms in the last five years, the stakes are too high to take a chance on an uncertain National. Farmers and landlords and employers battered by Labour will not simply trust it to be different to Labour. If they can’t be sure, they will reward Act or others.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Photo / Mark Mitchell
It’s fair enough that National doesn’t want to release policy yet. Any good ideas could be nicked by a Government desperately short of popular ideas. Any expensive policies could be priced out by Grant Robertson using all the money in next year’s Budget.
It’s also not unusual that an opposition party keeps its powder dry this far out from an election. But what normally happens is that voters can fill in the blanks with what they think the party will do based on its principles. The trouble is Luxon is so new in the job and National’s swung so wildly from Bridges-conservatism to Muller-liberalism to Collins-extremism that voters don’t even know the principles. They’re confused.
National’s plan seems to be to release policy early next year. That means the party has only another five weeks of business and probably two or three flat-lining polls to survive this year. They’re clearly working on it. This week’s populist boot camps policy is a case in point. More of that kind of red-meat policy should push the polls up.
But come next year, they’ll want to be very clear about what they will repeal and what they will keep. If they aren’t, they risk turning a gimme election into a tight election.
