TPM argues theirs is not a conventional party, being focused primarily on the candidate vote in the seven Māori seats.
Even on that measure, its record is mixed. Two years ago, it romped home with 76% of the vote in Waiariki. But across the other six Māori seats, TPM secured less than half the candidate vote.
In Te Tai Tokerau, Tāmaki Makaurau and Ikaroa-Rāwhiti, TPM won only around 40% of the candidate vote – and this in its best-ever election result overall.
More often, TPM gets under 2% of the total party vote, and less than 10% of those identifying as Māori.
Even in the Māori electorates’ candidate races, it has won majorities only in 2008 and 2023. With its six-member caucus now divided three-all, it would be a miracle if it happens again.
While Labour failed spectacularly to get out its vote in last month’s Tāmaki Makaurau by-election, TPM didn’t do much better, with turnout plunging below a third. In a general election, history suggests Labour can be confident of doing much better.
Now, after attempts to suspend at least one MP, the TPM dispute is heading to the courts.
For Labour leader Chris Hipkins – currently beleaguered by shambolic policy releases – any formalisation of TPM’s split is the best news he could hope for. Its remaining voters aren’t headed for National or Act but primarily to Labour and the Greens.
Combined, those two are now polling materially ahead of National and Act and a few more points from TPM would put a Labour-Green alliance closer to governing alone.
More importantly, TPM dropping out of the script defuses the current coalition’s planned fear campaign against its role in a second Hipkins Government.
Labour strategists had indicated Hipkins was close to publicly ruling out a formal governing arrangement with TPM, but would accept its votes on confidence and supply. TPM’s existential troubles are increasingly making that academic. Like everyone else, including the overwhelming majority of Māori voters, Labour can sit back and watch TPM’s meltdown unfold.
While upsetting the Greens and the Labour left, Hipkins is clearly following the usual MMP script of tacking to the centre and operating a small-target strategy. With finance spokeswoman Barbara Edmonds, his model is unmistakably more a Clark-Cullen Government than a repeat of the failed Ardern-Robertson experiment.
Helen Clark and Sir Michael Cullen were always extremely wary of the Greens, even ruling out forming a coalition with them in 2002 over their opposition to genetic engineering. In 2005, the Greens missed out again, with Clark preferring the support of NZ First and Peter Dunne’s United Future.
But, if Hipkins is unenthusiastic about working with TPM co-leader Rawiri Waititi, he’s not that much more enamoured with Greens co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick, now digging ever deeper down an omni-cause rabbit hole.
When Swarbrick complained about Labour’s new Clayton’s capital gains tax (CGT), Hipkins was quick to put her in her place, saying Labour and Edmonds would control fiscal policy under any future Labour-Green Government and there would be no deviation from his stated tax policy.
He was not “a complete pushover”, he said.
“You don’t have to be like Christopher Luxon: roll over and let Winston Peters and David Seymour tickle your tummy.”
In fact, Hipkins is only half right. Concessions by Labour and National to NZ First are necessary but Hipkins understands that parties like the Greens, Act and – if it came to it – today’s TPM have nowhere to go.
Unlike Luxon with Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill, there would be no concessions to the Greens on anything material. That’s especially true given how far left Swarbrick and her co-leader, Marama Davidson, have positioned their party.
“Well, I’m sorry you think I’m being intransigent,” Hipkins could say, “and I am. But if you’re that unhappy, I guess you could always try your luck with Act and the Nats.”
Hopefully, Luxon has finally learnt the same lesson with respect to Act, assuming he has a chance to negotiate a second coalition deal with Seymour and Brooke van Velden, who played the self-proclaimed mergers and acquisitions expert so skilfully in 2023.
Peters and Hipkins have publicly ruled out working with the other after the next election but such declarations are always more performative than substantive.
Peters has also always committed to respecting how the votes fall and negotiating accordingly. For his part, Hipkins, like Clark and Sir John Key, knows the benefits of a prime minister having options to both their left and right when governing.
Whether or not it is good for New Zealand that Hipkins and Edmonds are mimicking Clark and Key by operating a small-target strategy and focusing on the median voter is another question entirely.
The left-wing critique of their CGT proposal – that it is not much more than the old brightline test, won’t raise much if any revenue and certainly won’t radically change behaviour – is not without merit.
Critics on the right equally have a strong point when they attack the plan to spend most or all of the money on goodies for the median voter and everyone else rather than using any revenue to reduce New Zealand’s locked-in, long-term deficits.
In any case, it just isn’t true there is a genuine link between the proposed CGT and Labour’s promise to fund three free doctor’s visits for everyone each year.
If house prices don’t increase, the CGT won’t raise any money. If they fall, the CGT risks costing the Government money in tax rebates. Either way, we’ll all still get our free doctor’s visits, whether we need them or not.
Linking the two is just PR, in the same way Key linked floating shares in energy companies to capital spending on infrastructure with his so-called but in fact non-existent “Future Investment Fund”. Likewise, Robertson never had a “Covid Recovery Fund”.
In more ways than one, then, Hipkins isn’t offering much more than MMP politics-as-usual, with the same handouts that the median voter has come to know and love so much over the last couple of decades.
Catch up on the debates that dominated the week by signing up to our Opinion newsletter – a weekly round-up of our best commentary.
