Labour will need to get up, dust itself off, and get in the fight again quickly, because the incoming government is going to be pushing some policies that will really hurt ordinary Kiwis.
As the votes are tallied, it looks like New Zealanders have deliveredChristopher Luxon his long-held dream — emphatically.
Luxon entered politics with the purpose of becoming prime minister and, at the time of writing, it looks like National will have the numbers to put him on that pedestal.
Expect Act to target the education portfolio but to be most focused on policy wins — David Seymour doesn’t necessarily want too many of his untested MPs having ministerial warrants.
Having the excuse of “Act made me do it” will be very convenient for Luxon and Nicola Willis when they make cuts to popular policies and move to privatise public services.
Again, National and Act have been clear that the bureaucracy must go. The voters obviously agree.
Good luck, incoming Prime Minister. You’re going to need it.
It has lost a vast swathe of its 2020 intake, along with some key future leaders. Perhaps they have lost a generation of leaders.
The party looks set to gain only a few new MPs. On top of that, insiders expect that many of the old hands who led Labour through the last period in opposition and in government will retire, leaving a leadership void.
There will be plenty of analysis of what went wrong for Labour in the coming weeks, but here’s my initial explanation.
Chris Hipkins gained popular support for the policy bonfire, which showed he was listening to the public’s unease about some policies, and his leadership from the front after Cyclone Gabrielle struck — but he too readily faded into the background after that.
Rather than setting the political discourse with his own vision, he seemed to be stuck responding to events, dragged along by reform programmes that were not core Labour priorities and certainly not priorities for the voters, while Luxon was making the running on the issues voters care about.
The drip-drip of ministerial shenanigans did not help.
To lose one wayward minister is a misfortune — four looks like rot.
Deciding against a couple of big-bang policies in favour of small, incrementalist policies meant Labour was always going to struggle to seize the voters’ imagination and explain what it stood for.
Labour will need to get up, dust itself off, and get in the fight again quickly, because the incoming government is going to be pushing some policies that will really hurt ordinary Kiwis, and there needs to be a strong opposition mounted to those moves.
As this column is being written, Labour looks to have lost seats such as Te Atatū and Mt Albert as well as five of the seven Māori seats.
Given all of this I expect the leader of the Labour Party to resign shortly.
Some will accuse me of picking over the corpse of the 2020 Labour caucus but given the size of last night’s defeat there will be a need to realign base policy such as Labour’s attitude to wealth tax.
If David Parker survives last night’s massacre he may well be the right person to lead both party and policy debate in the short term at least.
Shane Te Pou. Photo / NZME
The Greens and Te Pāti Māori can be proud of their tight, professional campaigns, and the voters have rewarded them for their positive vision.
They are going to have to carry the torch for the left while Labour pulls itself together, and be the voices for those hurt by the coming cuts.
Shane Te Pou (Ngāi Tūhoe) is a commentator, blogger and former Labour party activist.
