When then-Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern delivered her first press conference of 2023 at Labour’s caucus retreat in Napier in January, she announced the day of the election: Saturday, October 14. And then resigned. She was quickly succeeded by her friend, Chris Hipkins – one of the few people who knew the resignation was coming.
There’s always talk of a snap election when parliamentary democracies replace a head of government mid-term, but by setting the date before she stepped down, Ardern took that off the table. Labour didn’t want an early election: inflation and interest rates were high, GDP growth was negative, the mood of the nation was sour. And, historically, voters have punished governments who went to the polls early. Much better to wait. Conditions should be better by October: inflation under control, cheaper mortgages, economic recovery. An ideal environment for an incumbent government.
Labour had trailed National for most of 2022. The public wanted change – but voters were sceptical of National’s new leader, Christopher Luxon, an inexperienced first-term MP who had little to say about himself or his values, other than that he’d run an airline and wanted to cut taxes. He was prone to gaffes, he fumbled in interviews, and often failed to answer basic questions about his own policies. Labour ran a successful attack campaign against Luxon, suggesting he was a religious fanatic: he would ban abortion and turn New Zealand into Gilead. At the same time, Labour re-invented itself. Ardern’s government weighed itself down with a collection of unpopular, failing policies: Hipkins tossed them overboard, promising to focus on the cost of living. By March, Hipkins was well ahead of Luxon in the preferred Prime Minister rankings, and Labour was ahead in the polls. The nation wanted change, so Labour had changed.
Labour also enjoyed the advantage of incumbency. Throughout the year, it introduced policies to “support New Zealand families and businesses through the difficult economic conditions”, a phrase that appeared in countless press statements and prime ministerial speeches. Free prescriptions, cheaper childcare, free and subsidised public transport and increases in Working for Families transfers flowed from the Beehive and into the bank accounts of median voters.
But by midyear, Labour had begun to decline. There had been rumours of a dramatic budget surprise – “a game-changer” – but when the budget was unveiled in late May, it merely contained more subsidies and transfers. Inflation remained high, the health system was falling apart: violent crime and ram raids led the nightly news. And Hipkins’s cabinet was disintegrating. In late March, Police Minister Stuart Nash was sacked after a series of scandals, the most serious of which was breaching cabinet confidentiality to his campaign donors. In early May, Customs Minister Meka Whaitiri defected to Te Pāti Māori, announcing this via a press conference without troubling herself to inform the Prime Minister. In June, Michael Wood – Minister of Transport, Immigration, and Workplace Relations, widely regarded as a potential future leader of the party – resigned as a minister after failing to declare conflicts of interests regarding investments he owned relevant to his portfolios.
In late July, the Treasury released its budget planning documents. These revealed that the government had considered introducing either a capital gains tax or a wealth tax in the budget and using the revenue to fund a tax-free threshold on income tax. But Hipkins had ruled it out. When this became public, Hipkins ruled out any wealth or capital gains taxes after the election, and Revenue Minister David Parker resigned his portfolio. Two days after this, Justice Minister Kiri Allan crashed her vehicle into a parked car. After failing a breath test and being charged with careless use of a motor vehicle and refusing to accompany a police officer, she subsequently resigned her portfolios.
By the end of August, Labour had fallen to the high twenties. National was in the mid to high thirties, and Act was comfortably over 10%: enough to form a right-wing majority government. Luxon insisted this would be a “strong, stable government”, contrasting it to the alternative: a Labour-Greens-Te Pāti Māori “coalition of chaos”. New Zealand First was steadily trending up, but Luxon refused even to discuss Winston Peters, on the grounds he wasn’t in Parliament and his party had been polling below the 5% threshold for five years. He simply wasn’t relevant.
In the opening weeks of the campaign, a National-Act government began to look inevitable. Luxon had spent several months touring the nation, giving speeches in town halls and bowling clubs, and he emerged from this experience as a far more comfortable and polished politician. He dominated the first leaders’ debate. His favourability ratings matched Hipkins’s, then gradually overtook him.
Labour continued to flail. Its centrepiece tax policy was the removal of GST from fresh and frozen fruit and vegetables. But someone leaked the policy to National’s deputy leader, Nicola Willis, who gleefully pre-announced it. When Labour unveiled its scheme weeks later, it was met with a flood of criticism from economic commentators. Meanwhile, the Green Party was running a campaign promoting strong, progressive policies – free dental care, the wealth and income tax switch Labour had ruled out, a plan to equip homes with solar panels and electric vehicle chargers. Labour’s left-wing voters began defecting to the Greens.
Act Party leader David Seymour had long indicated his party would be interested in policy rather than cabinet positions, and in the second week of the campaign, he signalled a radical new approach to post-election negotiations. If National would not give in to his demands, Seymour warned, Act would support a National government on confidence but not supply. Luxon could form a government but couldn’t pass a budget – or any other legislation – without negotiating separate deals with Act.
Constitutional lawyers and political scientists weren’t sure if this was constitutionally possible. But if it was, it would be a very fragile, tenuous way to run the country. National was promising strong, stable government, but Seymour was threatening the exact opposite. That same week, Act lost its fifth list candidate in quick succession: many of them standing down or being struck off after the discovery of bizarre, conspiratorial or offensive claims they’d made on social media.
Act’s poll numbers began to decline. New Zealand First crept closer to 5%. Ever since the mid-1990s, Winston Peters has campaigned by making public statements angering progressives, while asserting his populist credentials to his target voters, then basking in the subsequent media outrage. In mid-September, he declared Māori were not indigenous to New Zealand. Until then, he’d been largely irrelevant to the stories dominating the campaign, but now his grinning face led the news.
National’s dream of a comfortable victory followed by a simple alliance with Act had turned into a nightmare of fiscal holes and a three-way coalition containing both Seymour and Peters, who openly despised each other. In late August, Luxon and Willis released their tax policy: middle-class tax cuts and rebates funded by spending cuts and new taxes on casinos and foreign property buyers. But the fearsome gang of economic commentators that had savaged Labour’s GST scheme now tore Willis’s plan to pieces. The “party of economic credibility” insisted through clenched teeth that their models were correct, but grimly refused to release them.
Winston Peters ruled Labour out at the beginning of the year. But in 1996, Peters campaigned to remove National from government, then went into coalition with the party after the election, explaining he had changed the government by joining it. So, it always seemed likely Peters would open negotiations with both National and Labour immediately after the election, yet again playing them off against each other. But in late August, Hipkins ruled Peters out. Labour is accountable to more voters than Peters, so the party can’t be as morally and linguistically flexible as he is.
This created a dilemma for Luxon. If he also refused to work with Peters, then some of his supporters might regard a vote for New Zealand First as wasted, and this might knock the party below 5%. But Peters might make it in anyway – and if he did, he could only work with National, guaranteeing a right-wing government. A week before advance voting began, Luxon released a social-media video conceding he’d form a government with Peters if he had no other choice.
National seemed to realise very quickly that it had made a strategic error, rolling out a video from John Key warning that the nation would “wake up in limbo land” if it failed to deliver National and Act a comfortable majority. Campaign chair Chris Bishop suggested the country might go to a second election. The panic appears to have damaged National, strengthened Peters and sent some voters back to the relative calm and stability of the left-wing bloc. But the polls still indicate a National-Act-NZ First government.
A week before the election date, a paper published in the New Zealand Medical Journal estimated New Zealand’s Covid response saved 20,000 lives. Labour is deeply frustrated that its Covid response is not the central issue of the election. Its actions saved 20,000 lives! And what thanks does it get? But 2020 was Labour’s Covid election. The nation rewarded the party with a majority government. Three years later, it’s hard to see what it has accomplished with its unprecedented power and the huge sums of money it printed, borrowed and taxed, other than high prices, a larger yet less-effective public sector, and a lot more debt.
A few weeks ago, Hipkins was interviewed on The Rest Is Politics, a popular British podcast. One of the hosts – former Conservative MP Rory Stewart – reflected on how little time he had to think about anything once he entered politics. The relentless nature of modern politics and campaigning just never allowed for any reflection or contemplation.
Both major parties have clearly thought about how best to beat each other and win power. It’s harder to see why they want to win – other than personal ambition – or how they’ll govern once they’re there. Labour claims it has a plan to lower inflation, but it has been saying this for two years now, and it’s clear it has no plan at all. Neither does National, although it says it does. Luxon promises he’ll grow the economy and improve productivity – but if he has any policies to accomplish these goals, he’s kept them secret.
This intellectual emptiness has cost both parties dearly: they’ve lost hundreds of thousands of votes to Act and the Greens – both of whom have actual values and policies that reflect them. And once again, Labour and National find themselves in thrall to Winston Peters – not a man acknowledged for his high moral values, but he has thought more deeply about how to win and wield power than they can ever fathom.