The government’s latest quarterly action plan – yes, these are still a thing – declares its intention to repeal the ban on offshore oil and gas exploration passed by Labour in 2018.
Cost of living is ostensibly this government’s gravest concern. Electricity prices have jumped nearly 9% in the past year, and the oil and gas ban is the alleged reason for this. Yet the ban is still on the books. The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment’s modelling warns that even if repealed, it’ll take about 10 years for any new gas fields to come online. Perhaps, like the Bene Gesserit in Dune, the coalition’s plans are measured in centuries.
We had an energy crisis in 2024 brought on by reduced lake levels and a gas-supply crunch. And this could happen again next year, with the nation watching in horror as prices surge, the economy groans and slows, and more of the manufacturing sector slides into bankruptcy. The Prime Minister is likely to stamp his foot and bleat that this is all the previous government’s fault. The coalition would not come close to winning re-election.
Even without that or some equivalent fiasco the current trajectory of our politics points towards a Labour win next year. Christopher Luxon remains a peripheral figure in his own government, eagerly reporting on his action items – many of which are empty signifiers: “take decisions”, “progress legislation” ‒ while indifferently admitting “it’s still tough out there” when asked about economic forecasts.
Losing patience
The Finance Minister attempts to address said toughness by tweaking tax settings and abatement thresholds. The projects to reform the banking and grocery sectors proceed with glacial speed. Deputy Prime Minister David Seymour continues to dominate media discourse, alongside NZ First’s Winston Peters and Shane Jones, with Jones intensifying his bizarre campaigns against the environment and endangered species.
The public’s already-thin patience with these powerful and erratic minor-party figures is fast diminishing. Nostalgia for the relative normality of the Jacinda years is taking hold: the recent Post/Freshwater poll ranked Ardern, who left Parliament in 2023, our most popular politician. Labour’s primary offering to the voters next year will be that it is not the coalition. That might be all it needs to win.
Public opinion is sometimes described as “thermostatic”: if a government moves too far in one ideological direction, voters adjust their preferences, favouring the opposite, seeking to balance things out. The coalition’s hopes lie with an improving economy – which may evaporate like water in a drought-stricken hydro dam – and the threat of a far-left government: Labour held captive to the whims of the Greens and Te Pāti Māori. Surely that will scare centrist voters into sticking with National?
But the recent Ipsos issues poll found the Greens are perceived to be the most trusted party on climate change and the environment. Te Pāti Māori is most trusted on issues facing Māori. Act and New Zealand First are not trusted on any major issue facing the nation.
Another year of Jones gloating about dredging the seabeds and the prospect of a Green fisheries minister could feel like an awakening from a fever dream. There is a hypothetical left-wing government that is more attractive than the coalition’s offering, which is currently a disjointed combination of cruelty, culture-war nonsense and sclerosis. Voters don’t even have to like that left-wing alternative. They just have to dislike it less than the status quo.
Swinging extremes
There is a version of the election that plays out the way National’s strategists hope. It wouldn’t be out of character for Te Pāti Māori to campaign on seizing back the homes of white middle-income swing voters, or for the Greens to pledge they’ll legalise crime, either or both parties costing the left the election. In 2017, Labour and the Greens collaborated to present a moderate, unified front. Grant Robertson and James Shaw agreed on the Budget Responsibility Rules, which locked in conservative fiscal settings, committing themselves to a low-spending, low-borrowing approach to government that both men gleefully tore up during Covid.
An equivalent pact is unlikely. Labour would never propose it; the Greens would never accept it. Their new fiscal strategy proposes $25 billion in taxes and an additional $40 billion in debt, numbers you’ll hear National cite roughly 40 billion times during election year. Te Pāti Māori thinks Parliament is illegitimate, so it’s unlikely to cohere on a budget strategy or anything else.
Labour’s current philosophy is to affect indifference to the antics of its fellow opposition parties. It can attempt to occupy the political centre, while National is visibly bound to NZ First and Act, like someone who has fallen into a chimpanzee enclosure trying to claw their way out while the animals cling to them, screaming.
New Zealand is passing through an era of unusual political volatility: Labour lost about 670,000 votes in 2023. Recent polls indicate it’s already won back about a third of that and shows no signs of slowing. But the upcoming by-election in Tāmaki Makaurau, triggered by the tragic death of Te Pāti Māori MP Takutai Moana Natasha Kemp, will function as a stress test for Labour’s splendid isolationism. This will be a high-profile race. The Greens are likely to stand a candidate – co-leader Marama Davidson contested the seat in 2020.
Labour has ambitions to win back all seven Māori seats, but without matching the rhetoric of the more radical parties, it’s not obvious how. Even if the force of thermostatic voting sweeps it back into power, there’s no indication of how it’ll address the problems Ardern and now Luxon neglected.
Two years in, it could find itself desperately adjusting tax thresholds and “taking actions” that are not actions while the nation’s lights flicker and dim, and wrathful voters cast about for a (hopefully) less terrible alternative.
