The odds of a Hipkins/Labour Restoration in 2026 improve with each new poll: a radiant dawn breaking over the left-wing political landscape in monthly survey intervals. But as it rises, the challenge of building a stable coalition with Te Pāti Māori gathers like a distant storm; clouds boiling with the thunder and lightning of Tāwhirimātea, threatening to blot out the red sun.
How do you govern alongside a party that holds the state itself in contempt? When asked about this, Labour’s strategists have jutted their chins, flashed their eyes and defiantly replied, “Who says Te Pāti Māori will even be in Parliament after the next election?”, citing their strategic goal of winning back the Māori seats.
The goal appears completely hopeless in the wake of the Tāmaki Makaurau by-election. Peeni Henare, former cabinet minister with a distinguished political whakapapa, backed by Labour’s allegedly formidable campaign machine and advised by Willy Jackson, Labour’s allegedly brilliant Māori caucus leader, was heavily defeated by Oriini Kaipara, a first-time candidate.
Labour’s campaign theory was that Māori voters were more interested in material issues – “jobs, home and health” – than Te Pāti Māori’s more radical policies: a separate Māori parliament and justice system, the abolition of prisons, the return of all foreshore and seabed, state-owned and conservation land to mana whenua.
This would have been convenient: most voters are worried about jobs, home and health. If the theory held, Labour could enter the general election campaigning on a single coherent message. But that model of contemporary Māori politics was defeated by a two-to-one margin. Now, there is talk of an accommodation between the parties – perhaps Labour contests the Māori seats but not vigorously, quietly pitching for the party vote, and Te Pāti Māori moderates its rhetoric to avoid scaring centrist voters back to National.
This would require rigorous message discipline from both sides. Te Pāti Māori could not, for example, describe the current government as worse than Nazi Germany, or attack Labour for engaging “Indians, Asians, Black and Pākehā” volunteers in its campaign team, statements made over the course of the by-election by party president John Tamihere and MP Tākuta Ferris respectively. And Labour’s Māori caucus would likewise have to moderate.
The by-election saw Henare vow to repeal the coalition’s gang-patch ban, foregrounding law and order – the only issue the public really trusts National with any more.
For the moment, Labour has settled on the hilariously empty line that it is not guaranteed to work with Te Pāti Māori in government.
Winston saddles up
The Tāmaki Makaurau defeat was not the worst thing to happen to Chris Hipkins’ hopes of prime ministerial resurrection that weekend. New Zealand First’s annual conference featured a sequence of ferocious attacks on Labour, alongside wokeness and transgender ideology, which joined Winston Peters’ traditional enemies – neoliberalism and global Marxism – as the existential threats to our fragile nation that only NZ First can deliver us from.
If the right-leaning coalition is to win re-election it must capture votes off the left. Christopher Luxon is unlikely to achieve this, so Peters has taken advantage of Labour’s strategic vagueness. If Hipkins and his MPs will not say what their party is for he will do it for them. And so they are for economic chaos, moral posturing and woke ideology.
Former Labour minister Stuart Nash appeared at the conference to declare his fealty to Peters, expressing his disappointment at his old party for abandoning its traditional values. Nash was stripped of his portfolios after he was caught leaking confidential cabinet information, but in his imagination this disgrace has transformed into Hipkins – who he thought was his friend! – stabbing him in the back. Shane Jones – also a former Labour cabinet minister – declared Labour was no longer the party of the workers. New Zealand First has taken on that mantle.
It’s hard for Labour to stomach the notion of Jones, ex-fishing boss, champion of corporate welfare, darling of the lobbying industry and the parliamentary press gallery, presenting himself as a tribune of the working class. But left-wing parties around the world are finding that class conflicts have become cultural rather than economic, and that sections of their traditional voter base can be captured via conservative attacks on causes that have become progressive politics: trans rights, climate policy, immigration.
Saving kiwis
New Zealand First also advanced an economic case: making KiwiSaver compulsory and increasing the payments to 8% then 10% for both employers and employees, funded out of a gigantic tax cut (this would be a great policy if the crown could afford it, which it absolutely cannot).
Jones promoted a remit to consider either structural separation or re-nationalisation of the electricity gentailers. The Greens already have a bill to separate the gentailers in the members ballot, and it is an odd thing that these minor parties are proposing solutions to a genuine national crisis that Labour and National seem, ahem, powerless to solve.
Peters’ popularity usually declines in government, but he thrives when National and Labour are weak. So he’s rising rapidly in the polls. If he stays on his present trajectory he’ll overtake the Greens and NZ First will become the largest third party. He has mastered the pose of the anti-establishment senior minister; denouncing the terrible state of things while simultaneously governing the country.
Te Pāti Māori is also an anti-establishment movement – unlike Peters’ ersatz populism it’s the real deal – and it’s riding the same mood of dissatisfaction, the sense that the parties at the centre of our politics are hollow and impotent.
Both are explicitly nationalist, although they have widely divergent visions of what the nation should look like. And they’re both exploiting Labour’s tactical silence, filling it with polarising issues that Hipkins is desperate not to talk about.
