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Analysis: Looking back at the polling trends for the year suggests that the 2023 budget was the turning point. Chris Hipkins became Prime Minister in late January. He spent most of the subsequent three months ahead in the polls, through the Auckland weekend floods and the chaos of Cyclone Gabrielle. Even some of the internal chaos in his caucus – the resignations of Meka Whaitiri and Stuart Nash – didn’t seem to touch Hipkins. His party was nearly always a few points ahead of National, and Hipkins himself was far more popular than opposition leader Christopher Luxon.
But in the 20 polls since the budget in mid-May, Labour has been fractionally ahead in just two of them, both in June. Then came the resignations of Michael Wood and Kiri Allen, and a slow decline that turned into a dramatic loss of public support during the early stages of the official campaign. There’s still a month until the polls close but it’s now very hard to see the left-wing bloc – Labour, Greens and Te Pāti Māori – forming a government.
Where did all Labour’s voters go? Some to National, of course – the all-important swing voters have swung en-masse to the centre right. The Greens and New Zealand First have picked up the scraps. The Green Party is on track to see its best result ever, and Peters’ party is now consistently over the 5% threshold: he’s the kingmaker in some polls, others see National and Act governing alone. Luxon and David Seymour are engaged in a pre-election battle of wits over their post-election coalition negotiations, with Luxon ruling out various Act policies and Seymour threatening to support National “on confidence but not supply”, a constitutional arrangement that – if it’s even possible – would leave Luxon with a dangerously fragile government.
Why has Labour’s support disintegrated? It’s never any one thing: the turmoil in the caucus obviously hurt them, and they haven’t figured out how to sell their new leader. There was an assumption on the left that Luxon’s inexperience would hurt him on the campaign trail, while Hipkins is a career politician: the safest pair of hands imaginable. A negative campaign highlighting Luxon’s unlikability and radical right-wing views would bring this into focus for the electorate.
But Luxon has emerged as a very genial and energetic campaigner, while the only vaguely humanising thing we know about Hipkins is that he likes pies and Coke and sausage rolls. There’s breathless media coverage whenever the Prime Minister eats a savoury pastry but it feels impossibly remote from the kindness and hope of the Ardern years, and an insufficient reply to National’s charge that Hipkins and his government have wrecked the country.
Record numbers of voters are telling pollsters the country is heading in the wrong direction. Labour finds this very frustrating. Unemployment is down; the recession was mild; wages are trending up. Yes, there’s inflation but there’s inflation across the OECD. New Zealand’s isn’t that bad, and it’s also heading in the right direction. And didn’t the Labour government save our lives and jobs during the pandemic? Hipkins promised to focus on bread and butter issues and he’s done just that: extending early childhood education, removing prescription fees, free public transport, free dental, GST off fruit and vegetables. What more do people want?
I suspect they wanted Hipkins to signal that he had a plan to send it in the right direction. A diagnosis of our problems and a plan to solve them. The budget and now the campaign have revealed that there’s no such scheme. It can be dangerous to over-theorise campaign slogans which are often designed to be as meaningless as possible (example: the “Let’s do this!” of the Jacinda era). Labour’s is “In it for you”. It’s very transactional: vote for Labour and they’ll give you free stuff.
National’s speaks to that broader dissatisfaction in the nation’s mood. They’ll “Get New Zealand back on track.”. And they’ll also give you tax cuts and transfers, paid for by cancelling some of Labour’s handouts. It’s not clear that their grand tax package will address inflation: it might end up making it worse. But they’ve persuaded the voters that on cost of living and other key issues – especially crime and housing – they hear them, and they’ll change things.
No governing party has ever switched leaders and won re-election – and Hipkins inherited an inflationary economy and a mediocre Cabinet implementing a suite of deeply unpopular policies. He dumped what policies he could, managed the caucus meltdowns and tried to mitigate the cost-of-living crisis. But he never spoke to the very sour mood of the nation after three years of post-covid disappointment, high prices and political failure. His vision for the future is that the nation’s trajectory will stay more or less the same – but that he will eat pies on the way.
