It’s still a while before the end of the government’s first 100 days, but we’ve already got a fair idea of what this coalition stands for.
With the summery shadow of Waitangi Day over us, race relations have been thrown into the spotlight. New Zealand First leader Winston Peters has relished his return to the negotiating, and now Cabinet, table. He has wasted no opportunity since his opening speech to skewer the Opposition. He has argued that Te Pāti Māori doesn’t have a mandate to speak for Māori. If it did, he suggests, how come it came away with only 3% of the nationwide vote?
This talk of mandates takes me back to 1996, the first MMP election. Peters had a starring role then, too. National and relative newcomer NZ First formed our first MMP-era coalition government, and although Act wasn’t formally a partner, there were other similarities to today.
First, few people went into the 1996 election anticipating a National-NZ First coalition at the other end. Based on polls and other research at the time, it appears that only about 1% of voters had that as their expected or desired outcome. This raises an interesting question for me – sure, National and NZ First combined for about 47% of the party vote, but only 2% of the people who voted for them got what they wanted. Who are we voting for exactly – a party or a coalition?
NZ First is in a unique position, in that it has been most successful at king-making. Act will never go into coalition with Labour, and Labour has shown in the past that it can rely on the Greens whether they’re inside a coalition or not. NZ First can, and has, gone with both.
In the run-up to the 2023 election, I surveyed more than 6000 of you and, based on your responses, there are numerous observations I can make about how the next three years might go. I’ll limit myself to one.
First, though, a “feeling thermometer”. This is a classic political science and political psychology question – how “cold” or “warm” do you feel about each of the parties? Unsurprisingly, people feel very warm towards the party they intend to vote for, and, to a lesser extent, towards the other parties that share their ideological leaning. Labour party voters like Labour, the Greens, and Te Pāti Māori. National supporters like Act – just not as much as they like National, etc.
But nobody – apart from NZ First voters – likes NZ First. Not even National voters, who can now thank Peters for crowning King Luxon.
And NZ First voters? They also dislike everyone else. They are, on average, chilly towards National and Act and downright frigid towards other potential suitors.
Why? A big chunk of NZ First voters share a feeling of being shafted. In the survey, they described themselves as the least happy. They’re also older, earn the least and report the lowest amount of formal education of all voters.
Many of these folk feel left behind economically by the neoliberal political status quo that developed in the 1980s. They also feel like New Zealand is becoming a different place from the one they grew up in – they definitely think people should use toilets consistent with their assigned-at-birth gender and they’re head-to-head with Act voters over eliminating bilingual road signage. They agree that women and racial and sexual minorities have been unfairly advantaged in recent years. It’s important to note, given Peters’ jibes at Te Pāti Māori, that NZ First voters are also in the minority.
Peters knows his voters, and he knows the fine line between supporting a National-Act agenda that likely won’t make much material difference to their lives and “sticking it to the man”.
He, at least, has played this game before, but who would want to be Christopher Luxon for the next couple of years?
