Dull & Duller: NZ's election year kicks off
Can the voters be bored into submission?
New Zealanders have an election date: 7 November.
At this stage, it’s looking like it could be a close contest – between dull and duller.
Maybe effective political leadership was meant to be this way. Just look at Auckland’s mayor, Wayne Brown: he’s won two elections in a row by large margins – on very low turnouts. He bored the people of the country’s biggest city into handing him victory, and then he got on with the boring work of fixing potholes.
That was the mood pervading prime minister Luxon’s state-of-the-nation speech in Auckland on Monday – which more or less kicked off the election campaign. He couldn’t have been less inspiring.
“National is fixing the basics and building the future,” he declared – to no applause. His key points were “tight budgets” and “no room for extravagant election promises”. Some people would find that reassuringly predictable.
Luxon said the economy is shifting “away from speculation and towards productive economic activity, supporting higher incomes and more jobs” – which sounds like what his opponent Chris Hipkins said when touting Labour’s capital gains tax and investment fund policies.
In spite of that point of agreement, Hipkins called the speech “a whole lot of management speak mumbo jumbo”. Now, I’m not one to be censorious about language, but didn’t he know that “mumbo jumbo” is considered to have racist origins?
Green co-leader Chloe Swarbrick triumphantly claimed that she and her party had “correctly predicted” what Luxon’s state-of-the-nation speech was going to say. She’d even told journalists how to correct the PM’s assignment before he’d handed it in. She missed the point, however: Luxon wants to be predictable.
As the PM himself said, “Welcome to 2026, it’s going to be a great year.” Make NZ Boring Again.
TV audiences can anticipate some dull debates between two uninspiring leaders: Luxon and Hipkins.
There’s a bright side to this: good government goes unnoticed, so the best candidate may be the one who’ll get on with the job and not bother anyone for the next three years. The beauty of a representative system is that, when it works, people just vote and then they forget about government. They leave it to someone else – entrusting them with responsibility for a limited time. “See you at the ballot box in three years time,” they say.
At least we have a date now.
If that is the best Luxon & Co and Chippy can do, then we are really in a pickle! No words about fast rising inequality. No words about challenging the power companies and breaking up the gentailers. No words about the duopoly of supermarkets. No word about help to people on a fixed income like super. No vision for solving our static, low wage economy and stopping the flight of talented people overseas. No words about our crumbling health services. No words about the people stuck on welfare who want to work but can’t because of our too low minimum wage. No words about the appalling obesity epidemic and cheap junk foods. No words about building more affordable housing to tackle the over priced housing market. On and on! Do these people have any ideas? Oh maybe policies for 2029! Really? But that will be another election cycle away! No words about a 4 year term which most people would be happy with. No real policies about the water infrastructure renewal the country needs. And don’t even talk about Air NZ and the awful decisions Luxon made when he ran it! Ferries and wasted time and money? Oh my, we really are in a pickle!
Actually that is exactly the sort of speech someone who is sorted would give. Completely divorced from the reality of most of Aotearoa. And boring as hell.