It's time to decide: advance polling opens

A briefing on the parties

As they prepare to vote – or not to vote – many New Zealanders say they’re disillusioned with politics and unsure whom they can trust to lead the country. A relatively low voter turnout seems likely as there’s been so much ‘yeah, nah, dunno’.

Here’s how the parties are positioned, starting from the left.

Te Pati Māori used to be talked about as the next kingmaker. Remember that? They were going to decide who’d be PM. But they positioned themselves so far to the left that (predictably) they became captive to Labour and lost the limelight to Winston Peters. They were polling often over 4% in mid-year but have fallen back to 2-ish. All the same, polls may be under-estimating them, and they’ll get a better result than their one electorate and 1.2% party vote in 2020.

The Greens are polling over 12% and look set to increase their numbers in the House. This can be attributed partly to the left’s disillusionment with Labour, especially with Hipkins’s refusal to tax the rich. The Greens propose a wealth tax and an income guarantee, as well being strongest on climate, making them more progressive on social and environmental issues than Labour. They’ll benefit from Labour’s cautious pitch for the centre. Can they retain Auckland Central and flip Wellington Central?

Labour take pride nowadays in conservatism and prudence, while bowing to significant cost pressures and making gestures towards inclusiveness. Government is a frustrating series of complex obligations, but Hipkins has proven to be a competent PM and a quick-witted campaigner. A spring tide of pissed-offness is against him though. Post-pandemic blues, global inflation, fear of crime and some horrid weather aren’t all his fault, but he takes the blame anyway. Furthermore, some members of his team severely embarrassed him after he took over in January. As 2023 wore on, Labour’s polling declined from mid-30s to mid-20s. Their campaign is in disarray for now as Hipkins is down with Covid and isolating for five days, but this won’t make much difference to the election result. At around 26%, Labour’s only got its bedrock support-base left anyway.

The Opportunities Party (TOP) hope to win the seat of Ilam and take a place on the cross benches. Ilam will swing heavily away from the incumbent Labour member, Sarah Pallett, and there’s an outside chance that enough people will give TOP’s Raf Manji their electorate vote, instead of National’s Hamish Campbell, and thus bring a fresh centrist voice into the House. One to watch on election night.

National has gradually opened up a lead in the polls over Labour, but they’re stuck below 40, and not looking much like a shiny new government-in-waiting. They tarnished their self-awarded reputation for awesome economic management by leaving question marks hanging over their own calculations. They’ll let rich foreigners buy high-end property and cream Kiwis’ online gambling habits to pay for some income-tax cuts. National gets away with introducing new taxes, but may have over-estimated how much revenue they’ll raise, and their fiscal plan overall is more conservative than Labour’s. Political communication doesn’t come naturally to Luxon: when faced with awkward questions, he’s been evasive and unconvincing, and the credibility of his tax policy is in question.

As a side-kick party, ACT benefits from disillusionment in a way that mirrors the gains made by the Greens. David Seymour’s aggressive anti-statism has at times drowned out National’s insipid conservatism. It looks like ACT will improve on their 2020 election result, and they have a shot at winning a second electorate: Tamaki. Seymour is prepared to ignore libertarian principles and go for the jugular by accusing his opponents racism. But there are certain lines he’s unwilling to cross for the sake of votes, and he’s gnashing his teeth over the return of the Pied Piper.

Winston R. Peters has been doing the rounds of provincial community halls, wooing disgruntled grey-haired citizens with his special brand of ‘common sense’. NZ First is polling better than in 2011, when they last came back from purgatory: almost consistently over 5%. If by ‘kingmaker’ we mean someone who can support either of the two main parties and effectively decide who governs, then Peters can’t play that this time round. Labour and NZ First have cancelled one another, so Peters has only one office-holding option: join National and ACT. It’s precisely this prospect – Luxon, Seymour and Peters sharing power – that makes most voters bury their heads in their hands and groan.

Although Peters has been seducing their potential supporters, the gaggle of far-right conspiracy-theorist parties are worth mentioning, even though none of them has a snowflake’s show. By my count, there are six of them, and one is a pre-electoral coalition encompassing four parties and a couple of social movements. The hilarious thing is that they all have the same manifesto. It’s a copy-and-paste conspiracy: ‘National sovereignty, a traditional way of life, freedoms and democracy are under threat from globalist forces, UN agencies, sustainable development goals and the indeterminacy of gender. Witness the climate hoax, the vaccine mandates, co-governance and puberty blockers. The people need to defend Kiwi freedoms and uphold the NZ Bill of Right Act. Farmers must be liberated from state control. Boys must be boys and girls girls. Act now – better still, donate now – before you find yourself enslaved.’

Then there are three single-issue parties. So, if you’re fired up about the particular rights of women, animals or weed-smokers, then there’s a party just for you. A vote for one of these minnows isn’t necessarily ‘wasted’ – if you’re the mum of one of their candidates.

A strong performer could be the Abstention Party. In 2011, Abstainers represented 30% of the voting-age population – beating Labour. It’s unfair to call them ‘apathetic’ because there are conscientious reasons for not voting, such as: all the political parties suck, the system doesn’t represent people like them, and anyway the schools failed to teach them anything useful like how to tick the right boxes.

Neither should we accept that patronising and oppressive anti-abstention line: ‘if you don’t vote you can’t complain’. Not voting is a valid complaint about social injustices; abstainers have as much free-speech as everyone else. We should call out abstention-shaming whenever we encounter it. There’s no place for that kind of thing…

Getting back to the serious question about which leader and party you trust: it’s hard to tell, as the voters don’t know (and the politicians can’t predict or promise) the exact office-holding and policy programme that will emerge from post-electoral negotiations. And the likely coalitions (on either side) haven’t been tried before. We’ve not seen Greens in cabinet before; we haven’t seen such a powerful ACT party before. And Winston is predictably unpredictable.

For voters who want a change of government, there’s uncertainty as to whether an alternative team will actually perform better. Voting for change on the grounds that ‘you couldn’t get worse than the present lot’ is hardly an endorsement of any alternative. Neither is it clear what happens if Labour get to form another government, given the differences in policy between the left-wing parties.

Furthermore, on TVNZ’s Q+A on Sunday, James Shaw didn’t rule out the possibility of talking with Christopher Luxon after the election – although he did acknowledge that Green Party members have the final say and that Labour is their preferred partner. A National–Green coalition looks unlikely politically, but let’s wait and see how the numbers stack up after the election. The Greens have to consider the risk of a National–ACT coalition stalling or even undoing pretty much all climate policy progress. Peters wouldn’t apply his handbrake to that.

Strategic voting requires foresight and hence could backfire on the voter if predictions aren’t borne out. And the situation over the next few weeks is unpredictable.

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Debate about the cost-of-living crisis was overshadowed at the end of last week by unedifying mutual accusations of racism. This came to a head during the leaders’ debate when Chris Hipkins quoted a NZ First candidate who’d laid into co-governance. Hipkins condemned it as a racist statement and accused Luxon of being willing to work with people who say such things. Incendiary distractions like this might work for Labour when they have no progressive taxation policies with which to counter their conservative opponent – and when there’s not much else to tell the two Chrises apart.

Hipkins aimed to tarnish National by association with a third party – a party with which National is only reluctantly willing to work and which had no representative in the room to reply to the accusation. Peters later tried to defend his candidate’s comment on the grounds that it attacked a policy, not a people.

Hipkins insists that politicians must stop stoking racial division, which of course they must, but he was adding fuel to the fire. He discarded Ardern’s politics of kindness and chose to go negative. From there, the accusations flew – left, right and centre. Now he can do time in isolation to reflect on what he unleashed.

Further concern arises from an assault on a Labour candidate and a break-in at the home of a TPM candidate. This election campaign is turning nasty. Green co-leader James Shaw was right to say ‘all of us have a responsibility to try and create an atmosphere for democracy to take place, which is respectful, where people can have different opinions and for that to be okay’. Unfortunately, the kind of person who might cross the line into political violence won’t be heeding his words.