With its crushing victory in the general election yesterday, Labour has an enormous mandate for its second term, and one that's largely unfettered by the conventional demands of MMP coalition politics. It's too soon to plough ahead with 100 percent certainty, given National lost two of their election-night seats in 2017 once the specials came in two weeks later. The same might happen to Labour, who knows?
Either way, commentators are busy raising the stakes for the Ardern's second term, claiming the sweeping mandate to govern places the Government under the pump for the next three years. There's certainly some truth in this - the public will no longer wear excuses that NZ First has stymied progressive politics since 2017. But this stonking victory, unprecedented under MMP, illustrates the challenges of viewing politics through the media lens. For a long time many media old-hands have treated National as the 'natural party of government', assuming that their next term is just around the corner and that any Labour-led government is just a temporary aberration. This election puts the lie to that worldview. With this Parliamentary term Labour has now spent more time leading governments under MMP than National has. And with its policy of cautious centrism to bring moderate swing voters along for the ride, Labour has so far been highly successful in supplanting National in its former role as the home of the median voter.
Part of the challenge in filtering political discussion through the media is that the media now has relatively few practitioners who understand where Labour voters are coming from. With National in increasing disarray, the long-standing back-channel connections to former senior National front-benchers and grandees are increasingly useless as viable news sources. Newsrooms are populated with younger, poorly-paid journos who do much of the leg-work, and whose youth makes it more likely that they'll be left-leaning, but those journos are more likely to be Green or Maori Party-aligned than to the Labour movement that now governs.
Witness the election night coverage on TVNZ, where surrogate after surrogate for the National Party, the Greens and the Maori Party popped up to laud their own party's efforts (or, if you're Nikki Kaye, excuse them). But unless you weirdly count Lovely Old John Campbell as some sort of raging Labourista, there was no-one on screen to give the perspectives of the party that absolutely dominated the election night in a historic wipeout of the political Right. TVNZ has always been famously leery of left-wing political ideas; perhaps it had better start thinking about broadening their narrowly conservative political diet in favour of a wider range of ideas.
Only a fool would deny this election was hugely influenced by Covid-19. But as Andre Alessi (from memory) has pointed out on Twitter, the last National Government had enormous crises of its own in the Christchurch earthquakes and the Pike River disaster. While I'm not claiming either policy response was a terrible botch, in neither case did National cover itself in any kind of glory as Jacinda Ardern has in responding to Covid. Voters have responded to the highly competent, carefully explained, straightforward positivity of Ardern and her core Ministers, and punished harshly those opponents who carped and bickered. Put plainly, voters believed the sacrifices endured by everyone to combat the disease were worth it, and they're optimistic about the future, however hard the medical and economic recovery will be. Any argument to the contrary, even if it has merit, was ultimately counter-productive. Yet Simon Bridges and Judith Collins, in particular, both persisted in the negative campaigning that ultimately led to their downfalls.
Hard times are no doubt ahead of New Zealand, and the Government has limited its ability to address the fiscal implications by locking down the potential transformative tax solutions of a capital gains tax or a form of wealth tax. This leaves relatively little wiggle-room for a hyper-progressive reshaping of the New Zealand economy that dyed-in-the-wool leftists want. But it's the political centre that Labour wants to own, to advance its own version of a progressive legacy. By staking out Ardern's Labour as a moderate, consensus-building Government that leftists, centrists and the soft-conservatives can all cast their vote for, Labour under 40-year-old Ardern has the opportunity to build a hitherto unthinkable 12 or 15-year Government, as opposed to the one or two-term administrations that might otherwise have resulted. A couple of terms followed by a massive rightward correction under National is not enough to reverse environmental degradation, decarbonise the energy and transport sectors, clean up polluted waterways, reinvigorate the health and education sectors, pay for long-delayed infrastructure, reduce massive inequalities in social outcomes for disadvantaged groups, particularly Maori, and tackle enormous social evils like the housing crisis. The Ardern Government, if it proceeds cannily and doesn't alienate all its new voters, has the opportunity to radically reshape New Zealand's politics, the economy, the environment, and society in general. It won't succeed in this if its gets distracted into niche political crusades that don't appeal to the average voter.
The rare success of the Green Party bodes well for a progressive voice in Parliament to Labour's left. Even with a single-party majority, Labour would be wise to offer the Greens a confidence and supply agreement and a few key portfolios outside Cabinet. Unfortunately, it may be in the Greens' best interests to decline and to remain outside Government. The policy gains that might accrue could easily be more than countered by the cost of tying the party too closely to a more-centre-than-left Labour Government. James Shaw and Marama Davidson may consider 2023 presents a better opportunity for a true Labour-Green coalition. The risk of this approach is that until then, Labour has every opportunity to nick Green policies and claim the credit for implementing them.
Act has a wonderful opportunity to claim the spotlight for the next three years with its much-enlarged caucus. But as the 2002 term showed, tiny parties that receive a temporary boost of wandering National voters often struggle to retain them three years later. And Act will struggle to maintain a consistent voice, given its mix of libertarians, flat-taxers and gun rights advocates. Still, under a canny leader like David Seymour, Act could stake out its claim to the right of the political spectrum, leaving National to hold a smaller conservative and rural rump, with the aim of forming a symbiotic Australian Liberal-National-style partnership.
In 2020 NZ First fought and died by the sword. Always at its best in opposition, Winston Peters' party made the fateful call to trumpet its handbrake role in the three-party Government. In a conventional election this political inertia might have worked, but in this Covid election it proved to be a gruesome miscalculation. Crucial voters slipped over to Act or simply melted into the afterlife. Perhaps the New Year honours list will see a swansong gong for Rt Hon Sir Winston Raymond Peters, and most likely Hon Tracy Martin will find herself sought after for a senior Government appointment after three years being praised as 'virtually a Labour Minister'.
The Maori Party appear to have snatched Waiariki from Tamati Coffey, which is an impressive surprise victory. But their vote-splitting gambit has masked the fact that as a political movement the party is increasingly tiny, with its party vote shrinking from 30,000 in 2017 to a mere 24,000 in 2020. Despite blanket and generally uncritically favourable media coverage - including one fanciful RNZ piece that claimed a candidate 12 points behind the Labour incumbent was still in the running - the Maori Party has never amounted to a political movement that attracts substantial support. Their best ever result was in 2008 when they scored a mere 2.39 percent of the party vote - i.e. not even one in 40 voters. While mainstream media almost always ignores it because it doesn't interest them, Labour is actually the political home of most Maori voters. [p.s. Apols for Blogger's lack of macrons]
And finally, the National Party naturally had a shocker, which was no less damaging despite the polls having predicted it weeks out. A rolling series of avoidable political scandals, serial leadership changes, multi-billion-dollar shadow budget botches and unforced errors from the eventual election leader Judith Collins all contributed to their worst result since 2002. But the overarching problem, despite Collins' assertion that the party put up a comprehensive suite of policies, was that many in the party couldn't shake the belief that they actually 'won' the 2017 election. This mindset led many of the party's senior brains to think that the 2008 policy platform that was so successful for the chilled-out-entertainer vibe of the highly-popular John Key would work in the vastly different political environment of 2020.
While this shellacking is a golden opportunity for the party to re-imagine its elevator pitch to New Zealand voters, the initial signs aren't strong. Highly experienced potential replacement leaders like Amy Adams and Nikki Kaye saw the writing on the wall and resigned early. Grizzled old hands like Gerry Brownlee and Nick Smith have lost their seats. Many of the party's safest seats are in the hands of the religious right (nicknamed the Taliban by their secular caucus colleagues), who are way out of step with mainstream New Zealand values. And the party has lost nearly all of its non-Pakeha MPs in the winnowing of its party list. New star Christopher Luxon has no experience in Parliament and would be wise to learn the ropes before staking his claim to the top job.
These myriad factors point to the next three years being a fascinating mix of political challenges for a highly popular re-elected Government. There are plenty of potential mistakes to be made, and further grave crises to tackle. Perhaps some of the Opposition sniping about Labour's limited talent pool are accurate. But the proof of last night's election result shows that Jacinda Ardern has the skills and the policies to build an enduring political legacy. Ardern is deliberately staking a claim as the (left-of-centre) heir to Angela Merkel's crown of global stateswoman. That means the next three years may not be as left-wing as 'proper lefties' want, but the long-term impact could ultimately be as significant or more so than the Michael Joseph Savage and Peter Fraser's era-defining first Labour Government of 1935-49.
