Chris Trotter
Christopher Luxon is betting on boring. Boring, by National’s reckoning is good.
Boring means predictable and investors like predictability. Boring means uneventful and “events, dear boy, events” are what bring governments down.
Boring means unexciting and the general absence of excitement is what keeps potentially unhelpful voters at home. So, if you’re looking for a single word to sum up the strategy most likely to secure this government’s return, then National’s “boring” is right on the money.
Those who wrote off Luxon’s state of the nation speech as uninspiring and lacking in vision clearly failed to grasp the importance of keeping the electorate comatose.
Revolutions are made by the anxious and the enraged. The status quo’s most reliable protectors are the citizens who snooze. Reports that Luxon’s audience, somewhere out there in the blue haze of Auckland’s new convention centre, were struggling to stay awake should not be taken as negative criticism.
These were rave reviews.
Strategic boredom
One of the most interesting snippets of news emerging from the prime minister’s address was that the mayor of Auckland had not been invited to attend, gaining entry only as an invitee’s plus-one.
To quote Napoleon’s chief of police, Joseph Fouché: “This was worse than a crime – it was a mistake.”
If boring is your strategic watchword, then Wayne Brown should be your guru. Not because Brown is boring; far from it. He is a most engaging repository of irascible honesty and take-no-prisoners humour.
Luxon would have been much wiser to bring Brown inside the tent, rather than attempting (and then failing) to keep him outside.
Why? Because it was Brown who realised that the widespread public dismissal of local government elections as terminally boring was the key to him winning the mayoralty.
What layer of society is most resistant to the notion that local government elections can be ignored with impunity? Brown’s campaign team confirmed that it was the elderly: citizens over the age of 65. Ergo, configure your campaign to the interests and prejudices of these voters and forget the rest – not because the rest are unlikely to vote for you, but because the rest are unlikely to vote at all.
This was the insight that allowed Brown to win two elections on the trot – each time by a landslide.
Voter abstinence
Now, there will be those who will object, quite rightly, saying general elections are very different from local government elections.
Turnout is much higher and the media attention devoted to general election campaigns is much greater. But, if these differences are accurate in a general sense, closer examination reveals them to be not as true as they used to be.
The highest turnout for a New Zealand general election occurred in 1984 when 93.7% of registered voters made it to a polling-booth. Since then, turnout has declined steeply.
At the last general election, in 2023, it was 78.2%. Expressed another way, more and more eligible voters are abstaining from participating in the most important of all democratic rituals.
Strategically-speaking, therefore, it is vital that as many of those abstainers as possible are given no reason by National and its allies to transform themselves into participants.
Ideally, a big chunk of the electorate should be only vaguely aware that an election is taking place.
This is not to say that everybody should be bored stiff by the 2026 election campaign. National Party supporters, and conservatives generally, must not be allowed to tune-out of Luxon’s 200-day-long election campaign. On the contrary, they must be motivated to vote in record numbers.
Historically-speaking, the best way to ensure a good turnout of conservative voters is to scare the living daylights out of them.
This generally involves setting before them, in the most lurid detail, the terrifying consequences of a left-wing victory.
Readers of a certain age will recall the National Party’s election campaign of 1975 – most especially Rob Muldoon’s “Dancing Cossacks”.
It is important to acknowledge that these highly effective ads were deployed against an increasingly unpopular incumbent Labour government. In 2026, Luxon will be required to defend his own incumbency in slightly less strident tones.
Fifty years ago, the full weight of political communication would have landed on the shoulders of the mainstream media – there being no other effective means of addressing the whole electorate.
Fifty years on, and the mainstream media has lost much of its audience and even more of the public’s trust.
This is less of a problem than it might seem. The internet not only allows political parties to address voters for free, but it also allows campaign teams to direct specific political messages to specific demographic groups.
Luxon can frighten the living daylights out of National voters while Labour voters go about their business none the wiser.
Voter-scarers
In many ways, NZ First and ACT pay their political rent by behaving as National’s proxy voter-scarers.
Both parties draw electoral strength by focusing the attention of key demographic groups on issues that will shock, offend, frighten and/or outrage as many of them as possible into keeping their votes lodged firmly in the right-hand electoral column.
Although ACT trumpets its championing of positive liberty, (the freedom to), it is at heart a party dedicated to the preservation of negative liberty (the freedom from).
ACT rails against the constant encroachment of government regulation and control, and promises its largely business-oriented supporters to keep New Zealand as free from state tutelage as possible.
NZ First promotes a radical variant of representative democracy in which the will of the people, as expressed at the ballot-box, must override the will of unelected judges and public servants.
The party is equally wary of the power wielded by large, often foreign-controlled concentrations of private capital. Winston Peters has made himself the champion of those two classic generators of populist energy, the small business owner and the family farm.
His bogeymen are the economic, social and cultural elites; his heroes the ordinary men and women who, in spite of poor pay and scant recognition, keep the lights on for the rest of us.
Cynical electorate
How, then, are the parties of the Left to counter Luxon’s dull technocratic message of plodding competence and slow economic recovery?
Against the prime minister’s bland managerial promises to “fix the basics and build the future”, how are Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori to inject the requisite dose of excitement into the 2026 election campaign?
It is by no means an easy question to answer.
The generation of political excitement is extremely difficult to separate from the generation of expectations. Raise more hopes than you can fulfil – or, even worse, raise the same hopes that your party failed to fulfil when it was last in government – and you risk generating not excitement but cynicism.
A cynical electorate is a sceptical electorate, and sceptical electorates do not lightly change horses in mid-stream.
Helen Clark’s solution to this perennial left-wing conundrum was to under-promise and over-deliver. Unfortunately, it works only in the context of an incumbent conservative government that has run out of puff.
In such circumstances the voters are less interested in big, exciting promises than they are in throwing “the current lot” out. The Left is sailing with the wind behind it.
To eject a government that has been in office only for a single term requires more than small, easily-kept promises.
The last time a government was defeated after a single term was in 1975 and it required both a darkly charismatic leader and what was easily the biggest electoral bribe in New Zealand history.
In the 12 months leading up to the election in which the Bill Rowling-led Labour government was ruthlessly ejected from power, the political atmosphere crackled with an energy that boded nothing but ill for the incumbents.
Muldoon’s relentless campaigning had transformed him into a force of nature – a rare and frightening spectacle to behold. On election night 1975, Rowling told a gaggle of equally traumatised journalists that he felt as if he had been “hit by a bus”.
Laws of economic gravity
The Labour leader, Chris Hipkins, can promise “Jobs. Health. Homes.” until the cows come home. But, apart from the fact that Labour promised all three when it was last in power (not that long ago!) and failed to deliver any of them in a timely and fulsome fashion, anyone even vaguely aware of New Zealand’s current economic capabilities knows that big and expensive promises are fiscally undeliverable.
Maybe if Hipkins were another Muldoon (pictured) – someone who could draw crowds in excess of 6,000 eager followers – maybe then the laws of economic gravity could be suspended, if only for the duration of a fiery left-populist campaign.
But Chippie ain’t Muldoon. He’s the same cautious politician who made Barbara Edmonds his shadow finance minister for the not insignificant reason that he wanted someone who understood and respected the laws of economic gravity.
But if Hipkins can’t do excitement, then he’ll be competing to do boredom better than Luxon – and that’s a competition he cannot win.
Neither can the Greens and/or Te Pāti Māori carry Labour over the line. The more excitement they generate, the more ammunition they contribute to ACT’s and NZ First’s campaign to depict all three left-wing parties as a terrifying coalition from hell.
And that’s assuming the Greens and Te Pāti Māori even want to be exciting in 2026. After the two years they’ve been through, “boring” must be looking pretty good.
Once again, Luxon wins.
The truth of the matter is that an overwhelming majority of New Zealanders are convinced that the system they live in is arranged more-or-less as it should be. ‘
Every three years small tweaks and adjustments are demanded by groups seeking to improve and/or protect their position in society, but the overall shape of New Zealand’s political, economic and social institutions is accepted by the electorate.
That being the case, the Prime Minister’s willingness to settle for controlling what he and the coalition he leads can control is the right call.
Boring is good. Boring works. Boring it is.
Chris Trotter has more than 30 years’ experience as a political commentator and is the author of the Bowalley Rd blog
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