Wayne Brown’s pollster must have scratched his head as he analysed the data.
The bulk of his client’s support was, as expected, coming from Aucklanders over the age of 55 who listened to Newstalk-ZB and, more often than not, voted National/Act. But, alongside these solid, conservative Kiwis, dubbed “Country Calendar watchers” by Brown’s campaign boffins, there were others who diverged from the stereotype.
Sure, they were baby boomers but that’s where the similarities ended. These were National Radio listeners who, right up until this election, had been rock-solid Labour/Alliance/Green voters.
In this contest, however, they were willing to step across the tribal boundary lines. Brown didn’t need their votes, he was going to win easily without them, but the fact that he had them boded very ill for the Left. Very ill, indeed. Boundaries crossed once can be crossed again.
The local government elections of 2022 unfolded in circumstances far removed from those held three years earlier in 2019. It wasn’t simply the fact that New Zealand had spent the intervening years in the grim shadow of the global covid-19 pandemic that had altered the political equations. Covid and everything that came with it had also altered New Zealanders’ hearts and minds.
In 2020, elated at having emerged virtually unscathed from their encounter with the delta variant of the coronavirus, Kiwis swung wildly behind their young prime minister and her Labour-led government. Credited with bringing the country safely though the danger, Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Party was returned to office with more than 50% of the votes cast. The “transformation” she had promised in the early months of her first term was now possible. She was no longer at the mercy of Winston Peters’ “handbrake”. This was ‘Jacinda’s’ moment.
Two years on, the situation has radically changed.
If the prime minister’s handling of delta had been a triumph, her handling of the omicron variant of covid-19 was a disaster.
The exceptional solidarity achieved during the first nine months of the pandemic had evaporated. The government’s strategy for fighting the virus had changed – and then changed again.
The clarity of the PM’s strategy disappeared. In its place arose a regime of coercion and confusion that angered and alienated tens of thousands of New Zealanders. Vaccination refuseniks lost their jobs. Auckland was locked down for months.
Then, as suddenly as it had been erected, Labour’s regime of mandates and lockdowns was dismantled. By the time the local body elections rolled around in September 2022, hundreds were being infected with covid-19 every day, and 2,000 New Zealanders had died of the virus. Elation had given way to a brooding, sullen silence.
Nothing seemed to work. Omicron and long covid scythed through international and local workforces. Labour shortages became acute. Supply chains stretched and broke. Behind the necessary, covid inspired, monetary expansion marched its inevitable corollary – rapidly rising inflation. Then, Russia invaded Ukraine and everything got a lot worse. Still, nothing worked, but now everything – especially energy – cost even more.
Cities that work
Those running for local office had two choices: embrace the steadily hardening public mood or attempt to rise above it.
Mayoral candidates and other local politicians could not, credibly, make promises that only central government has the power and resources to keep. Accordingly, candidates supportive of the Labour government urged voters to exercise patience and keep the faith. Overdue investment in crucial infrastructure was happening all around them. Central government was acting. Better times were coming. Stay the course.
Not all voters were so easily mollified and neither were those who intended to ride to victory on their discontent.
Right across New Zealand, the message conveyed to conservative contenders for the mayoral chains was the same. People are sick of road cones. Sick of waiting in traffic jams. Sick of buses that never turn up. Sick of major projects that never seem to get finished but whose budget over-runs (when they are disclosed at all) continue to rise and rise, and rise again. We are heartily sick of grand schemes, the voters told the Right.
What did these hard-pressed ratepayers of New Zealand want from their local councils? Surprisingly little. They wanted the electricity to stay on, the water to stay clean, the rubbish to be carted away, the bus and train timetables to tell the truth and for all those bloody potholes to be filled in. Not to put too fine a point on it, they wanted their towns and cities to work.
It wasn’t that they didn’t care about climate change, colonisation or the shortfall in affordable housing; it was simply that, as ordinary citizens of modest means, they had only so much caring to offer.
If covid-19 had taught them anything, it was the importance of putting first things first: your health, your family, your sanity, your job. All the stuff that happens close to home. All the stuff that happens over the hills and far away, no matter how important, could – and probably should – wait.
This was the mood revealed by Wayne Brown’s pollster, Tim Hurdle – described by veteran political journalist Richard Harman as “one of the country’s top political operators”.
But, there was a problem. Older, whiter, wealthier and more settled than the rest of Auckland, these “Country Calendar watchers” had become the favourite target of politicians and journalists purporting to represent the views of younger Aucklanders.
These self-proclaimed “progressives” angrily rejected older voters’ minimalist expectations of local government. It is simply wrong, they insisted, to suggest that action on climate change can wait. Or, that mandatory housing intensification represents an unwarranted central government intrusion upon the rights of property-holders. Or, that the establishment of Māori wards contravenes longstanding constitutional principles. If older voters continued to obstruct the progressive agenda of younger voters, they argued, then the state should use its powers to force them out of the way.
Control and coercion
It is this willingness to invoke central government coercion that has sharpened the edge of both national and local politics.
The idea that if local authorities resist the plans of central government, then the latter is entitled to simply pull rank and legislate over the top of them, is fraught with all manner of political difficulties.
Local politicians will justifiably object that if the democratically inspired opposition of regional, district and city councils is to be regularly and peremptorily over-ridden by Parliament, then what is the constitutional purpose of local government? Why bother with it at all?
On no other issue are these questions more sharply debated than in relation to the Labour government’s Three Waters legislation. The proposed law has been attacked by a multitude of local authorities – many now led by vocal opponents of Three Waters – as being economically, politically, culturally and constitutionally unacceptable to the degree where it should be withdrawn immediately and revised comprehensively.
If Wayne Brown can persuade a majority of Auckland councillors to join him in rejecting the effective confiscation of the storm, drinking and wastewater networks constructed and paid for by generations of Auckland citizens, then it will require a positively Putinesque assertion of Wellington’s will to smack them down. To borrow an expression from the new mayor of Nelson, Nick Smith: Labour would have to have a death wish.
The prime minister has laughed off the suggestion that the results of the 2022 local government elections can be read as harbingers of Labour’s doom in 2023. By doing so, she has lost the opportunity to accept them as a timely reminder that governments endure only by virtue of the voters’ continuing support.
With the general election a year away, there is still time for Ardern and her colleagues to re-think and re-set their policies.
But if the arrogance and political tone-deafness afflicting this government persist, then the temptation for a growing number of angry and alienated Labour/ Green supporters to migrate across tribal political boundaries can only grow. There is no reason why the fate of the social democratic parties of Europe should not also overtake the New Zealand centre-left.
The voters, or at least those sufficiently motivated to return their local government ballot papers, have given the prime minister and her colleagues a mighty big hint.
They should take it.
Chris Trotter is a political commentator of more than 30 years’ experience and the editor of the Bowalley Road blog.
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