Chris Trotter
Twenty-nine percent is pretty bad, but not bad enough to propel Kieran McAnulty into Labour’s top job.
The most probable trigger for a leadership spill in the Labour caucus would be two or more reputable polls showing the Chris Hipkins-led Labour Party attracting less support than David Cunliffe’s disastrous 2014 party vote of 25.13%.
The caucus meeting that followed Labour’s worst showing in a general election since the 1920s was borderline hysterical. One of the more memorable moments allegedly came when a tearful Hipkins, his voice raw with emotion, more-or-less begged Cunliffe to relinquish the leadership.
Rather surprisingly, the irony of Hipkins refusing to relinquish the leadership after receiving a party vote just 1.78 percentage points higher than Cunliffe’s was lost entirely on his caucus colleagues. Nor did they appear to care that Hipkins had fallen short of Jacinda Ardern’s 2020 record-setting party vote by a whopping 23 percentage points.
It says a great deal about Labour that the leader who halved its support did not think it appropriate to make way for somebody else. It tells us even more about the party that Hipkins’ colleagues did not angrily thrust him aside.
In explaining their failure to hold Hipkins accountable for his appalling performance in what most observers agree was an appalling campaign, Labour’s MPs offer up the time-worn excuse that there’s no one else who could do the job.
The party suffered a serious defeat in 2023 and it will need careful nurturing if it is to recover full political health before the 2026 election. No one, they insist, is better qualified to manage the recovery of Labour than Chris Hipkins.
This is arrant nonsense.
The common touch
The entire Labour caucus knows that in Kieran McAnulty it possesses an entirely acceptable replacement for Hipkins. McAnulty has the look and sound of the sort of skilled tradesman who transforms your dusty old garage into a well-appointed home office: the working-class bloke who has cracked the Kiwi dream of starting your own business, becoming your own boss and making a go of it.
McAnulty’s none of these things, of course. No such person could ever get selected by the Labour Party of the 2020s.
The real Kieran McAnulty hails from Eketahuna, grew up in provincial New Zealand and is a graduate of the University of Otago with an MA in politics. That degree was more than enough to get him hired as an economic development adviser by the Masterton District Council.
So far, so modern Labour Party. But, McAnulty has tried his hand at more than bureaucratic keyboarding. At one time he worked for the TAB as a bookie, he has been a volunteer fire-fighter and was smart enough to campaign for election in an old ute that was forever threatening to fall apart.
McAnulty has the common touch, is quick with a joke and if he told you that he was a successful tradie, you’d probably believe him.
In other words, McAnulty is the obvious choice to succeed Hipkins. The man from Eketahuna easily passes muster as an “ordinary joker”. Hipkins, by contrast, kicked off his career by becoming a fulltime student politician. Sadly, he can still pass for one.
That McAnulty’s colleagues have declined to make him their leader speaks volumes about the party Labour has become.
From the perspective of the typical Labour MP, elevating a cis (twice-married) white male who can comfortably share a beer with a pub-table of ordinary working-class New Zealanders with opinions on te Tiriti, trans rights, Palestine and climate change that are nothing short of deplorable, would be a signal to the electorate that Labour had turned away from its “progressive” principles in pursuit of a quick populist hit.
To be clear, they would not see this as a good thing.
Deficient values
The key explanation for why Labour’s MPs are holding on to “Chippie” and giving the electorate no believable indication that the party feels their pain is because, deep down, they don’t believe that, as a government, Labour did anything wrong.
That voters rejected them so decisively in 2023 is not being interpreted as evidence that Labour positioned itself at too great a distance from the values of ordinary Kiwis, but as proof that the values of ordinary Kiwis are seriously deficient.
Making McAnulty their leader is impossible because it would signal to the world that Labour’s MPs had finally realised that between 2020 and 2023 they got just about everything wrong.
Think about it. Why would the Labour opposition in possession of the former boss of the Police Union – a guy who, in 2023, not only held his Wellington seat but made sure National’s Nicola Willis didn’t take it off him; a man who gets why his constituents feel unsafe on the streets – refuse, point-blank, to make Greg O’Connor its spokesperson on law and order?
There’s only one answer that makes any sense. Labour would rather have a young woman who looks about as sold on coming down hard on criminals as the average Israeli looks sold on giving Hamas a second chance, than appoint a spokesperson whose views on crime and punishment the public just might believe – and take seriously.
Labour simply does not believe it needs to, or should, change. While it hovers around the 30% mark in the polls, it is much easier to construct comforting scenarios in which the Greens attract the support of around 15% and the Māori Party around 5% of the party vote, allowing “The Left” to return to power with exactly the same suite of policies that the electorate rejected three years earlier.
That the latest round of polling lends a measure of credence to Labour’s day-dreaming makes it even more agreeable.
The gaping hole in Labour’s analysis is that a “Left bloc” with 45% is most unlikely to grow any larger (remember 2017?) Indeed, such numbers are almost certainly not evidence of an eager electorate swinging leftward, but of voters getting increasingly grumpy with their right-wing government.
Those same voters will not, however, remove that government from office if they feel its replacement, like the restored Bourbon dynasty, has “learned nothing and forgotten nothing”.
Without a suite of policies in which the voters can repose their confidence – policies that show clear evidence of reflection and revision on Labour’s part – the incumbent government is most unlikely to fall.
Electing Kieran McAnulty leader of the Labour Party would, however, make a serious dent in the National-Act-NZ First Coalition government’s chances of re-election.
Why? Because voters are much less likely to resist the idea of changing the government if McAnulty is at the heart of that change. But, an unchanged Labour Party, especially if it’s led by Chris Hipkins, will not only be resisted: it will be unelectable.
Chris Trotter has more than 30 years’ experience as a political analyst and commentor. He is the author of the Bowalley Rd blog
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