Chris Trotter
If Christopher Luxon could articulate a right-wing vision with the eloquence of Sir Paul Marshall, he’d have no worries. The hedge fund manager and right-wing media mogul’s keynote address to the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship’s London conference on 23 June (available here on YouTube) is precisely the sort of communication that might have prevented National’s humiliation in the latest 1News Verian poll.
To be fair to Luxon and National, the Verian poll was in the field well before the party’s AGM, so the voters’ response to National’s compulsory KiwiSaver policy announcement has yet to be gathered in by the harvesters of public opinion.
Both the Prime Minister and his party will be hoping their surprise abandonment of National’s longstanding objection to saving by compulsion (which extends all the way back to the “Dancing Cossacks” of 1975) will prove to be a game-changer.
That surprise announcement – so reminiscent of the hapless David Shearer’s 2013 announcement of Labour’s disastrous KiwiBuild policy, also made to delegates attending their party’s annual conference and with similar hopes of breaking out of the political cul-de-sac in which both he and Labour were trapped – may not, now, be enough.
Not in the face of a key opinion poll showing just how dramatically New Zealand politics is falling apart.
According to the poll, the share of the popular vote commanded by National and Labour combined stands at 61%. That is the lowest percentage recorded by TVNZ in 30 years. Not since the first MMP election in October 1996 has the electorate’s disdain for the two main parties been so pronounced.
Now, as then, their dwindling support signals widespread voter anger and a very real potential for political instability.
Since every party with the funds to do so is constantly polling the electorate, we must assume that National – whose campaign war-chest is bulging at the seams with donated gold – was being kept up-to-date by its own polling firm (David Farrar’s Curia Research Ltd) about what was happening out there in the place former National leader Don Brash called “punterland”.
Certainly it would explain the unmistakable note of panic in the voices of National’s keynote speakers: the Prime Minister, President Sylvia Wood and Campaign Chair Simeon Brown.
The constant reiteration of the urgent need to lift National’s party vote; Brown’s gratuitous belittling of his coalition partners; the Hail Mary policy volte face on compulsory saving – all these measures pointed to a party that already knew how messy electoral politics is getting and how close the rest of the country was to finding out.
And now it knows.
The 1News Verian poll is usually kinder to National than its public rivals, so its descent into the terrifying 20s (29%) makes you wonder what other pollsters are recording. (Some might construe Winston Peters’ gnomic reference to how National might react to an even lower percentage as a hint!)
But National’s drop of one percentage point is just a fifth of the size of Labour’s fall from grace, from 37% to 32%. Most of Labour’s lost love has been picked up by the Greens, who now stand at 13% – a gain of two points. That’s an important affirmation for a party plagued by an extraordinary series of political scandals. Not as important, however, as Opportunity’s advance to within just 0.4% of the 5% MMP threshold.
Opportunity has entered that crucial electoral zone where the voter’s judgment shifts from “I’m not wasting my vote” to “They’re in with a chance – why not?”
If Qiulae Wong continues to demonstrate the wisdom of her party advertising for its next leader on Seek, then there is every chance that enough voters will deviate from their intended electoral option to carry Wong and six of her colleagues over the threshold and into Parliament.
Clear and courageous
How to account for the two big parties’ decline and the rise of Opportunity and the Greens? An answer may be deduced from the fact that National used the opportunity provided by its AGM to announce a truly significant policy.
In addition to regular polling, well-resourced political parties also make use of focus groups. In their responses to the questions put to them, focus group participants provide party strategists with terms, phrases and observations that point the way to effective political communication.
If focus groups are regularly offering up criticism of the major parties’ unwillingness to offer clear and courageous solutions to the nation’s problems, then the strategists’ smart response would be to halt a slide in their support by advancing clear and courageous policies.
National’s pledge to make KiwiSaver compulsory fits that description admirably.
But faithful to its “nobody move, nobody gets hurt” approach to November’s general election, Labour steadfastly refuses to demonstrate either clarity or courage. Small policies, with small price-tags, are all the party is prepared to offer. Labour’s leader Chris Hipkins and his advisers have a plan – and they are sticking to it.
A more flexible Labour leader would have responded to National’s AGM announcement by immediately proclaiming his own commitment to a compulsory KiwiSaver scheme. A more courageous Labour leader, having seen National’s bid, would have proceeded to raise it with an even more significant policy promise.
But Hipkins is no poker player. Faced with National’s bold policy bid, the Labour leader folded.
Walking away from the table is not, however, the Greens’, Opportunity’s or NZ First’s style – and they are being rewarded for it.
Putting to one side their arithmetical difficulties, the Greens’ tax policies demonstrate considerably more radicalism than their previous propensity for alienating performative displays. A wealth tax signals revolutionary intent much more effectively than a keffiyeh.
Opportunity, likewise, is presenting an unapologetically radical manifesto to the electorate. Their commitment to establishing a compassionate technocracy is genuinely new and shows every sign of attracting the support of at least one voter in 20.
For more than 30 years, NZ First has both provoked and responded to that part of the New Zealand electorate unpersuaded, in roughly equal measure, by free market fundamentalism and the Gospel of Woke. The party’s blending of nationalism and democracy, while undoubtedly volatile, answers an impulse buried deep in the Kiwi psyche.
Is NZ First unsullied by venality? Certainly not. Does anyone, apart from those who are never going to vote for Winston and his party anyway, care? Nope.
ACT is in a very different space. More than any other group, ACT’s supporters are vulnerable to Luxon’s anguished demand for all good right-wing voters to come to the aid of the National Party. Attracting just 6% in 1News Verian’s latest poll, ACT cannot afford to lose too many more defectors to the centre-right.
Would David Seymour really care that much if ACT’s voters did walk? One senses a growing weariness with the leadership burden he has carried through three election cycles.
The gap created in ACT’s ranks by the departure of Brooke van Velden – fearless shieldmaiden of the neoliberal Rohirrim – will be especially hard to fill.
Between them, Seymour and van Velden achieved much. (Who else could have unseated pay equity?) And if Luxon is indeed preparing to tack leftward after the fashion of John Key, then ACT’s leaders may argue that the party is under no ideological obligation to follow him.
Which just leaves Te Pāti Māori. The 1News Verian poll gives it just 2% of the party vote, but the pollster’s assumption that TPM will take all six of the seats it currently holds is what accounts for 1News awarding a 64:60 “overhang” victory to the centre-left. If, however, TPM wins only two of its current six seats, then the balance of parliamentary power changes.
Unsurprisingly, TPM is reported to be giving serious consideration to waging a one-tick, electorate-only, election campaign.
This would entail TPM voters enrolled on the Māori roll giving their electorate vote to TPM candidates in the seven Māori electorates, while being encouraged to vote for the Greens or Labour with their party vote.
Were TPM to pull off a clean sweep of the Māori electorates, while receiving a negligible party vote, then the size of the House of Representative could be expanded by up to seven seats – all of which would be added to the Left’s column.
Struggle for legitimacy
Such an overhang would make it extremely difficult for the right-wing parties to claim victory – even if, collectively, they’d won a majority of the party vote.
But a left-wing government created out of this dubious democratic proposition would struggle to secure legitimacy. Its dependence on the support of Te Pāti Māori and the Greens would arouse fears on the right of a sudden and dramatic burst of legislation designed to “decolonise” and “indigenise” Aotearoa-New Zealand.
The fears of conservative voters would be heightened by the knowledge that such a “woke” government could count upon the enthusiastic support of the larger part of the judiciary, the public service, academia and the mainstream news media.
In such circumstances, political and cultural polarisation would grow and the preservation of social cohesion and political stability be made progressively more difficult. An uncompromising determination on the part of a quasi-revolutionary government to retain and exploit its temporary political and constitutional advantage would be bound to inspire a great deal of malice in punterland.
A vote for Opportunity in November could thus become a matter of considerable importance. Not on account of what it might bring in, but in consideration of who it might keep out.
Chris Trotter has more than 30 years’ experience as a political commentator. He is the author of the Bowalley Road blog.
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