Chris Trotter
In The Dark Knight, Batman’s butler, Alfred Pennyworth – played to perfection by Michael Caine – explains to his employer the dire implications of the Joker’s nihilism: “Because some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money, they can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”
Those lines weren’t just memorable, they were prophetic. In the year’s since The Dark Knight’s release in 2008, the nihilistic impulse, especially in politics, has grown only stronger.
So much so that by 2015, convenors of focus groups in both the USA and the UK began recording a new and alarming sentiment among participants.
With increasing frequency, people were responding to questions about their nation’s political institutions and what could be done to improve them with the chilling answer: “burn it all down”.
Over the course of the next year, the aggressive nihilism lurking in those focus groups acquired an all-too-real political substance.
First in the UK’s Brexit referendum and then in the shock election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States, the incendiary impulses of a disturbingly large number of voters had torched the comforting assumptions of the political mainstream.
They weren’t looking for anything logical and they couldn’t be bought, bullied or made to see reason.
Close to home
That was yesterday’s world – and it was burning. It still is, and much closer to home than many New Zealanders realise.
Across the Tasman, a recent Redbridge poll found 83% of populist Pauline Hanson’s voters – whose One Nation party is polling just a few points behind Anthony Albanese’s Labor government – cited “burn it all down” as their feeling toward Australia’s political system.
A kindred sentiment was reported here by the Helen Clark Foundation in April 2025.
While most New Zealanders paid lip-service to the virtues of democracy, almost a third of those surveyed (32%) were open to “having a strong leader who does not have to bother with Parliament and elections”.
Such figures seldom rise from anything other than the ashes of their nation’s democratic institutions.
This “a plague on both their houses” sentiment that manifests across the electorate – the preference of nearly a third of us for a strong leader untrammelled by democratic restraint; the growing number of alienated and angry nihilists willing to see the entire system torched – has been further darkened by the prospect of a November election which delivers no clear winner.
Leaden political environment
The Taxpayer’s Union-Curia Research poll taken earlier this month showed the Left and Right blocs each winning 60 seats in the 120-seat House of Representatives – a hung Parliament.
Neither National nor Labour could muster more than 35% of the party vote (National’s 2017 result, 44%, now seems a very long time ago). Their adjunct parties, the Greens and NZ First, each attracted around 10%. ACT limped home with 6.7%.
Now attracting less than 3% of the party vote, Te Pāti Māori would have to hold onto at least one of the seven Māori electorate seats to retain its parliamentary presence.
This is a dispiriting political picture, revealing a pervasive mood of public boredom with its constitutive elements.
The leaders of the two largest parties contribute heavily to this leaden political environment.
Neither Christopher Luxon nor Chris Hipkins possesses the charismatic power required to energise their third of the electorate and draw away support from rival parties.
Neither leader favours the sort of change agenda that challenges and enthuses voters. Indeed, neither man seems willing to embrace any other strategy than playing it safe.
But when a significant number of voters are looking at the status quo and saying, “burn it all down”, offering more of the same is not only the most boring option, but it is also the course of action most fraught with danger.
Sharpening the contrast
National’s and Labour’s strategy of “standing pat” and presenting each other with the smallest possible target runs a real risk of encouraging their adjunct parties to move towards the extremes.
It makes good electoral sense for NZ First, the Greens, ACT and Te Pāti Māori to sharpen the contrast between the spiciness of their own policies and the bland stodginess of the two big parties.
In normal times, this strategy tends to be counter-productive. A smaller party determined to differentiate itself by moving sharply to the right or the left generally encourages the moderate majority of voters to crowd around the parties occupying the centre ground.
Far from being challenged, the status quo is reinforced.
In not-so-normal times, however, when many voters view the status quo as “the problem”, promises of “real” change are able gain real traction.
Once perceived, however, any loss of support to what they deem to be political extremists is certain to alarm centrist voters.
They begin to question whether the hitherto dominant centrist party will emerge from the election with sufficient power to rein-in the perceived extremism of its allies.
These doubts are intensified if the centrist party’s policy-makers opt to embrace at least some of the radicalism of their putative allies in an attempt to stem the flow of defections from its own ranks.
This was the dynamic which in 2023 cut the Labour Party’s electoral support in half.
The centrist voters who had flocked to Jacinda Ardern in the “covid” election of 2020 had grown ever more alarmed at what they perceived to be Labour’s attachment to reckless borrowing and spending, authoritarian social controls and the identity politics of the “Woke Left”.
This alarm was not allayed by revelations that Labour’s support for what many New Zealanders considered to be the extreme policies of decolonisation and indigenisation had been deliberately kept hidden from the electorate in 2020.
Slowly, and then quickly, voters who had spent their entire lives voting for the parties of the Left began to consider the ultimate heresy of shifting their allegiance to the Right.
Flight to the Left?
Is the 2026 general election shaping up as a re-run of the 2023 flight from the Left – but in the opposite direction?
Is there a serious danger of the centre-left voters who abandoned Labour returning to the left-wing fold in response to what they see as National’s reckless lurch to the Right?
Not really.
National has behaved in office according to its nature. Luxon’s leadership has been distinguished neither by extremism nor ideological backsliding. Governing in difficult economic circumstances, the coalition government has suffered only a moderate degree of voter attrition.
National won 38.06% of the party vote in the 2023 general election; the most recent Taxpayers’ Union-Curia Research poll puts it at 31.3%.
The loss of those seven percentage points is, however, mitigated by the fact that at least four of them have migrated to National’s coalition partner, NZ First. A strong and well-funded National campaign will further increase the fluidity of the right-wing vote.
Labour’s problems of 2023 have not, however, gone away.
According to the Taxpayers’ Union-Curia Research February poll, the party has lifted its 2020 party vote of 26.9% to 34.1% – a creditable gain of 7.2 percentage points.
Between 2024 and 2026, most of Labour’s gains came at National’s expense.
But now that the electoral consequences of the coalition’s more controversial policies – especially its moves against pay equity – have been bedded-in, any further shifts in support for the Opposition parties (as recorded in the latest One News-Verian poll) will mostly represent churning in the overall left-wing vote, not large numbers of right-wing voters switching sides.
Playing it safe
New Zealand electoral politics is stuck. Left and Right have settled into blocs of roughly equal size that change only marginally from poll to poll.
Neither bloc is offering policies calculated to set the electorate on fire. Both blocs seem determined to play it safe.
This is the way it used to be. Sixty years ago, New Zealand’s two-party system, cemented into place by first-past-the-post, offered a similar picture of a society split down the middle electorally, but not socially.
Stuffy though Godzone may have been in the 1960s, it was a stuffiness born of affluence and social peace. If the country was stuck, then as far as most New Zealanders were concerned, it was stuck in a pretty good place.
But the golden weather didn’t last. By the eighties, New Zealand found itself stuck in a very bad place. The status quo had become unsustainable. At the highest levels of the state, the decision was made to burn it all down.
But the arsonists who torched the old New Zealand weren’t nihilists. They were idealists, supremely confident that a New Zealand driven by untrammelled market forces would emerge phoenix-like from the ashes of Muldoonism, stronger and more prosperous than ever.
Roger Douglas would show Maggie Thatcher and Ronald Reagan how it was done.
But what is to be done now – 40 years later? All over the world the market-driven experiment is failing and the key institutions of national and international order are being set alight by nihilistic populists who want only to watch them burn.
Our own politicians, meanwhile, are seized by the conviction that if nobody moves, nobody will get hurt.
Has New Zealand ever been stuck in a more dangerous place?
So much petrol. And so many matches.
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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