New Zealand’s local elections appear to show a backlash against Ardern. The reality is more complex
Every year between 2008 and 2016, political commentators would reliably announce that former prime minister John Key’s “honeymoon” was finally over. The Herald on Sunday was perhaps the first outlet to call time – marking the second week of May 2009 as “the moment the honeymoon came to a crashing halt”. New Zealanders disagreed, and Sir John’s polling held. In the nine years that National were in government their immovable ratings became a running joke. “The year is 7059”, wrote the essayist Giovanni Tiso. “Small bands of humans roam the barren New Zealand landscape in search of food. National’s polling is steady at 49%.” It took Sir John’s retirement, and Jacinda Ardern’s Labour leadership, to register a meaningful change in their parties’ popularity.
But in 2013 we were still naive, as a wave of progressives swept local elections. Labour’s Len Brown won the Auckland mayoralty despite a rancorous campaign against him. Labour’s Lianne Dalziel won Christchurch. The Green party member Celia WadeBrown won the Wellington mayoralty, and progressives were returned in the country’s smaller cities, including Rotorua and Nelson. The national broadcaster noted the “left lean” and the political commentators were quick to speculate that this signalled trouble for Sir John’s re-election in 2014.
National won that election in a near landslide. And so the commentators should exercise caution – and perhaps humility – when reading the results from last weekend’s local elections. Conservative candidates won the mayoralty in Auckland, Christchurch, Rotorua, Nelson, and Invercargill. Even Dunedin, the most reliably leftwing city in the South Island, elected a conservative mayor whose first dip into the national media saw him argue that his city would experience a very low level of sea level rise “because the ocean’s quite cold”. On these results it’s tempting to argue the country is moving right, or at the very least returning to form after the aberration that was the 2020 general election. But with the 2013 local elections in mind, perhaps the best that could be said after the weekend’s local results is that they reflect local conditions.
The backlash in Dunedin, where the
Green party mayor lost to the conservative candidate, is partly a response to the cycleways, pipe improvements, and pedestrianisation. The same is likely true in Auckland, but at scale. The construction of the City Rail Link is causing disruption to business and movements across the CBD. Both the left’s candidate, Efeso Collins, who promised fare-free public transport, and the right’s winning candidate Wayne Brown, who promised to stop it all, aimed to make movements across the city easier. The disagreement was over which method: public transport or the private vehicle.
Wellington went left, returning a Green party mayor in Tory Whanau. Some commentators write this off as woke Wellington. But Whanau is a change candidate in the same way that conservative winner Brown was in Auckland. Her pitch was more or less the same: she would fix what was going wrong. The exploding pipes, the gridlocked roads, and the always-unaffordable homes. The same is true in cities like Rotorua: the new National affiliated mayor was promising to fix what many residents understood as their broken city.
From this perspective perhaps the local election was less about national trends than it was about local conditions. That’s a comforting story for liberals and leftists. But inherent in any demand for a “fix” – no matter where – is a prior acknowledgment of a problem.
The cost-of-living crisis is punishing incumbents in the UK, Australia, and the US. New Zealand is no different. Labour’s polling is nowhere close to what it was at the 2020 election and, absent any credible policies to fix that crisis, a betting person would almost certainly back National at the 2023 general election. Auckland had 12 years under Labour mayors and it’s possible to argue that the mayoral vote was a signal to the party. New Zealand has had six years of a Labour government that managed crisis after crisis, but the cumulative disruptions, adjustments, and disappointments are possible taking their toll.
Morgan Godfery (Te Pahipoto, Sāmoa) is a senior lecturer at the University of Otago and a columnist at Metro