Labour’s safety first approach pays dividends while Nats dropped ball

Jacinda Ardern’s crushing victory last night means that for the first time she can govern without a handbrake.

With National facing utter humiliation and the centre-Left holding nearly two thirds of Parliament, Ardern now has a historic opportunity to deliver the transformation her leadership has always promised.

Labour’s landslide follows a devastatingly simple and disciplined campaign. The party’s strategists realised early on that the central question of the election was who was best placed to lead New Zealand through Covid-19.

Voters had trust in Ardern from her handling the pandemic, and were repelled by National’s revolving-door leadership and relentless negativity.

Labour focused firmly on winning and holding the centre ground, leaning heavily into stability and ‘sticking with the plan’. Critically, they avoided the sort of gaffes and big announcements of previous campaigns that might have given National a chance to get back in the game.

Instead, National found itself framed as chaotic and risky – a role that the party went on to play exactly as Labour had written for it. To be fair to Judith Collins, she inherited a party in disarray.

Despite giving her best, she delivered an amateurish campaign that will be remembered for a budget that didn’t add up; gushing members of the public who turned out to be party supporters planted for the cameras; damaging leaks and disunity; and to top it all off a bizarre decision to spend the final days of the campaign insulting fat people.

It seemed more like a script from The Thick of It than an election campaign from a major political party.

The Labour Party’s slogan was ‘‘Let’s Keep Moving’’, but in the end it may as well have been ‘‘Would you just look at the state of that other lot?’’

Judging by the result, that’s exactly what the voters did.

Collins can surely now only hang on for as long as it takes to find a credible replacement. She will leave behind her a party in crisis, having abandoned the centre, squandered its core brand of stability and economic competence, and after last night’s decimation a whiter, more male, more conservative party increasingly dominated by its evangelical wing.

The full ignominy of National’s position couldn’t have been summed up more perfectly than in the final leaders’ debate, where Collins begged New Conservative voters to come back home to National, while it was Ardern who invoked the legacy of Key and English.

But having won from the centre, Ardern’s risk is that in her newfound popularity she becomes John Key, a politician who won multiple elections but had his finger so firmly on the pulse of middle New Zealand that he forgot to actually do anything.

There is always a tension in politics between appeasing the median swing voter and actually making meaningful change. True leadership is about taking people with you.

Ardern has already shown New Zealanders through her handling of Covid that bold action founded on the progressive values of kindness, collective action and protecting the most vulnerable benefits us all.

Her challenge this term – backed by an overwhelming mandate – is to take that approach and apply it to the running sores of housing and poverty and the challenge of climate change as we build back from Covid.

Collins can surely now only hang on for as long as it takes to find a credible replacement.