On the trail towards a selfie-made victory
One week after the Labour landslide, senior journalist Andrea Vance asks: Is Jacinda-mania authentic, or the product of sophisticated backroom operations?
One of the defining moments of the 2020 election happened quietly, behind a closed office door, seven floors up in the Beehive. A few hours earlier, just a few streets away, Judith Collins and her shadow finance minister Paul Goldsmith had unveiled their alternative Budget. Journalists were treated to a Friday morning breakfast at Wellington’s Intercontinental hotel and given an hour to scrutinize the documents.
The big selling point was a 16-month temporary tax cut, putting an extra $50-a-week in the pocket of an average earner, Collins claimed from a podium in the hotel’s grand ballroom.
The package was worth about $4.7 billion, to be paid for by raiding a Covid-19 response fund.
Goldsmith’s plan was a better way, Collins boasted. “Responsible economic management has been a hallmark of successive National Governments.”
Commentators were enthusiastic: finally the campaign delivered a bone to chew over. Ten days earlier, Grant Robertson had announced he would bring back the top 39 per cent income tax rate.
There was now a real choice between what the two main parties were offering: a dose of fiscal stimulus sugar, set against Labour’s wage subsidy and infrastructure spending.
The fast-paced drama of an election campaign means politicians are expected to deliver an instantaneous, snappy reaction. Robertson had his soundbite ready: National’s policies were “desperate and reckless” he concluded, two hours after the plan was made public.
It was standard election mudslinging and Collins shrugged it off, returning to her Auckland home. She took the following day off public events to rehearse and prepare for her party’s official campaign launch, to be held at Avalon Studios in the Hutt Valley.
At his desk in Robertson’s ministerial offices, economics advisor Craig Renney was still at work, meticulously poring over Goldsmith’s fiscal policy. National had paid economics agency NZIER to review the figures, but bitter experience taught the former Treasury analyst to scour the spreadsheets.
Renney, a Geordie whose chirpy demeanor belies a razor sharp mind, was part of Robertson’s
team, blindsided in 2017 by Steven Joyce’s accusations of an $11b fiscal hole in Labour’s Budget.
Renney was able to disprove National’s claims but Labour’s narrative was haunted by the uncertainty.
He checked, and re-checked, the calculations. Goldsmith had used outdated Treasury estimations for contributions to the Super Fund.
Labour sat on the information. Then, three hours before Collins’ launch, Robertson dropped a press release with a blistering critique of National’s competence. The $4b mistake dominated Collins’ post-speech press conference.
It was satisfying political theatre for Robertson, who’d been irritated by Joyce’s tactics.
But it also served to underline what Labour’s internal poll had been telling the party since at least the beginning of the year: voters trusted Ardern and her team on the economy over National, for the first time in perhaps a generation.
‘‘The mistake that was made with National’s fiscal plan could have been forgiven if people trusted them on the issue,’’ campaign chair Megan Woods says. ‘‘It became so big for National, because people were having doubts about their ability to lead New Zealand out [of the Covid-19 pandemic].’’
Woods and her campaign manager Hayden Munro were mentored by the late Jim Anderton in the art of Leftwing grassroots campaigning. Both have experienced when a campaign can go very wrong. Munro’s first was the 2010 Christchurch mayoral race when Anderton made an unfortunately timed comment about an ‘‘earthquake seismic shift’’. He started out 20 points ahead but lost to Bob Parker by 13 points.
The following year, Woods began her first Parliamentary campaign, which was majorly disrupted by the second, devastating quake.
‘‘We are both from Christchurch,’’ she said. ‘‘We had in the back of our mind we had to be prepared for anything and [have] the ability to pivot campaigns. So agility was built into the campaign right from the beginning.’’
But neither foresaw a global pandemic, or twice shutting down and restarting their operations.
Munro was on a video call to candidates when his phone blew up with text messages. Four cases of Covid-19 had been discovered in the community in Auckland.
That night, Woods and Labour leader Jacinda Ardern made the decision to suspend campaigning, after only four days on the road.
It was a risky move; campaigns are meant to ramp up in excitement. Keeping volunteers energised is always a challenge. Labour sent home 7000 not knowing if they would re-engage after lockdown.
Ardern, Woods and Munro opted to stick with the strategic foundations outlined to MPs at a caucus gathering in the Wairarapa’s Brackenridge retreat and spa in January.
Internal polling showed an overwhelming majority of New Zealanders believed the country was going in the right direction and approved of Ardern’s performance.
The emergence of Covid accentuated this and, during the lockdown, Ardern’s popularity outstripped anything seen since UMR, Labour’s pollster, began tracking in the early 1990s.
The strategy hadn’t changed but the dynamics did. Covid was all voters cared about.
‘‘The campaign that we’ve run was the campaign that we wanted to run back in January,’’ an insider says.
‘‘Voters use elections like job interviews or performance reviews. In 2017, they really liked the new applicant but they didn’t know much about her, not enough experience.
‘‘This time, she’s been with the company for three years. It’s obvious she’s done a really good job. That will be the story of the election: voters looked at her and said: ‘you’ve done a good job, we’ll extend your contract for three years’.’’
David Farrar is director of Curia Market Research, National’s pollsters. ‘‘Nothing was ever going to change the outcome. Covid dominated,’’ he says. ‘‘The [levels] of advance voting showed people wanted it out of the way.
‘‘National had already gone from 45 to 30 per cent in the polls. It was unclear if there was anything that would have taken them back to the 40s. There was overwhelmingly a positive theme, plus 50 [per cent believed], that [the country] was heading in the right direction.
‘‘It is very hard to turn around a first term government when the direction is so strongly positive.
‘‘Jacinda’s favourables were even higher: plus 65, plus 70. Those two things by themselves are almost determinative. And, in the end, I think Auckland going back into level 3 helped Labour. It put all the focus back on Covid.
‘‘There was proven incompetence, like no border testing for six months and new cases, but … people gave the Government the benefit of the doubt because they saw what happened overseas.’’
There was mild criticism about a lack of policy from the party. ‘‘This eternal question of policy versus presidential,’’ the insider sighed. ‘‘The last three years have really shown that you’re not electing a robot that does a manifesto and nothing else. You are electing a person to deal with whoknows-what.
‘‘And actually, if you look at Key in ’11 and ’14, he made a virtue of the handling the GFC, Christchurch, Pike River. That is something that New Zealand voters are used to.’’
Supporters were disappointed in the lack of a visionary tax policy.
A Labour insider traces the roots of this back to the 2017 election campaign. ‘‘They learned from the ridiculous situation we got ourselves into over [the capital gains] tax… and over on the side on water tax. National went hard on that. We lost five per cent in the last two weeks at least.
‘‘People believed that we were going to increase income tax. They would argue with the moderator in focus groups.
‘‘All the soft voters were excited by Jacinda – [many of whom] were actually medium-hard National voters that became soft [because they] were unsure and worried about tax.’’
This time around the campaign played safe, arguing that an economic crisis is not the time to hike taxes.
There were other reasons for caution. ‘‘We talk to our sister parties a lot,’’ an insider reasoned. ‘‘And Australian Labor and [the] UK both had unpleasant experiences in the last five years. UK Labour under Miliband thought they were about to beat a one-term government, and then famously, those exit polls come out on the day and they’re not even close.
‘‘And then the same thing happened to the Aussies last year.
‘‘Second thing, when you have a poll lead and you are a Left-wing party, you start to get concerned about your voters – who are less inclined to vote than centre Right voters anyway – not getting out to vote.
‘‘That really happened to us in 2002. So, our party has a history in New Zealand of that not coming off.’’
This offered an opportunity to the Greens, one of Labour’s governing partners, who were pushing an ambitious wealth tax. ‘‘Our wealth tax got launched early so most people had actually forgotten about it until Labour launched their [policy],’’ a senior MP said.
‘‘We did notice the polls after that – it wasn’t statistically significant – but they were all up a point or two.’’
National used the wealth tax as a cudgel with which to beat Ardern but Beehive insiders believe that was a tactical error, driving soft voters to Labour to stave off the Greens.
After the false start, the relaunch of campaigning had all the hallmarks of Ardern’s down-to-earth image. She started her nationwide tour from her parents’ Waikato home, so they could babysit toddler daughter Neve, and shared a selfie working at a cramped desk with an old-fashioned cassette player.
Ardern’s public persona is as cultivated as a carefully-curated Instagram page. Her image is tightly controlled by a formidable press team led by her chief press secretary Andrew Campbell, with Kelly Spring, a former RNZ journalist, and ex- Stuff business editor Ellen Read.
Interviews are not given lightly and journalists often complain Ardern is inaccessible, especially when compared with ex-PM Sir John Key. There is a suspicion she prefers reaching voters through social media, unfiltered by reporters.
At every stage, Ardern was followed by a camera crew from the Augusto creative agency. The Auckland company filmed her first ads back in 2017, when she replaced Andrew Little a few weeks out from election day and their offices were used as a base for key Labour staff on polling day.
At times, the crew was better resourced than the travelling media pack.
A Facebook video It’s not everyday you get the PM in your ute was celebrated for folksy interactions between Ardern and Wairarapa MP Kieran McAnulty.
But look closer: there are no fewer than five cameras trained on Ardern.
Someone was always made available to film a ‘‘livestream’’, at which she became adept.
A week out from the campaign, thronged by hundreds of selfie-demanding shoppers at the
‘‘We have to reach people where they are. And that does mean that campaigns are much more about video.’’ Labour insider
Ma¯ngere markets, Ardern performed a piece-tocamera in one take, from the centre of the scrum.
Digital – which includes advertising on news websites like Stuff – made up the biggest proportion of the campaign’s spend. (The amount is a closely guarded secret but it was more than the next most expensive TV advertising, staff costs and then newspaper ads.)
Labour’s campaign team was unapologetic. ‘‘It’s because of these,’’ an insider explained, pointing to a cell phone.
‘‘This is increasingly the prism through which people interact with the world. It’s how they get the news, where they are spending most of the time.
‘‘We have to reach people where they are. And that does mean that campaigns are much more about video.’’
The Greens eschewed television ads. ‘‘It’s expensive and the numbers don’t justify it,’’ a senior MP said. They poured resources into outdoor and digital advertising: ‘‘You couldn’t move in Auckland Central for seeing Chlo¨e’s face.’’
(Chlo¨e Swarbrick became only the second Green MP to win an electorate seat. That was one of the election night surprises, but it shouldn’t have been. A robo-poll conducted by Labour put her ahead a few weeks ahead of the ballot, but they discounted it because it contradicted public polls.)
As a minor party, the Greens must count their pennies.
Pushing back the campaign was expensive and the partial lockdown in August threw their carefully planned schedule out of whack. A backlog of emergency legislation had also kept MPs from hitting the road for longer than they anticipated.
‘‘We were jamming through emergency legislation – as Parliamentarians we couldn’t get out of the building. I’d planned to do nights and weekends [campaigning] but we were working there. It was bizarre because my [local] campaign was kind of happening without me,’’ a senior MP said.
‘‘[Before] everyone knew when everything was – debates, meetings – and then the whole thing fell apart. But we were all in the same boat.
‘‘The issue was community organisers in our main centres: they had to be paid to stay on longer, and be able to stay on longer. We lost one who had another commitment.
‘‘We were pretty worried about it. But we raised enough to cover that.’’
Covid also hit the party in other unexpected ways.
They’d hired Matt Thomas, who worked for the Australian Greens for seven years, including as field director in the 2018 state campaign and 2019 federal election.
‘‘I was pretty done with Australian politics after Scott Morrison won, it was a depressing election, so I decided to come across the ditch,’’ he says. ‘‘I actually had a great time.’’
But the extension of the election period into October meant he had to return home early and run operations from hotel quarantine in Sydney. ‘‘It’s the same. My day-to-day didn’t change, and I was working on New Zealand time.’’
As Ardern rallied support with chaotic scenes in shopping malls, markets, universities and street walkabouts, her campaign team knuckled down in a grey, corporate office in central Wellington.
Fraser House, Labour’s long-time headquarters, has lost some of its ‘‘beer and sandwiches’’ charm since a refurbishment paid for from the 2017 campaign surplus – much to the chagrin of this year’s team.
The rhythm of the day started early, with a 7am staff call between Munro, data specialist Rob Salmond at Fraser House and Campbell and Ardern’s chief of staff Raj Nahna in the Beehive.
They’d discuss overnight media coverage, poll tracking (the major parties poll a sample of about 300 voters most nights) and focus group results.
After 30 minutes, they’d be joined by Ardern, Robertson and deputy leader Kelvin Davis to run through Ardern’s schedule, press releases and identify any issues they might need to react to.
After that call, Munro and Salmond briefed staff in a daily ‘‘stand-up’’ meeting. They ran through how the field campaign was tracking. (Overall 150,000 doors knocked, including 80,000 on election day). Socialist red rose stickers were handed out instead of gold stars.
‘‘The field campaign was very successful,’’ former staffer and government relations consultant Neale Jones says. ‘‘Labour has always been very good at this and they really stepped it up [from 2017].’’
Updates on the war chest were also integral to these briefings. As well as big donations and union contributions, Labour has done well from small online contributions. Over the course of the campaign, it raised $1.59m, with the average gift being $34.
At 3pm, Munro entertained budget bids from nine regional organisers. In the final week this included $1400 for custard squares to treat volunteers.
One of the secrets of Labour’s success was locked in the algorithms and databases of a programme called Labour Connect. A source familiar with the system says: ‘‘They’ve got very good data in terms of who’s going to vote for us, who is persuadable, who is going to vote Labour but won’t come out unless they get a push. It is very targeted.
‘‘They get data from every available public data source and they also have enrolled non-voter data so they can tell whether you voted in previous elections.’’
It also draws on data from public sources. ‘‘For example, I looked up myself on Labour Connect and it had me 70 per cent Labour, 30 per cent Green which is pretty accurate. They knew my occupation so they’d worked out my salary’s broad range.
‘‘Based on salary they knew I’d probably be a National voter, except they knew my university record so that I’d done a liberal arts degree.
‘‘They knew where I lived and that I didn’t own a property … they also knew that in the mesh block around me, people vote Labour or the Greens despite being middle class.
‘‘From all those analytics, the programme puts together and goes: he’s probably Labour but could be a bit Green. It’s more accurate than canvassing.
‘‘So if you ring people up, you actually have less accurate data than Labour’s analytics can do, because people lie over the phone or get it wrong. The algorithm knows you better than you know yourself.’’
Woods says it is simply an ‘‘electronic version of the electoral roll.’’
‘‘You check off who you’ve talked to, if they’ve told you their intention of who they’re gonna vote for, then it’s recorded. That’s something that most political parties do in New Zealand, there’s nothing exceptional around that.
‘‘In terms of big data, it certainly wasn’t the kind of exercise that we’ve seen as influencing campaigns overseas in terms of individualised targeting of people.
‘‘It’s not Cambridge Analytica.’’
All of these combined to deliver an historic result: Labour romped home with 49.1 per cent bringing 64 seats and the ability to govern alone.
But the scars of nine years in opposition – and losing the popular vote in 2017 – still run deep.
On the morning after the election, Munro took a flight back to Wellington. His reading material was The End of Party, British political journalist Andrew Rawnsley’s account of the second half of New Labour’s spell in office. ‘‘Landslides can be dangerous,’’ he grinned as he hopped off the plane.