How NZ First will win in 2020
Winston Peters heads to the NZ First conference in Christchurch this weekend with a lot to prove. He has a strong record. By the end of this parliamentary term his party will have spent eight years in government since it was founded in 1993, five of those years Peters will have spent as deputy prime minister.
NZ First has spent more years of its life in government than most other parties.
NZ First was once so strong Peters was able to demand a made-up portfolio all of his own: that of Treasurer, senior to the Minister of Finance, which he held from 1996 until 1998.
While the party has a good record of getting into government, it is what happens next that has proved to be a bit of a problem. NZ First has never managed to clear the crucial
5 per cent threshold after a stint on the Treasury benches.
It did not matter so much in
1999 when the party managed to get in on the coat-tails of Peters’ win in Tauranga. But in 2008 disaster struck when Peters failed in Tauranga and the party crashed out of Parliament, scoring 4.07 per cent after three years in government with Helen Clark. Next year, with only Northland as a possible electorate win, the party knows it has got to defy history to make it back into Parliament – and potentially to government.
But the party thinks it has got a strong proposition for the electorate in 2020: insurance.
The way the current numbers fall, there is a good chance National and Labour will need NZ First to form the next Government. The party’s voters skew rural and tend to be focused in the primary industries. The message to these voters will be to be tactical, promising NZ First will tame National’s free market, neoliberal excesses, in the same way they have put the brakes on some of Labour’s and the Greens’ more Left wing – NZ First would say ‘‘ideological’’ – policy.
NZ First has been keen to remind voters it was not National who negotiated a lower methane target in the Zero Carbon Bill but NZ First.
As the campaign period approaches, the party promises to be much more transparent about what occurred during the current Government. This will mean telling voters just what NZ First managed to negotiate from Labour and the Greens, a level of honesty the politesse of coalition Government currently prohibits.
The pitch to voters is obvious: a vote for NZ First means a seat at the table – you may not get everything you want but it is better than being shut out altogether.
NZ First will also have a legacy in Government to defend.
It has got to make sure people who voted for it last time, turn out again. This is no sure thing.
The party is usually the recipient of a strong protest vote from people who are discontented with the status quo.
It is quite difficult to win this vote back when your party becomes the status quo.
Data from the New Zealand Election Study, a survey of over
3000 real voters taken shortly after the last election, found only
44 per cent of people who voted for NZ First in 2014 also voted for the party in 2017.
Of the rest, it appears the party skews slightly Right. Some
24 per cent of 2017 NZ First voters went with National in
2014, more than double the number that went with Labour, which was 10 per cent.
On the night of the election
44.5 per cent of NZ First voters wanted National to lead the next government.
The party knows it could lose some of these voters but it thinks it can appeal to rural conservatives fearful of a National Party with Paul Goldsmith in the finance minister’s chair. Goldsmith is a neo-liberal. He is not quite like those who axed farm subsidies in the 1980s but he might not be the farmers’ best friend either.
They think their brand of economic nationalism could be a welcome alternative to a rural vote frightened of new water regulations, the Emissions Trading Scheme, the Zero Carbon Bill, and the pain of banks withdrawing from rural lending in the face of the Reserve Bank’s review of capital requirements. Proposed changes to the levels of capital banks have to hold has seen new lending to agriculture taper off at precisely the moment farms need to borrow more to meet the challenges of proposed new water regulations and the future ETS. Lending to agriculture grew 2.5 per cent last year, compared with growth of more than 6 per cent to housing, households, and businesses.
The party isn’t likely to come out against the plans – Peters is no friend of the big Australian banks and supports measures to make them safer – but the party will try to blunt the edges of the changes where they hurt the regions. This has put banking squarely in the sights of some rural voters, angry at being choked out of new lending, and smarting over the four major banks’ decision to close almost 50 Westpac, BNZ and ANZ branches, mainly in rural areas.
NZ First has a strong record here. The party has delivered plenty of goodies for the provinces, in the form of handouts in the form of Shane Jones’ $3 billion Provincial Growth Fund; an agreement from major banks to temporarily halt the closure of rural branches; and an agreement that money raised from the ETS gets recycled back into funding the cost of helping farms adopt new low-emissions techniques. It also negotiated a farm debt mediation scheme between banks and farmers with bad debts.
While no party will be able to relieve National of the claim to being the party of agriculture, NZ First could potentially use its record in the regions to split off a section of the rural vote that would like a return to the more interventionist style of managing the rural economy.
National may find itself being unable to respond to the ire directed by farmers at banks, now former golden boy Sir John Key is so strongly (and often negatively) associated with his position on the board of the largest bank of all: ANZ.
Peters knows not to put all his eggs in one basket, and the party isn’t naive that the association with Labour and the Greens will cost votes. Of course it wants to hold the parts of the country where it overperforms but it also wants to balance likely losses in these areas with extra votes in places where the party has historically underperformed, namely urban liberal seats.
High profile minister Tracey Martin is well known to be eyeing up an urban seat, possibly in the Wellington region.
The veteran list MP is almost certain to lose the seat but the party thinks she can run a strong enough ground campaign to bring a few additional party votes their way.
All of this could be for naught if the party doesn’t manage to keep itself together.
Two major leaks, one currently being investigated by the police, and allegations made against MP Clayton Mitchell’s conduct in a Tauranga bar last weekend evoke memories of the chaos that gripped the party in the dying days of the Bolger and Clark governments.
The party conference will give Peters an opportunity to instil some unity and discipline into his party.
Whatever pitch Peters makes to voters in 2020 won’t get far unless it is backed by a credible looking party behind him.
NZ First has been keen to remind voters it was not National who negotiated a lower methane target in the Zero Carbon Bill but NZ First.