Parties ready but are you?
The general election is on September 20. John Armstrong, Adam Bennett and Isaac Davison cast an eye over the main players
What if New Zealand held an election and the voters did not bother to turn up? With 100 days to go until election day on September 20, the political parties — no doubt fibbing through clenched teeth — profess to be ready. Or close enough.
Labour has integrated its backroom research staff with its communication and media operations in a large taxpayer-funded “war room” at Parliament.
The Greens knocked on 10,000 doors up and down the country a couple of weekends ago in a dress-rehearsal of what, for them, is a new face-to-face way of targeting their message to those identified as being sympathetic.
National has amply filled its coffers by using its greatest asset — John Key — to host many plush and expensive-to-attend fundraising dinners.
Winston Peters has been quietly shoring up his core vote on the more basic tea and biscuits Grey Power circuit.
What the new kid on the block — Internet-Mana — has lost timewise is being compensated for by the experience of longtime activists and the naive exuberance of first-time party members. Plus, of course, not a little cash from the Internet Party’s founder, Kim Dotcom. The latter may yet curse his bad luck, however, to have launched a party at the very time when the electorate at large seems unresponsive to fresh ideas and faces, which in Internet-Mana’s case are not actually that fresh anyway.
The pervading feeling is that voters simply have not connected yet with the policies and messages being peddled by the parties in what, apart from Jamie Whyte’s necessary excursion to the right in his quest for Act’s lost soul, is a pretty crowded marketplace around the political centre.
The polls have developed rigor mortis. Nothing is moving them. That either means people have already made up their minds or are refusing to engage until full campaigning begins and politics becomes inescapable.
It looks as if there is more of the former than the latter — much to the worry of Opposition parties, which, failing to make inroads into National’s buoyant support, are showing dangerous signs of cannibalising one another in what is an increasingly desperate hunt for issues which
might set an otherwise lethargic electorate alight and which have not already been hosed down by National.
The arrival of Internet-Mana will only exacerbate the dog-eat-dog competition on the centre-left, where many voters may have already convinced themselves that National is going to win anyway and will consequently stay at home.
National may also suffer. The swing voters who have stayed loyal to John Key may likewise presume he will coast home so easily that National does not need their tick on the ballot paper.
All up, voter turnout may be even less than the abysmal 74 per cent in 2011 when it fell by six percentage points on the previous election.
Labour intends pulling out the stops to get non-voters it identifies as leaning its way to the polling booths.
The likes of David Cunliffe might argue the opinion polls are all over the place and that only one poll matters — the one on election day. And that below the surface calm lurks ferment and anger which will erupt on election day and toss out a twoterm National Administration.
The apparent calm is more the case that, by and large, when it comes to getting politicians to listen and respond to voters’ often selfish wishes and demands, Keyled National is about as good as they are likely to get.
Beyond partial state asset sales, National has avoided doing anything to antagonise middle-ground voters during the past three years.
Where it has upset people on some issues, those have largely been peripheral — such as the monitoring of the intelligence agencies.
The truth is that the current Government is not that much different from a cautious Labour one. This makes Key and National extremely difficult to attack and is why the centre-left parties have expended so much energy on the seemingly easier option of trying to besmirch Key’s reputation. Voters will eventually tire of Key when Labour once more grabs the public’s imagination and thereby highlights Key’s eschewing of the politics of vision and constant favouring of pragmatic solutions. But that is not going to happen at this election.