Jockeying for the right positions
TALKING POLITICS
Despite living in the MMP era, journalists still tend to talk about getting both sides of the story, as if stories have only two dimensions: left /right, Labour/ National, government/opposition, she said/he said.
Of late however, there’s been quite a lot of political shoving and jostling on one side of the political divide.
National, Act and New Zealand First are all trying to woo the same bloc of angry and fearful voters.
This conflict explains why Winston Peters has broken with his age-old practice of being open to bids from both major parties, after the votes have been counted. This time though, he had no choice.
It was Peters after all, who gave Labour the platform that carried them through Covid into the 2020 election, and beyond.
To be a credible option for voters who loathe the current government, Peters had to rule out ever working with Labour again.
That done, he can now begin in earnest to raid National and Act’s support base.
As for National, Christopher Luxon’s bursts of hard man rhetoric – blame the parents, send problem kids to boot camps – are largely aimed at stopping Peters and David Seymour from stealing his milk- shake.
The risk for a major party is always that the embrace of extremism may repel the moderates, as the Republicans found during the recent US midterm elections.
To minimise that risk, Luxon’s tone tends to vary depending on which media platform he’s on.
He offers raw meat to the talkback crowd and to Breakfast TV’s Auckland audience, but when he’s talking to the more liberal audiences on RNZ he promises ‘‘wraparound’’ services and the funding to achieve desired social outcomes.
These are the same wraparound services he otherwise ridicules as
‘‘Kumbaya’’ politics and ‘‘mush.’’
As for the Act Party…back when they were one-note hardliners on the economy, they hovered for years at only 1% in the polls, largely dependent on a National Party deal in Epsom. Thanks to the euthanasia issue,
Seymour has since soared in the polls and had an image makeover. These days, he comes across as Young Winston, pushing all the populist buttons in reach.
Still, does our centre-right stage really have enough room for three mutually hostile populist parties? Probably not.
Seymour has grasped the potential threat and he routinely portrays Peters as a political has been – even though the Act Party itself still seems wedded to the
Thatcherite economic policies of forty years ago.
That’s the crevasse Seymour is straddling: he continues to advocate for hardline economic policies while wooing the angry voters previously left behind by such policies.
During 2023, Peters will no doubt be trying to convince those voters that the cures Act is offering may be worse than what currently ails them.
In sum, New Zealand is shaping up to have its own version of the Donald Trump vs Ron DeSantis battle for the soul of the centre-right.
Except here, there are three people in the marriage. They’ve already begun to throw the crockery at each other, with the likelihood of more to come next year.
Simultaneously, they will also need to look as though they could credibly work together in government, afterwards.