This one’s Labour’s to lose

Prime Minister John Key says National is the underdog in the Mt Roskill by-election. This remark allows him to pave the way for defeat while also galvanising the faithful to turn out and vote.

But in fact he is right: National is unlikely to win. As every pundit has pointed out, no governing party has won an opposition-held seat in a by-election. By-elections, it seems, are like safety valves, allowing the people to grizzle safely. After all, their protest won’t bring down the Government.

Labour points out that a win for National would give the Government an absolute majority; it would compensate for National’s shock loss of Northland to Winston Peters. This has the advantage of warning Labour voters not to take it for granted that the Mt Roskill MP will be Labour for another 35 years just as it was under Phil Goff. But this claim also has the advantage that it is true.

So Labour has much more to lose in this contest than National does. Hence the party’s rather cynical election bribe about Auckland light rail. Party leader Andrew Little’s promise is the best kind of pledge for an opposition: it will only come true if Labour wins the next election, which seems unlikely. Goff had a big personal vote while National had actually ended up winning the party vote in Mt Roskill by about 2000 votes last election. Goff had always been a carefully calculating politician. He was a natural conservative who knew how to play the Labour vote. Labour followers dutifully followed him for decades, even through the worst of the party’s civil wars in the 1980s when Goff denounced Labour renegade and leftie Jim Anderton as a "neanderthal."

Mt Roskill pits two largely unknown politicians against each other, and the fight has been occasionally vicious. National’s list MP Parmjeet Parmar has no profile and has made no waves in Wellington, but she does have the advantage of being of Indian descent. Mt Roskill is a multicultural community, with nearly two out of five residents being Asian.

Labour’s Michael Wood is a largely anonymous politician who succeeds an MP who was a household name not just in Auckland but New Zealand. His greatest hope is that inertia and habit will keep the seat for Labour.

One interesting feature of the by-election is Roshan Nauhria, the leader of the newly-formed People’s Party. The party aims at Auckland’s large Indian and Asian population, and bangs the law-andorder drum. Normally niche parties of this sort have no hope: but perhaps ethnic politics are changing.

Both the Greens and ACT have stood aside to let their bigger party friends have a clear run; Winston Peters has also stood aside, for the usual complex and probably unknowable reasons.

The Green and ACT party deals are entirely rational calculations of self-interest. What deals will they make for the 2017 general election?

By-elections are unique and generally say nothing about general elections to come.

They are local flurries which do not cause or forecast bigger and more important shifts in the tide.

- Fairfax NZ