When lovers fall out, it’s the little things that grate
One common way of looking at voters’ support for politicians is like it is a romantic relationship. New leaders are said to have a ‘‘honeymoon period’’. Governments get dumped. And when there is trouble in paradise, everyone wants to offer an opinion.
So it has been for Jacinda Ardern, facing up to being ghosted by about a third of the voters who delivered her a whirlwind Labour majority in 2020. The advice has been coming fast: each promising a silver bullet, or this one weird trick to save your government.
Much like relationship advice, much of some of this essentially takes the form of a wishlist from loyal supporters, rather than practical advice: Labour’s only chance to recapture its popularity is decriminalising cannabis, or doubling benefits, or funding the video game industry. More mainstream commentators have suggested jettisoning policies one by one, such as dropping the Three Waters reforms after a pushback from the newly elected mayors of Auckland and Christchurch, or ditching the proposed RNZTVNZ merger, or stopping ‘‘co-governance’’.
But that misunderstands the problem for Labour, which is not the policies that the internet is loudest about.
A few surveys ask New Zealanders which issues they regard as most important, such as the Ipsos New Zealand Issues Monitor. In September, ‘‘race relations’’ (a catch-all including Treaty-related dramas and presumably co-governance) ranked in fifteenth place as a concern, with one out of 20 people saying it is one of their top three issues.
A Taxpayers’ Union-curia poll found only 5% of respondents nominated government ‘‘policies’’ as among their chief concerns.
By and large, people don’t fall out of love over one big thing – it’s a compounding series of annoyances and tensions and small problems over time, gradually chipping away at the solidity of the connection.
Things that once you didn’t even notice start to grate.
That’s a reasonable model for understanding how voters start to feel disillusioned and why a third-term government is more likely to lose an election than a two-term government.
And you can refine the metaphor by, for example, recognising that financial anxiety can often make all kinds of relationship conflicts worse. Which brings us back to the issues which voters say they are in fact concerned about.
The top ones are related to inflation. The issue of most concern to voters by a long shot, according to both the Ipsos New Zealand Issues Monitor and the Taxpayers’ Union-curia polls, is cost of living. Ipsos has house prices second (after ballooning thanks to cheap lending, prices are now dropping, providing plenty for first-home buyers and the landed gentry alike to worry about). Other items on the list include fuel prices and ‘‘the economy’’.
Whichever way you categorise or label it, it is all about the economy, and how positively people feel about their future.
So at this point, if you’re a Labour strategist and still working on the relationship model of political support, you have to shift your objective from making things better through a grand romantic gesture like sending flowers or holding a boom box over your head, and towards fixing the whole economy. Or at least suddenly making a big group of voters feel better about their prospects in it.
The Government’s surprise reappointment this week of Adrian Orr as Reserve Bank governor for a full term of five years may seem a positive move in this respect – continuity, security and all that. But within the important median voter base, endorsing Orr puts the sort of strain on a relationship that inviting someone’s unwanted former uni flatmate to stay does. Not because he’s bad, but because you come home and find him surrounded by broken plates and he says he doesn’t know how it happened. Except it’s not a Warehouse crockery set, it’s your mortgage interest bill.
While Orr couldn’t be faulted for a swift response to lower interest rates and increase money supply in the uncertainty of the start of the pandemic, there are genuine questions about how long and liberally the stimulus firehose was applied. Orr, meanwhile, shrugs and blames Putin.
At this point an exasperated public might be excused for asking the Government, about nothing and everything, do you even know what you did at all?