PM’s big push for rural seat
Jacinda Ardern usually follows a less-is-more style of campaigning. At the last election Bill Englishwould pack every hour of the day with another cafe, another business, another factory. Ardern would visit one or two places, announce a policy, do a press conference, and leave it there. There is only so much of your day that is going to make the 6pm news, after all.
That was not the case yesterday in Wairarapa, a rural-ish seat Labour thinks it has a very good shot of winning. Ardern made six stops all over the sprawling electorate, took a ride in her candidate’s beaten-up ute, and posed for photos in the pouring rain with every local businesswho asked.
Ardern’s day started in the northern more rural half of the electorate at Pahiatua, the kind of place where some mispronounce ‘‘kia ora’’. It ended in Featherston, a town public servants commute to Wellington from that has an artisan cheese store.
Electorates do not decide who wins government, of course. But winning them is a huge deal to the local candidate and local party, and the campaigns fought over them can boost the country-wide party vote significantly. And as Labour starts to embrace being far-and-away the most popular party in the country again, the partywill be keen to notch up wins outside of its urban strongholds, just as National sought to win urban Labour seats likeHutt South when it was dominant.
In local races, candidates matter a lot. Kieran McAnulty, the listMP who is standing here, has done his best to brand himself as a Labour MPwho feels nothing like a typical LabourMP. He’s from Eketahuna, not Auckland. His career before politics was as a TAB bookmaker, not a union organiser. And he is refreshingly loose in conversation, not the kind of man you would worry about offending with an offcolour joke.
Famously, he owns a red ute with 413,000km on the clock and the back window smashed out, that he once got into a fight over to save from a thief.
McAnulty closed the gap with National considerably at the last election, to 2900 from 6700 at the election prior, and outperforming his party vote considerably. But he was running against the perfect foil: Alastair Scott, a patrician winery owner who lived inWellington.
Scott is retiring so McAnulty is facingMike Butterick, a local farmer who was instrumental in the 50 Shades of Green movement against rural afforestation. Both men claim to basically like each other, and neither seem likely to arouse serious negative feelings in the populace.
‘‘The reason I amconfident is because of the work Kieran has put into this seat,’’ Ardern said of the race. ‘‘I’ve had people come up tome and say ‘look Kieran’s earned it’. And that’s what we are all about for us, we never take anything for granted, we assume nothing – we just work hard.’’
McAnulty started the day looking rather put out, standing in gumboots and a suit underneath a Speightsbranded umbrella. The prime minister was in Pahiatua to open a water-treatment plant, and the heavens were providing plenty of untreated rainwater. The prime minister doesn’t come to your electorate every day, and the day she was it was raining on his parade.
Ardern said she always felt like a ‘‘Johnny-come-lately’’ at opening events for rural projects, as the localswere the ones who put years of work into projects – ‘‘Then I come along and unveil a plaque’’. This seemedmore pertinent later in the day when Ardern announced that Labourwould be effectively ending the $3 billion Provincial Growth Fund (PGF) if elected.
You might expect this to cause some outrage, but it doesn’t appear to have. The businesses Ardern talked to in the electorate were far more interested in a more expensive and far-less complicated stream of funds – the wage subsidy.
McAnulty’s mood seemed to pick up down the road in his hometown of Eketahuna, where the prime minister stopped for a cuppa and a photo with the huge Kiwi statue on the main drag.
Ardern jumped intoMcAnulty’s famous ute for the next leg, a situation which clearly did not excite her bodyguards, who had chatted to him about the car.
‘‘They said ‘We understand the boss is going in there, we just want to make sure you don’t take off on us.’ I said mate that thing hasn’t gone past 110kmh in a decade, I’m not going to take off on you.’’’
The next stop was Masterton, where Ardern stopped at Bear Flag Books and Retro, a vintage store that had relied on the wage subsidy. After a few selfies it was off to Greytown and the White Swan Hotel, which – you guessed it – was massively helped by the wage subsidy. Wairarapa is a tourist region better able to weather the Covid-19 storm than most, as much of its tourism dollars come from over the hill in Wellington, where public sector wages are still flowing.
This could be a problem for the National challenger, as the party’s country-wide campaign is built on criticising the economy this Government is delivering.
‘‘At this stage we are chugging along pretty good,’’ Butterick said.
‘‘We’re very very lucky, and I say touchwood, 80 per cent of our tourism has been domestic. The southern end of the electorate is geographically-favourably located.’’
He was adamant therewas not much of a divide between the more rural parts of the electorate and the more urban.
McAnulty was more willing to chop it up a bit, noting that in 2017 he had won the bits closer to Wellington and lost the more rural areas. His pitch to voters is fairly simple: Labour is probably going to win the election. Would you rather have a backbench opposition MPas your local representative or someone ‘‘at the heart of the Government’’.