Grant Robertson and the work left undone
With the Labour MP’s retirement from politics, a massive political personality bows out. But how will he be remembered? Luke Malpass reports.
When Grant Robertson entered Parliament in 2008, he said in his maiden speech: “My political view is defined by my sexuality only inasmuch as it has given me an insight into how people can be marginalised and discriminated against, and how much I abhor that.
“I am lucky that I have largely grown up in a generation that is not fixated on issues such as sexual orientation. I am not – and neither should others be.”
At the time, Robertson was an up-and-comer in Labour politics. A former president of the Otago University Students’ Association, he had worked for Helen Clark and had won the seat of Wellington Central.
Robertson was gay, and openly so. But 2008 was a different world to today, only four years after civil unions had come into law and marriage equality was still some five years away.
But Robertson, 52, was true to his word. While his being gay was an important part of what shaped him, it was not what his political identity was fundamentally about – instead, being a Labour politician and representing working people was. By the time he was finance minister, a lot of the public probably did not know he was gay – or did not care.
On Tuesday, he announced his retirement from politics to become vice-Chancellor of the University of Otago. But his legacy – which will be thoroughly raked over in the coming months and years – is a curious one: a mixture of ambition, achievement, interruptions, unfinished business and crisis management.
Born to a Presbyterian family in Palmerston North and raised in working class south Dunedin, he was head boy of King’s High School before attending Otago University, getting involved in student politics and leading the students’ association. Before politics, he worked in Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, then as a political adviser.
As he progressed through his career, he ran for leadership of the Labour Party twice – first against David Cunliffe and then against Andrew Little. He lost both times. After that, he said he put aside his leadership ambitions.
“As is very much on record, once I hadn’t succeeded the second time I actually did put that out of my mind and focused on what I could do ... I’m very proud of what I did do and the role that I played, particularly in supporting Jacinda [Ardern] while she was prime minister, is for me a really big achievement. I was sad at the time, but I got over it.”
Once Ardern became Labour leader, that surrendered ambition meant he was the lynchpin of the Ardern Government.
“I think people probably underestimated the wider role that Grant had to play in not just having all the pressure of being a finance minister, but he was an effective deputy leader of the party, and he was working for a prime minister who wasn’t strong in economics, and finance. So he was a guardian as well,” BNZ’s head of research Stephen Toplis says.
In mid-2017, the Labour Party was at a low ebb. The party was polling in only the mid-20s against a then-ascendant National Party, led by Bill English, that appeared to be cruising to another election victory.
Enter Ardern, who lifted Labour’s party vote to 37%, and negotiated with Winston Peters to get Labour into office.
But behind the phenomenon of Jacindamania was Robertson, who had spent time under unsuccessful leaders trying to create a fiscal credibility for Labour so that voters would see it as an electable alternative to a National Party that had successfully defined economic management as running budget surpluses. The late Sir Michael Cullen was a key inspiration and mentor.
To help cauterise Labour from claims of profligacy, Robertson invented Budget Responsibility Rules that Labour and the Greens would bind themselves to.
He was a believer in more money for public services, but also budget surpluses. His thrifty Presbyterian upbringing informed this approach. And overall, if he ever got to be a Labour finance minister he wanted to kill the idea that Labour was bad with money and the economy.
He came in “with a genuine intent to prove that a left-leaning finance minister could manage the books ... he was derailed by Covid completely and we’ll never get the chance to know whether he could have done that effectively or not”, Toplis says.
When Covid-19 hit Robertson held a mini-Budget on March 17, 2020 that was put together so hastily that papers were still being printed and brought into the Legislative Council Chamber for assembled journalists and analysts. It contained a range of measures, including a wage subsidy that would be expanded in the days after to cover all businesses when New Zealand went into lockdown.
It was during Covid-19 and in the run-up to the 2020 election that Robertson hit his political stride. The relatively seamless delivery of the subsidy to huge swathes of the economy, arranged in days, was a monumental achievement.
Council of Trade Unions chief economist Craig Renney, who previously worked for Robertson and was elected to serve on Labour’s policy council late last year, says he saw Robertson angry only once (but wouldn’t reveal what it was over).
“One of the times we really saw Grant deliver was during the 100-day plan in 2017. We saw the families package delivered, and we saw Best Start created [a payment for all new babies], we saw the winter energy payment created … we delivered huge changes to working for families and tax credits.”
But Renney says that both Robertson and the previous Government were at their ‘‘very best making decisive decisions” during Covid. “In a fiscal sense, deciding early not to let people just struggle by themselves … schemes to help give people some economic security at a time when the country really needed security, because we had a huge unknown in Covid at that point in time.”
Robertson thought about, “how do I deliver growth? How do I make sure there are more people in work? How do we tackle the consequences of Covid?”
On Tuesday, Robertson himself nominated his Covid management as a career highlight. And it will be the thing that he is most remembered for. “What I was really impressed with during that period, was he was very transparent with the likes of ourselves and other people in markets and stuff,’’ Toplis says. “He was open, he was giving as much information back to us as he could within the sort of constraints of being in government, so that we could be aware of what was going on.
“We were giving as much information back to him as we could and he was doing that across the board. You know ... whether he got it right or wrong is almost a moot point. You sure as hell knew the motivation to get it right.”
As a result of the decisive handling of Covid-19, Robertson and Ardern gave Labour a strong run into the 2020 election, aided by a shambolic National Party.
He even took the remarkable political step –and-risk–of releasing a campaign video directly appealing to people who had voted for John Key and Bill English to vote Labour – on the basis that the Judith Collins-led party was not the institution of fiscal rectitude its predecessors had been.
Talking to people on the campaign trail in 2020, people who were thinking of switching for National to Labour (which many did) more often nominated Robertson’s management as the reason than Jacinda Ardern.
Labour swept back into office with the first MMP majority. In his first Budget as a majority-government finance minister, Robertson took on Ruth Richardson’s mother-of-all Budgets and announced massive licks of new money for climate change and to reform the health system.
“On this 30th anniversary of that Budget, our Government is undoing some of the damage done all those decades ago,” Robertson declared at the top of his Budget speech in 2021.
It was vintage Robertson: a tribal Labour operator seeking to right wrongs and uplift the downtrodden – mixed with some pay-back for political opponents. But it also highlighted what many of his critics said about him – that he was good at dishing out the pie but the Government did little to grow it.
One of the more controversial moves Robertson made was to introduce a dual Reserve Bank mandate of price stability and “maximum sustainable employment”.
He also scrapped the Reserve Bank governor’s singular responsibility for the Official Cash Rate and handed it to a newly-established Monetary Policy Committee. The dual mandate has since been scotched by the new Government, and a Reserve Bank review by eminent Australian economist Warwick McKibbin in November 2022 noted that it introduced a lack of clarity.
“A dual mandate is an approach followed by many central banks, although the meaning of the additional mandate of maximum sustainable employment (MSE) is unclear,’’ McKibbin wrote. “Without defining and quantifying MSE, it isn’t easy to evaluate whether the RBNZ achieved it over the period under review.”
This became a key attack line for the then-Opposition, although how important the dual mandate was is disputed.
“It didn’t cause any harm but from the Reserve Bank’s point of view they were proud, and still are very proud, that they were the first central bank to target inflation, that’s what they are known for ... adding the dual mandate just added nothing,” Kiwi Bank chief economist Jarrod Kerr says.
“As an inflation-targeting central bank, you are always looking at the state of the labour market among other things.”
Kerr adds that in theory it might cause a communication issue for the bank, but that other central banks managed that tension and that the RBNZ also did so.
Inflation, however, did catch up with the Government and the latter part of the Covid-19 response – from 2021 onwards – is the part of the Covid story that gains the most criticism. Although predominantly driven by central bank money printing in New Zealand and around the world, much of the blame was politically sheeted back to Robertson.
“If there was criticism of him, and the Government more generally, it was that they didn’t know then when to sort of unwind from that Covid rescue mission,” Toplis says.
Along with the general tiredness of the Government, and a painful slipped disc in his back at the end of 2022, the rolling months of high inflation proved a significant political challenge for Robertson.
The other big issue was debt, which National and ACT hammered the Government for constantly. Toplis says that while debt by international standards was low, the real question was what it was spent on. “I think we tend to spend far too much time talking about the quantity of the debt rather than the quality of the debt.”
Leaving aside Covid-19, Toplis says, by the end of the Labour Government the quality of the debt accrued by New Zealand was not great. “Whereas in effect, we were borrowing and generating debt to simply sustain an economy.”
Out of the Beehive and into the House, Robertson loved the cut and thrust of politics, and was an enthusiastic debater. During the National Party’s nadir in 2020-21, he took great delight in tearing the then Opposition to shreds.
He was most at home in general debate – a free-ranging debate on Wednesday afternoons – when MPs can debate just about anything they want.
Robertson also had a significant capacity for seeing politics from the point of view of other parties – even if he vehemently disagreed with that view – one of the things that made him a very effective operator and strategist.
Behind closed doors, he was also open and analytical about the strengths and weaknesses of parties – Labour included – on any particular issue. He was quick with a joke, beloved by his colleagues and respected by his political opponents.
And he noted in his retirement remarks that the most difficult time in his political career was during the February 2022 occupation of Parliament – both as a parliamentarian but more as the then-MP for Wellington Central.
One of the less remarked areas of Robertson’s involvement was women’s sport and the Fifa Women’s World Cup in particular, which the Labour Government presided over. As an advertisement for both women’s sport and New Zealand, it was a significant success.
Robertson is a self-described cricket tragic and loves the lore and statistics of test match cricket in particular.
On his way out of the press conference to announce his departure on Tuesday, The Post asked him if the timing of his retirement had anything to do with the New Zealand-Australia test match at the Basin Reserve this coming Thursday.
He laughed and said, “no, it wasn’t, but I’ll see you there”.