Will political minnows hold sway in ’23?
To be confident of winning a general election under MMP, the lead party really needs 40 per cent support or more. That’s why the National Party, which gained 44.4 per cent of the vote in the 2017 election, spent the next three years complaining it had been robbed by Labour, which formed a government with just 36.9 per cent support.
That’s also why, on election night 2017, Jacinda Ardern didn’t behave as if she’d won.
Indeed, had that election been fought between Bill English as National leader and Andrew Little at the helm for Labour, English would almost certainly have been the next prime minister.
Ardern’s late replacement of Little and her immediate injection of personal charisma turned the tide just enough for Labour to woo NZ First, with 7.2 per cent, into coalition and cobble together a tiny majority with the Greens in support.
In 2020, Labour rode a tide of national self-congratulation about the initial response to Covid-19 and gained 50 per cent of the vote, becoming the only party to win a single-party parliamentary majority since the country switched to MMP voting in 1996.
Today, however, with roughly a year to go to polling day, one thing is abundantly clear, the electorate has fallen out of love with Labour and the party is odds-on to lose.
The trends in the BusinessDesk Polltracker, which is based on all available public opinion polls, are unmistakable.
Indeed, Labour has been falling since before the last election and National has been on the rise since October last year, when it appointed Christopher Luxon leader and ended four years of political purgatory.
However, National is not yet over the 40 per cent mark on a trend basis. Yes, it has squeaked in just above 40 per cent in the past two NewshubReid Research polls.
However, in the latest Roy Morgan poll, National sank to just 32 per cent support, where the news was even more dire for Labour, which fell to a “must lose” 29 per cent.
While Roy Morgan is not the mostwatched poll, its track record is respectable enough: it was the most accurate predictor of the 2020 outcome.
Not compelling
It is also consistent with most other polls in suggesting neither of the traditional parties of government are proving especially compelling and to an unusual extent.
Both Act and the Greens consistently poll at around 10 per cent, sometimes higher.
Given the Greens have looked disunified and ineffectual for much of the last term, such strong support suggests a good chunk of the centreleft vote is unimpressed by Labour’s recent performance.
This presumably reflects a combination of disenchantment that Labour has not been more “transformational”, has not been super-competent at policy execution, despite having a very large policy agenda, and perhaps a rising concern about climate-change inaction.
Act’s strong showing also suggests centre-right voters are trying to send a message to National that its policies are either too middle-of-the-road or not sufficiently well articulated.
Compared to Act, which squirts out pithy statements on just about every subject and has a huge policy slate, National can often appear either sluggish or bereft of new ideas, and often both.
Two current examples: 1/ Act knows what it would do to replace the Government’s Three Waters policy, while National hasn’t moved beyond promising repeal; 2/ the rehashing of the boot camps for youth offenders idea.
The latter may have some tough-on-crime appeal, but it lacks originality.
The last part of National’s problem, if it is really a problem, is the muchdiscussed fact that Luxon is not the Messiah.
He is well-organised, determined, articulate and largely unobjectionable to centrist and centre-right voters as a party leader. Like English, he could probably beat Little in an election, too.
But as a political personality, he is not John Key or Ardern and his lack of both those politicians’ experience in the bearpit of public life both shows and cannot be overcome without a lot more experience.
None of this is likely to change and that is not even necessarily a bad thing.
What it does mean, though, is that National needs strong policies if it is to do more than assume that a houseprice slump and the looming recession will win it the Treasury benches next year.
So far, its policies are either a mixed bag, non-existent or have been successfully portrayed as favouring the wealthy.
That leaves the not unreasonable expectation that a souring economy will do the job anyway.
Minor parties rising
The impact of this disenchantment with the traditional choices is producing a historically high level of interest in minor parties: Te Pā ti Mā ori, NZ First, The Opportunities Party (Top), the New Conservatives and other even smaller players.
Only the Mā ori Party has a guaranteed path into the 2023-26 Parliament, because it can confidently expect to win at least one Mā ori seat and defeat the requirement to win more than 5 per cent of the party vote to be allotted seats without winning a territorial electorate.
Top may also be in the hunt for a seat, although it looks a longer shot.
New leader Raf Manji has invigorated its policy positions and has name recognition and a track record in the Christchurch seat of Ilam, where he will stand next year and came second behind Gerry Brownlee in 2017, beating the Labour candidate.
Brownlee has opted for the party list in 2023, so Manji could conceivably land that elusive parliamentary electorate.
For NZ First, hovering around 3 per cent support in some polls, the question is the same as it has been since 2008 — the last election in which leader Winston Peters or any other NZ First MP managed to win a territorial electorate: can it breast the tape on election night 2023 with more
than 5 per cent support?
It doesn’t look impossible, but it’s also no slam dunk.
Having gained just 2.6 per cent support in 2020, it seems Peters and the party’s other loudest voice, Shane Jones, decided to stay largely below the radar for a couple of years.
NZ First also needed to get through a Serious Fraud Office case against it, which could have been a political bombshell. In the end, it failed and allowed Peters to mount his most beloved platform: the wronged victor.
He was playing that card again over the weekend, appearing to rule out any chance of working again with the “current Labour mob” and dangling his availability as a support partner to National.
That’s unusual, in that Peters usually leaves himself options to play both sides. But for as long as Ardern is the party leader, it looks as if he’s calculating that the combination of disenchantment and worsening economic conditions will kill Labour.
Disappearing act
If voters have had enough of you, disappearing is politically smart.
Key did it when his popularity faded. But Ardern is unlikely to.
She has become an over-exposed, double-edged sword for Labour, but imagine if she left the political stage now: it would be an admission of expected defeat in a way that Key’s handing the baton to English was not.
The way things look right now, National and Act have a good chance of forming a coalition government next year. The coming recession — or, at best, very weak growth — will produce almost impossible conditions for a third-term Labour-led government.
The issue to watch is how weak or strong National’s intake is, compared to the third parties snapping at its heels.