The leaders of New Zealand’s two main political parties, Jacinda Ardern and Judith Collins, have clashed in a boisterous, energetic and at times muddled third debate before the election on 17 October.
Ardern – the centre-left Labour leader and popular prime minister who is leading in the polls – was widely agreed to have won the debate over Collins, from the centre-right National party, but the pair often veered into parodies of themselves rather than engaging on the substance, analysts said.
“They were almost playing caricatures of themselves,” said Ben Thomas, a public relations consultant and former National government staffer, referring to Ardern’s exhortations to unity and Collins’s cutting retorts.
The pair fought on their approaches to containing the spread of Covid-19, which New Zealand has almost eliminated for a second time, with neither eschewing a strategy of lockdowns if needed, but with Ardern focusing on her party’s economic rebuilding plans while Collins highlighted her determination to bolster border defences.
As New Zealand relaxes its Covid-19 restrictions after a community outbreak in the largest city, Auckland, the debates have gone from flat and lifeless at the first to rollicking and peppered by hecklers on Tuesday – which was hosted by the news outlet Stuff in front of an animated crowd of 750 in the South Island city of Christchurch.
There was, as Ardern said afterwards, “energy in the room” that brought “a bit of spark between us”.
She “never declare[s] winners”, Ardern demurred to reporters after the debate. “That’s for the viewers to decide.” But most commentators named her as the victor, as she often went on the attack over the nine years that Collins’s party spent in power before Labour’s 2017 victory.
But she might not have needed the win.
Near the end of what has been a strange election campaign dominated by Covid-19 and the challenge of rebuilding New Zealand’s economy after a recession, Ardern’s popularity has soared as her government found success at containing the virus. Her Labour party is polling at 47%, according to a 1 News Colmar Brunton on 28 September, while Collins’s National has risen to 33%.
Collins, the third National party leader since May, was at 24% in the poll’s preferred prime minister rating, while Ardern took 54%.
The prime minister is widely seen as having protected the country from Covid-19; a strict lockdown when New Zealand had registered comparatively few cases of the virus has led to one of the world’s lowest death tolls. And with hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders already casting their ballots in advance voting, which opened on Saturday – the highest early voting turnout on record – analysts said many had already made up their minds.
“It’s all pointless. Voters vote on how they feel,” said David Cormack, the co-founder of a public relations firm and a former head of policy and communications for the left-leaning Green party, of the debate. “Jacinda makes them feel good. Judith not so much.”
The debate had been “unproductive” on substantive matters, said Thomas, the centre-right analyst. “Both of them seemed to be searching for big moments, neither of them got them, and the general likeability of Ardern stood out more than the ‘Crusher’ persona did,” he said.
Collins’s nickname, Crusher, bestowed on her for her desired policy of crushing the cars of so-called boy racers when she was a government minister, has sometimes irked her, but on Tuesday night she appeared to embrace her reputation.
“Come on!” she yelled, repeatedly, at Ardern. The Labour leader for her part appeared controlled but interjected too; both leaders seemed more comfortable at their podiums than they had during the two previous debates.
“The unity moment’s gone,” said Ardern, after the pair had appeared to agree momentarily before their jostling resumed.
There was no standout moment of new information on Tuesday, as there was in a Newshub debate last week when Ardern admitted, for the first time, that she had smoked marijuana “a long time ago”.
But she refused once again to say whether she would vote for a referendum on recreational cannabis attached to next week’s election. Collins in turn refused to commit to a ban on conversion therapy for gay youth, saying instead that parents should accept their children and “be grateful” that “they are alive”.
While the pair held similar views on whether New Zealand would become a republic – both saying that it would “eventually” happen – they clashed on the best way to respond to climate change.
“Grow the tech sector in a way that it’s a rival to every other sector,” Collins said. “We have to look at every sector,” said Ardern, including New Zealand’s large and powerful agriculture industry. “I don’t know how data centres are going to help climate change.”
Their trademark personas also emerged during answers about what the word “woke” meant: Ardern defined it as “huge self-awareness”, while Collins deemed the term “people who want to talk a lot of nonsense and never actually do it”.
Ardern drives an electric vehicle, she said. Collins? A BMW.
Perhaps the challenge for Collins was clearest at the end of the debate: this was “the most important election in a generation”, she said during her closing remarks.
But when Ardern finished hers – “Who’s better placed to keep New Zealand safe and who’s better placed to get us on track to recovery?” she asked – the theatre burst into rapturous applause.
“I think Jacinda won,” Thomas said. “Collins looked a little bit desperate.”
