Remember January 2020? We were young, carefree and full of hope. The political year in New Zealand started like any other but then the wheels came off spectacularly, and in a way none of us could have predicted.
Covid, coups, conspiracies, scandal, leaks, lies, leadership, lockdowns, misinformation, ministerial screw-ups, a sexting MP. It was immense – and that was before we hit the campaign trail.
Even setting aside Covid, which we all wish we could, we have lived through one of the most tumultuous years in New Zealand politics.
In the thick of a global pandemic while our country was in lockdown, our health minister breached his own lockdown rules.
We were speaking to families who were unable to be with their dying loved ones, unable to gather and support one another at funerals and tangihanga. Women were giving birth or miscarrying alone. People recognised these were the sacrifices we had to make for Covid despite our health minister risking it all for a bike ride and trip to the beach.
Another minister – responsible for workplace relations – was sacked for having an affair with a former staffer who worked in his department.
Just this week the speaker of our House of Representatives was forced to apologise to the entire country for wrongly suggesting there was a rapist in the parliament. Taxpayer cash to the tune of $333,000 was forked out to settle a defamation action.
It’s bonkers. It started bonkers. It ended bonkers. Remarkably the election campaign was an oasis of sorts. Given the year had been full noise, there was a fearful expectation the campaign would continue in hyperdrive. It was a terrifying prospect.
And so it began. One of my first stories of the campaign was about a senior National Party figure making midnight calls to talkback radio and pretending to be a chap called “Merv” to undermine a young woman candidate from his own party.
Then: handbrake. A 9pm press conference was called in the Beehive, where government ministers offices are. It could only mean one thing. Covid was back. The campaign was over. Back to lockdown for the biggest city, Auckland. The election was delayed.
Then something remarkable happened. Reset. Campaign round two started and miraculously, there was clear air.
We finally had policy to discuss – a new public holiday, drug harm reduction, business loans, tax, energy, electric vehicles, borders. That was just in the first week from the major parties.
But despite the unexpected volume and breadth of policy this was, as our prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, often said, the Covid campaign.
It was Covid that helped determine the outcome. Covid that cemented Ardern’s leadership in a crisis – something we already knew could happen following the Christchurch terror attack and Whakaari White Island volcanic eruption the year before.
If you’d asked Ardern pre-election campaign about her leadership and the hellish trifecta of crises that beset us, she would kick credit to the broader team – she never wanted to make it about her.
Come the campaign it was a different story.
Labour knew Ardern’s leadership was its bazooka of political power. So often politics is about nuance, but during an election campaign subtlety goes out the window.
At party rallies Ardern uncharacteristically trumpeted her leadership in a crisis Labour’s political advertising, meticulously workshopped and focus-grouped, was carefully designed to conjure Covid and Ardern’s leadership throughout.
Throngs of adoring supporters flocked to the prime minister’s campaign events, some crying as they thanked her for “saving us”.
Journalists were crushed in the stampede. Parents flung their children into the media scrum. “Get your picture with Aunty Jacinda!” they demanded of their young. A priceless selfie was worth a minor maiming.
But it’s a struggle to see how the rival National Party could have won the election even if Covid hadn’t happened. What a litany of failure. Own goals, friendly fire and faux pas.
The National Party’s annus horribilis was a remarkable exercise in political mismanagement. It was like an episode of The Thick of It had a baby out of wedlock in a church with an episode of House of Cards and somehow an episode of The Office was the surrogate. National could not catch a break and – barring Covid – the party only had itself to blame.
The party came into the campaign with one leg severed (the first coup), an arm chopped off (the second leadership change), and two fingers amputated (Andrew Falloon, the sexting MP, and Hamish Walker, the MP who leaked Covid patient details).
It had several stubbed toes (including wrongly declaring that pākehā MP Paul Goldsmith was Māori as it attempted to defend a lack of diversity in the party). It was always going to struggle to make it across the finish line.
Remarkably it continued to shoot itself in its remaining foot. Finance spokesman Paul Goldsmith’s fiscal hole undermined the National’s one advantage of responsible economic management and blew to pieces its one chance at a cracker, vote-winning election bribe: tax cuts.
And it was an MP most New Zealanders would have struggled to place, Denise Lee, who almost toppled the head of the party again.
She emailed the entire caucus with a supermarket list of strongly worded complaints about the leadership: an attack which was leaked to Newshub.
As bad as it was for National, and despite the Covid windfall of votes for Labour, the 2020 election defied the odds to become a traditional campaign.
Our MMP voting system still works. Yes, we lost one minor party (NZ First) but we gained another (The Maori Party). Yes we ended up with a single-party majority for the first time under the system but we also saw the resurgence and sustainability of two other minor parties, Act and the Green Party.
Ultimately, as horrible as 2020 was on so many levels, as ugly as our politics and as politics globally have been, New Zealand has landed in a relatively good place.
The United States no longer has a terrifying narcissist at the helm. Vaccines are being rolled out. To be young, carefree and full of hope again come January 2021 will be a stretch but there’s a strong case for optimism.
