Comment: The battle to become the main party of government after November 7’s election is starting to feel like a race to the bottom.
The incumbent, National, is saddled with rising unemployment, a fraught international environment and a Prime Minister who currently seems unable to go a few days without putting his foot in his mouth.
Yet despite those factors in its favour, the Labour opposition seems stuck in neutral, with a drought of momentum-changing policies, outstanding questions about the shape of any coalition it leads, and a leader who seems equally uninspiring to voters.
Given those structural problems, it is perhaps unsurprising that both parties have spent the weekend trying to rub salt in their rival’s wounds rather than making a positive case for change.
Labour’s latest policy as unveiled on Sunday, a pledge to have 15 percent of annual government contracts go to small businesses, seems reasonable on its face, and crucially doesn’t require any policy costings that can be picked apart by National.
But it is also transparently aimed at dragging out the negative headlines associated with Christopher Luxon’s apology-inducing remarks to a Rotorua business audience, as was made clear by Labour’s finance spokesperson Barbara Edmonds.
“While Christopher Luxon insults small businesses and asks, ‘Who cares what the government thinks’, we’re listening to small businesses and making government work better for them,” Edmonds said in a statement unveiling the policy.
Opportunistic? Undoubtedly, but such is the business of campaigning, and it seems safe to assume Labour is ready to fast-track the rollout of any other policies that happen to overlap with a Luxon faux pas du jour.
Not to be outdone, the National leader and his finance spokesperson Nicola Willis summoned reporters to Parliament on Sunday for what it quickly became clear was a non-announcement.
The pair announced National had committed to three budget responsibility rules – prioritising a return to surplus in the 2028/29 financial year, pushing debt below 40 percent of GDP, and reducing core Crown spending to 30 percent of GDP – to rebuild the country’s fiscal buffers.
But none of those commitments are all that new, having been laid out in numerous ministerial speeches during this term in government.
The true purpose of the announcement is to pressure Labour leader Chris Hipkins into setting out his own party’s “fiscal guardrails”, as Willis put it.
“As I stand here today, I am not even aware whether they believe a surplus target is appropriate, where they think debt should be, or whether or not they believe that we need to reduce core Crown spending in order to keep taxes low.
“Those are very basic questions, and they do form the parameters for National’s campaign.”
The party’s election advertising to date has focused almost exclusively – and misleadingly, in the eyes of some – on the array of taxes that would come with a Labour-led government. It is hard to know whether that has contributed to Labour’s fall in the most recent Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll – dismissed by Hipkins as a “rogue” result – but National clearly has confidence in pressing a topic where it has historically tied Labour in knots.
Luxon accused the last Labour government of running down the country’s economic buffers, leaving Aotearoa ill prepared for the next pandemic or natural disaster – seeming to minimise the very real pandemic that accounted for much of its extra borrowing.
“Yes, of course, some spending was necessary to respond to the pandemic, no one is arguing with that, but they took the excuse of the pandemic to put the money spending bazooka on overdrive, and we are now as a country still having to clean that up,” Willis said.
It is true that Labour is lagging behind in announcing a number of key policies, including its fiscal strategy; ahead of the 2017 election (the last time it was in opposition), Labour announced its budget responsibility rules alongside the Greens roughly six months before polling day.
Hipkins and his team seem determined not to be swayed by suggestions they need to pick up the pace, but the longer they wait, the more questions about those delays crowd out focus on the policies it does roll out.
National has questions of its own to answer: Willis rolled out a “no new taxes on working people” pledge that left unanswered exactly who, or what, might be taxed in their stead.
A day earlier, Luxon stood alongside Willis and National Party president Sylvia Wood to reveal its final list of candidates.
The rankings were low on surprises, with the only meaningful movements in the top 20 being the elevation of Speaker Gerry Brownlee to ninth spot and Nancy Lu’s ascent to 16th place (Luxon highlighted her connections within the Chinese community, “a big driver of our party vote”).
The main problem is that National’s dire polling means its caucus is set to shrink rather than grow, making rejuvenation and diversification a more difficult task.
The National leader mentioned the eight NZ-Indian candidates contesting the election as an example of how the party was appealing to different communities. But just one of those, Mahesh Muralidhar, has any real chance of entering Parliament via the list in 24th spot (although Luxon declared Muralidhar would “certainly win” the Tāmaki seat, currently held by retiring Act MP Brooke van Velden).
The party’s upper ranks also skew heavily male, with men making up 70 percent of the party’s top 20, while current ministers Tama Potaka and James Meager are the only Māori candidates in that range.
Hanging over the weekend’s proceedings was the spectre of renewed chatter about Luxon’s leadership, following a dreadful week. Wood said the National Party board “absolutely” had confidence in its leader, while Luxon himself appeared disinclined towards further self-reflection.
“It’s a week in politics for me, and so I’m used to – I have some good weeks and some challenging weeks,” the Prime Minister said, implying a level of parity between the two outcomes when such balance has been absent for some months now.
He was also unrepentant about his captain’s call on an MMP referendum, saying the party had long favoured a referendum on a four-year term; quite why this justifies throwing in a ‘buy one get one free’ question on our electoral system is less clear, particularly given there will almost certainly be added costs.
“We are very focused and united as a caucus, and we are ruthlessly focused on making sure we do the very best we can to maximise every party vote on November the 7th,” Luxon declared.
That ruthless focus on growing its party vote might call into question caucus unity, however, particularly if any leadership rival can gather enough support.
On more than a few occasions, Labour MPs have talked about how they are best served by Luxon remaining in place, but there is also an argument that National would be happiest seeing Hipkins at the reins until November 7.
If one party were to change its leader, could the other be forced to follow suit? It’s highly unlikely at this late stage – but that it is even worth consideration speaks to the situation that National and Labour find themselves in.
