Election 2023: How Jacinda Ardern can help deliver Labour a third consecutive election victory - Richard Prebble

Can former Prime Minister Dame Jacinda Ardern help deliver her successor Chris Hipkins an election victory this year? Photo / Mark Mitchell

OPINION

Voting in New Zealand started on Monday, but a week ago, potentially 700,000 overseas voters began casting their ballots. This election, New Zealanders who have lived overseas for up to six years - it used to be three - can enrol and vote. Half of all Kiwis living abroad are in Australia.

There is a social media campaign that says, “This election we’re letting Australia decide”.

A week ago, 78,000 overseas voters had registered. There are 2228 registered overseas voters in Auckland Central and 3397 in Wellington Central, enough to determine those races. If the polls are right and National/Act need just one more MP to govern, then the overseas vote will decide.

The bad news for National and New Zealand First is that overseas voters tend to be young and vote left. Every election, the overseas vote elects an extra Green MP.

The Government has made enrolling and voting overseas very easy. Unlike in this country, overseas you can register and vote electronically. See vote.nz.

Political party strategists have long dreamed of tapping the overseas vote. The challenge is how to campaign to 700,000 potential voters scattered around the world.

Labour may have found a way.

Last Saturday, former Prime Minister Dame Jacinda Ardern sent a post to her 1.6 million Instagram followers, saying she had just voted in New York and urging them to enrol and vote for Chippy.

Chris Hipkins has 22,000 followers on Instagram; Christopher Luxon 25,000; David Seymour 35,000; and Helen Clark 54,000.

With 1.6m followers, Ardern is in a different class. It is an incredibly valuable campaign tool. Her passionate followers will forward her post to friends and family overseas.

With a single post, Ardern may have decided the 2023 election.

With 1.6m followers, former Prime Minister Dame Jacinda Ardern has a lot of reach.

Last week, Hipkins was keen to tell the media he rarely rings Ardern. Now he has some time, perhaps he should give her a call.

Ardern is a unique phenomenon. She saved Labour from an electoral wipeout in 2017 and - thanks to Winston Peters - took office.

In office, her approval rating hit 76 per cent, more than all the present party leaders combined.

The 2020 election was the biggest win under MMP, and arguably the biggest election win by any New Zealand leader.

What to do with popular former leaders is an issue around the world. Al Gore turned down Bill Clinton’s offer to campaign for him and narrowly lost. Current US President Joe Biden accepted all the help he could get from Barack Obama and won.

Previous Labour leaders assured us they were in frequent contact with Helen Clark. This election, Clark raised $400,000 for Labour in 48 hours. Imagine what Ardern could raise.

For months, Ardern’s posts have been silent on politics. Her previous post was on August 1, about the Moonshot prize.

Saturday’s post shows Ardern is not over politics. Winston Peters - who, if elected, will be in Parliament aged 81 - demonstrates that politicians never get over politics. Ardern’s Harvard course is called ‘leadership’, but it is really politics. Last week, Ardern was a panellist at the UN in New York, and you cannot get more political than the UN.

Maybe her silence is a cunning plan. In the 1975 election campaign, former National leader Keith Holyoake also kept silent. Then on the Wednesday before the election, Holyoake addressed a campaign meeting and gave a tub-thumbing endorsement of Rob Muldoon.

If Ardern were to fly into the last week of the campaign, the Jacinda-haters would go nuts. It would suck up all the campaign oxygen. Her supporters would be motivated to vote.

It could backfire. It would highlight the contrast in leadership styles between her and Hipkins. Ardern would never run a negative campaign calling her opponents racists. Her intervention would remind voters that this Labour Government is not the Government we elected in 2020.

Labour’s U-turns have erased her policies. It is as if her Government never existed. Every one of the policies Hipkins has reversed, Ardern supported. It must be painful to watch your legacy being dismantled by your own party.

Ardern’s last dip into politics was her public endorsement of List MP Camilla Belich as her successor.

Ardern was humiliated. The Mt Albert Labour Party members rejected her advice and selected Helen White. With the floods and crime, the Mt Albert electorate needs an MP. The electorate may produce yet another surprise on October 14.

Labour’s only hope is a cyber campaign targeting overseas voters.

Those voters have not experienced the country’s cost of living crisis, interest rates, crime and the GP shortage. They have not watched ministers having to resign. Voters who have not lived in New Zealand for years will have positive memories of Jacinda Ardern.

With her 1.6m followers, the former Labour leader is the only person who can reach unregistered overseas voters.

Is Jacinda Ardern going to decide three elections in a row?

Richard Prebble is a former leader of the Act Party and a former member of the Labour Party.