Election 2023: Matthew Hooton - will Christopher Luxon rule out dealing with Winston Peters?

OPINION

New Zealand First was above 5 per cent in all three of the latest polls.

Published in recent days, all three were by reputable pollsters, including Curia, which polls for National and the Taxpayers’ Union.

NZ First’s support is also growing in the two high-profile TV polls.

An earlier poll, by Talbot Mills, which works for Labour, had NZ First rising to 4 per cent, even before the Kiri Allan car crash. The next Talbot Mills poll is picked to have NZ First above 5 per cent.

The good news for the centre-right is that, according to Curia, National-Act would still win 61 seats — enough to govern without Winston Peters.

The other two polls are less encouraging, giving National-Act just 60 seats. Christopher Luxon would be sworn in as Prime Minister, but his Government couldn’t pass a Budget — or do anything else — without NZ First. For anyone interested in change, it would be the worst result of all.

For Peters and NZ First, though, it would be superb. There would be no baubles to tempt them, nor any real work to do. Instead, NZ First would have a simple veto over anything Luxon and Act’s David Seymour wanted to do. Most probably we’d need another election, perhaps before Christmas, but more likely before a Budget could be passed, which usually happens in May.

Labour would stick with Chris Hipkins, its last remaining asset, and be odds-on to win that election, as soon as Peters, Luxon and Seymour fell out.

The adult option would be National and Labour forming a temporary grand coalition, to get some kind of Budget passed for 2024/25, before new elections. Sadly, neither Hipkins nor Luxon has given any indication they would be prepared to even talk about it.

Sadder is that Hipkins or Luxon could have avoided this shambles.

Over the summer, Jacinda Ardern, Grant Robertson and Hipkins designed the perfect re-election plan.

Had Hipkins then had the nerve to call one, he would easily have won an April snap election, and his moderate, bread-and-butter Labour regime could have limped on for another three years.

Even without that big call, Hipkins’ brand and political nous meant he would have started the campaign as a clear favourite, had it not been for Michael Wood’s idiocy and Allan’s personal collapse.

Hopefully, Allan will one day be well enough to appreciate the comedy value of “Justice Minister arrested after police dogs join chase”. Nevertheless, after Wood’s much less forgivable multi-year imbecility, that marked the end of Hipkins’ Government being taken seriously and the beginning of Labour’s dreaded polling collapse.

The polls’ biggest shock, though, is that despite Hipkins’ troupe surpassing even the dying days of the Jenny Shipley cabaret for sheer political entertainment and having delivered the worst economic numbers for re-election since the madcap Lange-Palmer-Moore and Muldoon circuses, Labour’s re-election is still plausible.

Peters must again be taken seriously. Already he’s well on track to hold a veto over anything the next government wants to do. He needs only the tiniest slither of extra support from National and Act to securely hold the balance of power and play kingmaker once again, as he first did in 1996, 27 years ago. Only Luxon can now stop him.

All year, Peters and Seymour have fought for voters worried about things like gun rights and He Puapua.

Seymour deserves a medal from every decent New Zealander — whether you back National, Act, Labour, Green, Te Pāti Māori or TOP — for single-handedly keeping NZ First below 5 per cent until now.

But Peters can go places that Seymour wouldn’t, including legitimising those caught up in conspiracy theories about vaccines, the World Economic Forum’s alleged “great reset” and the UN’s so-called “Agenda 21″.

Personally, Peters doesn’t believe any of this nonsense. He has been a perfectly orthodox Treasurer, Foreign Minister and Deputy and Acting Prime Minister for Jim Bolger, Shipley, Helen Clark and Ardern.

But his campaign rhetoric has never carried much epistemic weight. Anti-globalisation and conspiracism became his bread and butter after he rallied against nefarious plots by the Business Roundtable, allegedly led by Selwyn Cushing, who, in fact, didn’t fund the Business Roundtable, belong to it or even share its policy outlook.

As Judge John Dalmer found in the subsequent defamation action: “Mr Peters was at best reckless or even worse he knew the words used were false.”

But the words of the authorities have never mattered to Peters. This week, Bolger and Shipley’s former Treasurer and Clark and Ardern’s former Foreign Minister attacked Hipkins’ climate change initiative as revealing “the desperation and naivety of a globalist shill government”.

The former Deputy Prime Minister for both National and Labour then made clear his latest manifesto in perhaps his most chillingly 1930s-style language yet: “Our country,” he tweeted, “needs Nationalism with a capital ‘N’.”

Hipkins’ ministers may have failed him as Prime Minister. But Luxon has failed National and New Zealand by betting he could just roll into office based on a personality New Zealanders haven’t turned out to much like, and banalities like banning kids from using their smartphones even at lunchtime.

Compare National’s woeful position with the last two times the Government cleanly changed (see table).

Two months before the 1999 election — with economic numbers that looked quite good for Shipley, and just after she had successfully hosted Bill Clinton, Jiang Zemin, Vladimir Putin and other Apec leaders — the somewhat austere Clark was still only two points behind her as preferred prime minister. Under Clark’s leadership, Labour, the Alliance and the Greens were 10 points ahead of National and Act.

In 2008, with economic numbers nearly as bad as today’s, Key was nine points ahead of Clark as preferred prime minister, and National and Act 15 ahead of Labour and the Greens. Key’s lead had been ever greater.

This matters because, if Peters needs to be involved, any government Luxon leads will be a one-term fiasco. The one useful thing the supposedly principled Luxon might do is at least rule out dealing with this latest version of Peters, the most rhetorically extreme yet.

That could stop more National voters shifting to NZ First hoping for a National-led government, but wanting to check Act’s influence.

Luxon has set KPIs for each MP in his caucus. It would be interesting to know what KPIs his caucus set for him, including on the Peters issue.

Even the overwhelmingly popular Key was man enough to do the right thing in 2008. Is Luxon in 2023? If not, what do the National MPs he reports to have to say?

- Matthew Hooton has over 30 years’ experience in political and corporate communications and strategy for clients in Australasia, Asia, Europe and North America, including the National and Act parties, and the Mayor of Auckland.