Former minister Michael Wood. Photo / Mark Mitchell
OPINION
Disgraced former Transport Minister Michael Wood’s dreams of being Prime Minister have ironically been boosted by his departure from Cabinet following his latest undisclosed shares scandal.
Until now, Wood was front-runner to succeed Chris Hipkins if Labour loses in October.
Popular with the unions and Labour’s Auckland left, Wood was set to emulate David Cunliffe’s 2013 defeat of Grant Robertson, with little support among Labour MPs who knew him best, but overwhelming majorities from union bosses and party members.
It happened again in 2014, when Andrew Little came fourth behind Robertson, David Parker and Nanaia Mahuta in the first round among Labour MPs but won decisively among the unions, with 64 per cent of their votes in the first round.
Looking back, there’s little doubt Robertson would have made a better Labour leader than Cunliffe or Little, and a better Prime Minister than Jacinda Ardern.
Given that John Key won re-election in 2014 with just 61 seats for National-Act against 60 for a Labour-Green-NZ First-Māori Party alternative, Robertson would almost certainly have become Prime Minister that year had union bosses and party activists not discounted what Labour MPs thought about Cunliffe.
Still, if Wood’s arrogant and adolescent attitude to repeated warnings that he was not complying with anti-corruption rules does cost Labour the election, the party’s rules will again give union bosses and party members the majority say over a new leader - assuming a vacancy.
Wood would have easily won that election, only to follow the usual pattern of failed first-term opposition leaders against new governments. His tarnished reputation now gives him an excuse not to stand.
The new front-runner is a ticket led by Deputy Prime Minister Carmel Sepuloni, supported by rising star Kieran McAnulty, if he holds Wairarapa.
Robertson could certainly do the job, but the 52-year-old’s passion for politics has dimmed after more than 30 years on the front line, and he is too associated with Ardern’s policy failures and lockdown excesses to represent renewal.
After Hipkins, returning to Robertson would more communicate reversal.
Parker may fancy another go, positioning himself as the one minister who has genuinely tried to deliver truly left-wing economic change as opposed to just enjoying the Ardern cult. Sadly for him, the former businessman and lawyer is the smartest minister in Cabinet but knows it – and his colleagues know he knows it too.
A better option for the 63-year-old Attorney-General and list MP would be quietly leaving Parliament without the need for a byelection and walking into the barristers’ chambers of his choice.
Another likely Labour leader is Economic Development Minister Barbara Edmonds, but this year or next is too early for the first-term MP to put up her hand.
The Māori caucus may be miffed at Sepuloni becoming leader, arguing Labour’s first-ever non-Pākehā leader should be tangata whenua rather than Samoan and Tongan. But the caucus’ most likely candidate, Peeni Henare, hasn’t shone despite being a minister since 2017. Mahuta’s Three Waters fiasco rules her out.
In contrast, Sepuloni is respected for overseeing the Ministry of Social Development sufficiently competently since 2017 to avoid the previously controversial department causing political problems.
Having seen her in action in London representing Ardern as Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage among the UK’s arts establishment, I can testify that Sepuloni has the personal presence of an Ardern, Key or Helen Clark to take command even in unfamiliar and somewhat stuffy environments.
Less nobly but as important, Sepuloni was the Labour minister who best skewered Christopher Luxon after questions about his family’s use of the clean-car subsidy to buy Teslas. Viciously yet elegantly, she thanked the National leader for now supporting a Labour policy he had previously trashed.
Nevertheless, like Judith Collins, Phil Goff, Bill English, Mike Moore and Bill Rowling, Sepuloni would probably fail to see off a first-term Luxon-Seymour Government.
That’s been done only twice since New Zealand’s party system emerged in the late 1800s, by Keith Holyoake in 1960 and Robert Muldoon in 1975.
Sepuloni’s best hope of emulating them would be a Luxon-Seymour Government turning out to be an Ardern or Key-style Government of working groups rather than the Government of real change that an angry population demands.
National and Act insiders say that is unlikely, insisting that big, bold moves are planned before Christmas and in the 2024 Budget, more in the mode of a Clark, Bolger or Lange Government than the indolent Ardern and Key regimes.
Assertive new ministers, they say, will be ready to give instructions to the bureaucrats on the day they are sworn in, rather than waiting to lazily read briefing notes over summer before deciding what happens next
That’s why Wood’s humiliation is good for his longer-term ambitions. Whatever the most recent polls, his impropriety raises the probability of Hipkins leading Labour to a crushing defeat when the next polls become public next month.
Defeat would speed up Labour’s inevitable leadership cycle in opposition, but delay Wood’s own tilt at the top job.
By the end of this decade, he’d hope to have seen off Hipkins in 2023, Sepuloni in 2026, and McAnulty or Edmonds in 2029, and then take Labour into Government in 2032, when he’d still be only 52 – and hopefully sufficiently mature to understand that anti-corruption rules also apply to him.
It need not be this way. National would have been better off if Bill English had remained leader into 2020, and Labour if Clark had not resigned on election night in 2008.
If Wood has cost his party the election, it would be much better for Labour to slow things down and stick with Hipkins, at least initially. It would give Labour time to think about and understand what led to its defeat, including the lack of substance of its senior team which, combined with the triumph of brand, caused it to fail to deliver its promise.
Labour could even grant Hipkins the chance to take out Luxon in 2026, the way Moore nearly defeated Bolger in 1993 and Holyoake restricted Walter Nash to one term in 1960.
If he failed, Labour would then still have a handful of credible leaders lined up for the next two elections, rather than using them all up like National did after 2017 and Labour after 2008.
New Zealand has suffered from idle government for 15 years, but that hasn’t been helped by inept oppositions.
If the worst happens for Labour in October, it should at least try to do better as an opposition than its shambolic recent predecessors.
- Matthew Hooton has previously worked for the National and Act parties and the Mayor of Auckland.
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