Is NZ First's Winston Peters key to a National election victory? Photo / NZME
OPINION
Leading donors and strategists behind John Key’s rise are now proffering their money and advice to NZ First.
Christopher Luxon’s strategists are convinced National-Act can get over the line by re-running Key’s 2008 “ambitious for New Zealand” campaign. But some of National’s best PR and political minds involved 15 years ago disagree. They say the political environment has changed after too many hollow promises of brighter futures, and given the mere passage of time.
In any case, except for fronting National’s education policy written by one of the party’s leaders-in-waiting, Erica Stanford, Luxon has turned out to be a Key but without the charisma, and a Jim Bolger without the hunger to make a difference.
Long-term studies indicate only three times since 1990 that voters have been this disgruntled with the status quo: after the Mother of All Budgets in 1991; through the unpopular National-NZ First coalition and Asian Economic Crisis in the late 1990s; and in 2008 during the Global Financial Crisis.
With inflation and interest rates now the highest since Don Brash and Ruth Richardson brought them under control 30 years ago, and Grant Robertson’s cash position expected to be $25 billion in the red this financial year, whoever is in government should be toast, and the opposition cruising to victory.
As Richard Prebble explained on Wednesday, Luxon is the reason Labour is even in the game, and Chris Hipkins is the reason the Labour-Green-Te Pāti Māori bloc is fractionally ahead.
There’s little sign National gets it. This month, Luxon has offered nothing except a low-key agriculture policy for which National minimised media coverage, and a hare-brained “major strategic priority” involving putting trade spokesman Todd McClay on a plane to India to “hustle” for a free-trade agreement.
Embarrassingly, the India-New Zealand Business Council, led by former Fonterra director Earl Rattray, disagreed. It said 15 years of trying for a conventional trade deal with India had “delivered nothing”. India, it said, requires a different approach, focused not on government-to-government deals but building business-to-business links.
Rattray should know. He was a Fonterra director when it tried to break into India with its unsuccessful Britannia Industries joint venture, but has since flourished with personal dairy-farming investments on the subcontinent.
Had Luxon’s people spoken to anyone who understands New Zealand-India relations, they wouldn’t have let their boss look so naive.
Worse was Luxon’s failure to be ready when the utterly predictable results of Revenue Minister David Parker’s so-called Piketty project were released.
The inquiry was ethically and constitutionally dubious, given that it drew on the actual tax records of 311 individuals and their families, but National has known about it since 2021, including the fact that it motivated big donations from some of the families affected.
Since Hipkins’ elevation, Beehive strategists have made perfectly clear what they have in mind.
The day after Hipkins was sworn in, I was able to write that Labour planned to lay the ground to claim that some New Zealanders don’t pay their fair share, as a pretext for tax relief for median voters in the $50,000 to $100,000 range, and the option of a new top rate on very high incomes and perhaps a modified capital gains tax.
The new taxes could also be positioned as necessary to help pay down Covid debt and keep a lid on inflation. The Auckland floods and Cyclone Gabrielle have made the case stronger.
All this would be deeply cynical, of course. No one seriously believes raising tax on the so-called rich could fund meaningful tax relief for median income-earners, and Treasury would feel bound to say so if it was official government policy. Labour yesterday ruled out tax rises in May’s Budget, consistent with its 2020 election promises. But Hipkins still has its longer-term tax policy to be released closer to the election, about which Treasury may not comment.
The Beehive’s real interest is National being obliged to oppose any tax increases, especially given its fundraising success among the 311 families, putting it on the wrong side of public opinion.
Luxon has known this for months, and long-time National strategists can’t believe he hadn’t worked out a credible line.
There’s little confidence Luxon can secure the necessary votes for a National-Act coalition. To the contrary, National’s vote usually falls during an election campaign, even with a popular leader like Key. Luxon’s negative net favourability is not just a problem in itself, but indicates that when people get to know him, they are more likely to dislike than to like him.
The big idea now is to get behind NZ First, including Shane Jones in Northland.
Links between NZ First and the business figures Winston Peters used to condemn grew through lobbying activity to get him and Jones to block Robertson’s capital gains tax and force Jacinda Ardern to rule it out for as long as she remained Prime Minister.
Those links, and the money and advisers that come with them, plus bad blood after the 2017-20 coalition and NZ First’s need to play the field to remain credible long-term as the centrist kingmaker, make backing National this time a dead cert.
Peters would again become Foreign Minister, while the party leadership would pass to Jones, to assure its continuity when Peters retires.
NZ First’s new strategists, including some who have been successful in national politics since the 1970s and are familiar with Northland, point to its vote being split among incumbent Labour MP Willow-Jean Prime, Democracy NZ’s Matt King, Act’s Mark Cameron, National’s Grant McCallum and the Greens’ Reina Penney.
Crucial, they think, will be the 10,000 or so voters who switched from Peters in 2017 to Prime in 2020. If Jones wins them back instead of McCallum, NZ First is back - and Luxon becomes Prime Minister.
To achieve it, NZ First’s new advisers argue Jones’ and Peters’ Māori heritage means they can go places on co-governance, crime, gangs, meth and even Treaty settlements that not even Act or Democracy NZ dare.
To make Luxon Prime Minister, NZ First’s new friends hope he’ll agree to an Epsom-style deal in Northland, giving confidence to non-aligned voters elsewhere that a vote for NZ First would be neither wasted nor end up supporting a Labour-Green-Te Pāti Māori regime.
Act, of course, would be appalled. It would be in a similar position as in 1996-1999, when forced to support a National-NZ First and then a National-Mauri Pacific-Alamein Kopu coalition, with no influence over policy.
However much it might huff and puff, though, National and NZ First strategists bet it would have no choice but to go along with it. It would be the only way to stop higher taxes.
- Matthew Hooton has previously worked for the National and Act parties, and the Mayor of Auckland.
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