Prime Minister Chris Hipkins (left) and National Party leader Christopher Luxon. Photos / Mark Mitchell, Herald montage
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins (left) and National Party leader Christopher Luxon. Photos / Mark Mitchell, Herald montage
OPINION
The election might still be a tad over four months away, but the gushing of crocodile tears about negative campaign tactics has already begun.
It’s one of those entirely predictable features of election season: campaigning politicians accusing their arrivals of being attack dogs and of dishing the dirt -and before long they are engaging in the same behaviour themselves.
The silly thing about it is that attacking your opponents has always been part of the arsenal of campaign weaponry. It always has been, and always will be, yet as soon as it happens there’s an outpouring of righteous tut-tutting.
This is not to say it’s an acceptable practice. It’s more the tiresome way that it generates faux outrage.
As the Prime Minister was wrapping up his regular slot on RNZ’s Morning Report this week, he was asked about a National Party accusation that Labour had resorted to “fighting dirty”.
The presenter didn’t say what the accusation related to. But presumably it was National’s indignation over Megan Woods’ Handmaid’s Tale tweet, made in response to Chris Luxon’s statement that, if he leads the next government, he will reinstate prescription charges, including on contraceptives.
For those not familiar with The Handmaid’s Tale, the novel introduces a dystopian future in which women are forced into reproductive slavery.
Hipkins, naturally, dismissed the negativity charge, asserting that it was a bit rich coming from the Nats, given that they had attacked him ever since he became Prime Minister. The next day, as if to illustrate this point, Luxon was repeatedly calling Hipkins “soft and weak” over the Michael Wood shares mess.
In his RNZ interview, the PM was also asked, somewhat disingenuously, if he was concerned about the tenor of the campaign so far. Imagine how newsworthy it would’ve been if he’d replied that, yes, he was troubled, and that everyone should mellow a bit and play nicely.
Of course, Hipkins was never going to agree with the premise of the question. As an experienced campaigner, both as a parliamentarian and student leader, he knows all about the inevitable rough-and-tumble. So he simply noted that it would be a “robust” campaign.
Elections are bruising, high-stakes contests. In addition to promoting their own policies, parties and candidates look to denigrate those of their rivals, and to expose inconsistencies and weaknesses.
Going negative can be a risky strategy, but it has long been part of the mix.
Parties and candidates do it because it can help to win votes, and it’s a good way to rally the troops.
There has been a swag of academic research on negative campaigning. One thing that it shows is that parties will put the boot in if, in their assessment, they can score political points without alienating potential voters.
In other words, they ask themselves whether the supposed benefits of going negative outweigh the risk of voters being turned off.
If an attack strikes a chord with what voters are already thinking, it can be very effective. If it doesn’t, you might cop some flak.
There have been instances when going negative is something on which the campaign turns, to the attacker’s benefit.
In 2017, for example, National’s then-Finance Minister Steven Joyce launched a mid-campaign attack on Labour’s economic policy, claiming there was an $11 billion “fiscal hole” in its planned spending. Almost every economist and financial commentator dismissed it as rubbish. Joyce’s numbers, they said, didn’t stack up.
But his cynical hit job had the desired effect. It dominated a news cycle and played to a perception that Labour is weak on the economy, so halting the party’s momentum at a time when “Jacindamania” was ascendant. By the time Joyce’s claim was discredited, Labour’s poll numbers were flattening.
Former Labour Party leader and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern pictured in 2017 addressing a crowd in downtown Auckland. Photo / 2017 New Zealand
Then again, the attack dog approach can sometimes backfire badly.
In 2008 Labour Party president Mike Williams travelled to Australia to trawl through court records related to a money transfer scheme that had landed people in jail in the 1990s. Williams’ mission was understood to have been a bid to smear John Key, who was then on the verge of becoming PM.
Williams came up empty-handed. Labour got a lashing in the media for stooping to desperate tactics, and from that point it got no closer to overhauling National’s lead.
Negative campaigning is such a time-honoured election-season drill that it always seems ludicrous when a politician, especially one from a major party, has the temerity to gripe about it.
Witness National’s deputy Nicola Willis a week ago, getting into a state of high dudgeon over the Megan Woods’ Handmaid’s Tale tweet. Facing the media, Willis let loose a string of rebukes, labelling it “government in the gutter” and irresponsible, and accusing Woods of “baseless scaremongering”.
Yet National is as practised as anyone at playing the man.
Surely they haven’t forgotten Nicky Hager’s Dirty Politics investigation from 2014.
Based on thousands of hacked emails, it lifted the lid on the “covert attack machine run by the National Party and its allies” during John Key’s prime ministership, and linked his office to a process that saw material from the SIS handed to right-wing blogger Cameron Slater for the sole purpose of embarrassing then Labour leader Phil Goff.
That is the thing with negative campaigning. There’s a tendency for too much of the pot calling the kettle black.
Both the major parties, in particular, will occasionally cross the line, but spare us the caterwauling about dirty politics every time it happens.
Election campaigns won’t always be seemly affairs.
- Mike Munro is a former chief of staff for Jacinda Ardern and was chief press secretary for Helen Clark.
