Mike Williams: Hard and fast approach wins votes

Mike Williams.

As Auckland endures its third week in level 4 lockdown there's lots of time to speculate on the political impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.

There will be many academic theses written on this topic in years to come.

One political reality is already evident.

Voters handsomely reward politicians who take a hard and fast approach to any outbreaks and achieve Covid-19 elimination at this stage of the pandemic.

At least three elections in this part of the world abundantly support this thesis.

The New Zealand General Election on October 17 last year was one clear example of this phenomenon, with Jacinda Ardern's Labour Party returning to power with the first ever majority Government under the MMP electoral system.

The Labour Party scored just over 50 per cent of the Party Vote, an extremely rare outcome.

Only twice in the past century have parties exceeded 50 per cent. The first occasion was in 1938 when the first Labour Government was returned with an increased majority and the second was in 1951 when Syd Holland's National Party won a snap election taking advantage of popular opposition to a waterfront strike that had dragged on for five months.

Perhaps the most dramatic and significant Covid-19 election happened in Western Australia.

Labor Party Premier Mark McGowan, one of the first leaders to close state borders against infection from other states and who operated a firm lockdown policy similar to New Zealand's, scored a historic landslide victory on the March state election this year.

McGowan's Party won 53 of the 59 seats in the lower house of State Parliament. Zak Kirkup, the Liberal Party leader, was defeated in his formerly safe seat of Dawesville and just two Liberal MPs survived the political earthquake.

This election will change the face of WA politics as the Labor Party, with the Greens, won a first-ever majority in the gerrymandered Upper House.

With much smaller electoral populations in the rural Upper House seats than the city electorates – it takes seven Perth votes to equal one in Pilbara – this unfair voting system had guaranteed a legislation-blocking Upper House majority for National and Liberal Parties.

In Queensland, Labor Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk won a third term in office with an increased majority on the 31st of October last year.

This was another leader with a "hard and fast lockdown" approach to the pandemic and she was rewarded with electoral success in a contest the polls predicted she would lose just a year earlier.

The day before the state election, Palaszczuk announced that the state border with New South Wales would remain closed, firming up her image as a hard-liner on Covid-19.

The outlier in terms of its approach to the highly infectious Delta strain of Covid-19 is New South Wales, from where New Zealand's first Delta victim originated.

Blame for our Delta outbreak and the consequent lockdown should be laid firmly at the door of the Coalition Government of New South Wales and its Premier, Gladys Berejiklian.

Under pressure from Australian Prime Minister and the business community, New South Wales has adopted a "soft and slow" approach to Delta Covid-19.

This has allowed one positive case in an airport limousine driver to balloon into 37,000 confirmed cases and nearly 200 deaths.

New South Wales's half-hearted response to the Delta strain has infected Victoria and New Zealand while Queensland and Western Australia have maintained the aim of elimination and kept their borders firmly closed.

Queensland had just one case in the most recent report and Western Australia reported none.

A Sydney-based friend I spoke to last week was surprised to hear that our level 4 lockdown meant only pharmacies, supermarkets, petrol stations and dairies were open.

The NSW version of a lockdown, he said, allowed hardware chain Bunnings Warehouse, and furniture seller Ikea to remain open. Coffee bars were also open for takeaways and he told me that when he visited a local supermarket "masks were rare".

Australian PM Scott Morrison has pressured state governments to "open up" and is generally thought to have badly managed the vaccine roll-out.

Berejiklian doesn't face an election until 2023, but Morrison must call a Federal Election next year.

The latest Newspoll has the Labor Opposition eight points ahead of Morrisons Coalition and a majority of voters are dissatisfied with his handling of the "Covid Crisis".

As New Zealand has demonstrated, a hard-line approach to the virus is better for business than the calamitous New South Wales strategy.

With 43 per cent of its eligible population fully vaccinated, Berejiklian remains a long way short of the 70-80 per cent she thinks will allow opening up, but the travails of NSW may be doing us a favour.

At some point we will have to live with the virus and we'll need better leadership and social cohesion than New South Wales has exhibited.

Mike Williams grew up in Hawke's Bay. He is chief executive of the NZ Howard League and a former Labour Party president. All opinions are his and not those of Hawke's Bay Today