Heather du Plessis-Allan: ‘Crash’ poll should be a wake-up call for Labour

Chris Hipkins is trying very hard to win the election but is being badly let down by the knock-ons around him, says Heather du Plessis-Allan. Graphic / NZME

OPINION

It’s not necessarily bad for Chris Hipkins that Labour’s “crash” poll got out this week.

We weren’t technically meant to see it. It was a poll that Talbot Mills released to its corporate clients.

But someone got it out to the media. And it showed Labour had crashed to its lowest level since at least 2019. It’s also the first time National has been ahead of Labour by five points in a long while. It’s also the first time the right bloc of National plus Act has been ahead of the left bloc of Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori since 2017.

And then to rub some salt in that wound, the pollsters wrote, “We may now be seeing the long expected breakout of the centre-right.”

Normally it’s bad news for bad polls to get publicity because polls can be self-fulfilling. And that’s still true.

But it might be good that Labour MPs got to see this, so they start getting their act together.

Hipkins basically told them as much, saying from Europe that the poll is sending Labour a message and “I think that’s a message that the whole of the Labour Party will hear.”

You can almost hear his frustration in that sentence. It’s obvious to anyone watching that Hipkins is trying very hard to win the election but is being badly let down by the knock-ons around him.

We don’t need to re-litigate the list of shame: Stuart Nash. Michael Wood. Meka Whaitiri. Jan Tinetti. Kiri Allan.

But it is worth pointing out just how ill-disciplined these MPs can be. For example, Kiri Allan. She was supposed to be on leave when she started tweeting to correct the record of the Prime Minister’s post-Cabinet press conference while the Prime Minister was still talking in that press conference.

If Labour MPs want to win this election, that kind of self-indulgence has got to stop.

If you’re a traditional left-leaning voter, send your thoughts and prayers up for Hipkins because he is up against it.

When he’s not dealing with bad behaviour, he’s dealing with weird pet projects. Like Grant Robertson’s wealth tax and capital gains tax plan.

Robertson is normally a savvy political operator. He would’ve known this would go down in public like a tonne of the red stuff. And yet he got Treasury to investigate slapping a 1.5 per cent tax on wealth over $5 million anyway. He would’ve known that even if it never happened, the documents that proved what he was up to would get out. And yet he did it anyway. And the documents got out.

And like clockwork, the headlines and commentary were bad for Labour.

If Hipkins can’t even trust the good ones like Robbo, how on earth will he manage the rest?

Now that he’s killed off the taxes, next on his list might need to be light rail, race-based anything, and climate change anything. Those are the pet projects of Michael Wood, the Māori caucus and the Green Party respectively.

And when he’s done that, even if he can get his MPs to stop talking about unpopular stuff, he then needs to get the public service to shut up too. Because they’re causing just as much drama.

The rewrite of the science curriculum to remove gravity and physics is stupid. Health NZ’s public support for giving some patients shorter surgery waiting times based on their ethnicity is - I suspect - deeply unpopular. And NZTA’s plan to push bilingual road signs right now is probably an issue Labour doesn’t need.

You can hardly blame the public sector for pushing this stuff. For the last six years, they’ve been conditioned to think the majority of voters will just love it. Wrongly, obviously.

And you can hardly blame the Labour MPs for behaving any which way they like and pushing any dumb idea they like. Jacinda Ardern let them do it for years.

So thoughts and prayers for Hipkins. Although, they probably won’t help as much as that poll.

Heather du Plessis-Allan Drive, Newstalk ZB, 4pm-7pm, weekdays.