Labour's Chris Hipkins says his party needs to change. Photo / Alex Burton
ANALYSIS
Labour members gathered in Christchurch for the party’s annual conference were given two obvious themes by party organisers, “change” and “challenge”.
Party conferences always have two audiences – the members in the room, who tend to be dyed-in-the-wool backers of the party, and the general audience listening at home, who are perhaps tuning into that party’s ideas for the first time thanks to the fact that conferences give parties a rare opportunity to make their cases through the national media.
Hipkins told Labour members their party needed to change to rebuild the trust that Labour had broken under the last government – a tough message for party faithful to hear.
“Let’s be clear – Kiwis did vote for change last year,” Hipkins told members.
“We lost, and now we need to change. New Zealanders didn’t think we were focused on the things that were important to them, and they’d lost faith in our ability to deliver on the promises we were making,” he said.
The other leg of this was a “challenge” – slightly stage-managed by the party – from a panel of non-Labour people brought in to offer gently provocative ideas as to how the party might evolve. The stage management was important. Some issues are clearly off the table – Labour was unlikely to invite business leaders to suggest it should begin privatising assets again. The party did however invite Sam Stubbs, chief executive of KiwiSaver provider Simplicity, to suggest the party should be open to inviting KiwiSaver funds to operate infrastructure in New Zealand in a public-private-partnership (PPP) kind of way.
“Please, as a KiwiSaver manager who just wants to invest in the hood, give us stuff to invest in,” Stubbs said.
This should not be anathema to Labour. The Sixth Labour Government has a policy of no health, education or prison PPPs, but was open to them in areas like transport.
Labour knows it needs to push in this direction. Every party will be coming to the 2023 election with a plan to solve the infrastructure deficit and the country’s weak fiscal position means that those plans cannot rely on government borrowing alone – other capital, including from KiwiSavers, may be required. On top of that, there is the challenge of what to do with KiwiBank, which needs more capital at a time when its sole owner, the Government, isn’t in a position to offer any.
Speaking to the Herald from the conference, Labour’s Finance Spokeswoman Barbara Edmonds said Hipkins delivered a “fair assessment” of why the party had lost and what it needed to do.
“I think it was very much what I had heard. We were trying to do too much,” she said.
Edmonds was also live to the feelings of members who were frustrated by the party’s jettisoning of popular policies at the last election, but she told the Herald the party needed to have broad appeal to win.
“You can’t just have the left you need to have the middle,” she said.
Edmonds was supportive of Stubbs’ idea of opening up infrastructure to outside partners. Edmonds would extend this to iwi, calling the proposal a partnership between public-private and iwi or PPI (pronounced pipi).
Edmonds did not show her hand on policy. She attacked public sector job losses, and the retrenchment of public spending, particularly in research and science, but, with two years to go to the election, she opted not to lay out specifics of what she would do differently — only that she would not do what the coalition was going.
She was fairly clear-eyed about the challenge though, repeating the sobering statistic from Treasury’s 2021 statement on the long-term fiscal position warning that by 2060, 10% of our GDP will be spent on health (up from 7%), and 7% on superannuation (up from 5%; Treasury actually reckons the figure is even higher at 7.7%).
The magnitude of these figures hasn’t yet sunk in for New Zealand voters. Plugging the gap in health would require roughly three times the revenue as a percentage of GDP Labour expected to raise from the 2023 wealth tax. Plugging the revenue in superannuation would require more than double the revenue. Put together, plugging these gaps would require expanding the current revenue base by about a sixth – little wonder Treasury reckons that affording these changes won’t be borne by revenue increases alone, but a cocktail of eligibility changes and spending cuts elsewhere. No wonder politicians are loath to discuss how that might actually look. Everyone is going to have to compromise.
Māori caucus co-chair Willie Jackson delivered a surprising speech. The Māori caucus chairs are not a permanent fixture of the conference speaking programme (unlike the leader, deputy and finance spokesperson who speak every year).
Surprising too, was Jackson’s decision to use the speech to appeal to the “middle New Zealand”. Jackson’s political genealogy has not been one of centrism. His road to becoming a Labour MP and Minister went via stints as an MP, leader, supporter or potential candidate of Mana Motuhake, the Alliance and The Māori Party.
Jackson told members that 20 years ago, when Labour lurched right to fend off the Iwi/Kiwi-era National Party (occasionally remembered as a betrayal of Māori by some Labour members), New Zealand was very different to what it is today.
“Middle New Zealand has changed from 20 years ago.
“Middle New Zealand was once characterised to be conservative with views that isolated Māori, immigrants and minorities.
“Today, the middle is more culturally aware. Parents love their kids learning the Māori language and embrace diversity,” Jackson said.
Is he right? Two polls from Taxpayers’ Union-Curia show the Treaty Principles Bill is actually quite popular, with the most recent poll showing two times as many people supporting it as not (although a large number of people register as undecided).
And 2023 polling from Labour’s preferred pollster Talbot Mills show similar margins for things like Māori wards, where 45% were against compared to 19% in support. On the issue of co-governance the gap was smaller, with 31% against the idea compared to 26% supporting it.
Jackson is nevertheless correct in saying that middle New Zealand has changed since Iwi/Kiwi.
After all, the last National and Labour Governments both supported the Treaty principles, forms of co-governance, and some level of local government representation for Māori (in Christchurch, no less, the Key Government created places for Ngai Tahu on ECan before these were repealed under Luxon), however it is probably fair to say that polling suggests middle New Zealand’s relationship with the Treaty remains complicated.
Jackson told the Herald the Labour leadership team thought it was “probably appropriate that I give a talk about the elephant in the room”.
“It’s probably the most contentious issue at the moment,” he said.
Jackson said he wanted to talk to Labour’s membership about the “subtle differences” between his party, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori. This included a history lesson, in which Jackson paid tribute to Hipkins for being the first major party leader to acknowledge the view of the Waitangi Tribunal that Māori did not cede sovereignty in 1840.
However, Jackson said that this did not mean that he believed Parliament was not sovereign and that the King was not head of state.
Jackson said Labour needed to “pull back” some of its vote from middle New Zealand.
“We’re not on some extreme waka here. We’re not going to become puppets of the Māori party,” he said.
So we have a changed middle New Zealand and a changed and challenged Labour Party – or at least that’s what Labour hopes we have.
The first test of whether this is really true will come before the end of the weekend when a series of membership votes on things like taxation and the potential abolition of leadership “captain’s calls” will give an indication as to whether the Labour membership is happy with the changes made by its leadership.
Only when Hipkins has convinced his anxious membership that his party has changed, can he begin to make that case to the public.
Thomas Coughlan is Deputy Political Editor and covers politics from Parliament. He has worked for the Herald since 2021 and has worked in the press gallery since 2018.
Labour members have passed a remit on a wealth tax or capital gains tax.