Claire Trevett: Election 2023 - The questions Luxon won’t answer, Seymour waits and watches the polls

OPINION:

There will be a certain cautious smugness among some in National about the latest polls.

Back at the party’s annual conference in June there were howls of laughter from some quarters when a slide mistakenly left on the screen revealed its 2023 goal was 45 per cent.

At that point, it was stuck at 35 per cent, neck and neck with Labour.

In the past four or five polls, National has inched up and finally hit 40 per cent in the Newshub Reid Research poll out last week.

It also got very close to 40 in this week’s 1News Verian poll.

As Luxon had hoped, the exposure he is getting on the campaign and the tax policy has also helped with his preferred Prime Minister ratings. He is now on level pegging with Labour leader Chris Hipkins.

Admittedly, that peg is not very high. This is not an election in which personal popularity will win anyone many votes.

Labour’s hopes now seem to rest in voters starting to take an interest in the ever-growing list of questions Luxon does not want to answer.

Those are around National’s tax cuts plan, its wider policy mix and his potential governing partners, Act and NZ First.

The list of questions is growing by the day – and Luxon is getting more and more frustrated when they are asked every day.

There are the questions about whether he will rule in or out a governing arrangement with NZ First leader Winston Peters.

Luxon said some months ago it was a hypothetical situation; Peters wasn’t in Parliament and was not polling at the 5 per cent level required to get back in after October 14.

That has now changed. Peters is now polling around 5 per cent in most polls, although not yet convincingly enough for Luxon to have to change his answer.

Then came National’s tax policy and the various measures to pay for that tax policy.

Luxon and his finance spokeswoman Nicola Willis are doing their utmost to avoid a spreadsheets at dawn duel with the ever-expanding raft of economists calling out their foreign buyers’ tax estimates as wrong.

Illustration / Rod Emmerson

Then came the opening of the books last week and a new range of questions Luxon would not answer.

Act leader David Seymour is now deciding whether to shrink or defer his own tax cuts policy in light of the state of the books revealed in Prefu – an exercise he aims to finish by Tuesday.

Luxon cannot do the same thing: he and Willis pre-emptively hamstrung themselves by saying their tax cuts plan would happen no matter how bad the Government books were.

That leads to the obvious question of whether other National policies might have to be re-sized because of the state of the books, or whether National’s cuts to public services will now have to be larger than just the ones planned to fund tax cuts.

That led to a question whether National would stick to Willis’ earlier pledge that health and education spending would at least increase by inflation each year. The answer to that was maybe: after Luxon repeatedly refused to say yes, National later settled on saying that funding for front-line elements of health and education would at least increase by inflation.

Luxon is also asked how much and where National will make cuts in the public service to free up the money they need, and whether National’s policies will drive up housing prices and potentially make life difficult for first-home buyers again.

Willis has simply said “I don’t know” to the latter, National had not sought any modelling on it. Even if the answer was yes, it might not hurt them given a lot of voters are home owners who have seen their houses drop in value since the Covid boom times.

On whether letting foreign buyers back into the New Zealand market would push up house prices for New Zealanders, Luxon said that when Gucci puts its prices up, it did not mean The Warehouse would put its prices up.

National did not provide its data on that claim either, but it presumably means the foreigners buying up the Gucci houses will not push up the prices of the Warehouse shacks the rest of us sloth around in.

The repeated questioning on all these things is clearly starting to make Luxon a bit tetchy – he snapped “calm down” at one reporter this week.

However, Luxon will presumably continue to not answer such pernicious questions because he does not really need to.

National’s polling is going up regardless. Green Party co-leader James Shaw set the reason out during the Queenstown finance debate, saying he got the feeling people didn’t care whether National’s numbers stacked up: they just wanted the tax cuts.

Labour’s hope is that people will start to care – and start to think National has something to hide.

Labour will not be the only ones waiting nervously to see if National tipping over the 40 per cent mark was a temporary blip or genuine and ongoing momentum.

The change from the mid-year drag race between National and Labour has also had consequences for the smaller parties. The Greens and NZ First have nudged up as Labour has fallen.

However, National’s rise has come partly at the cost of Act. It is still too early to say whether that is the start of a trend. Seymour is putting a brave face on it, knowing that despite his high-visibility buses, Big Pinky and Little Pinky, much of the early focus on the campaign is on the two contenders to be Prime Minister. He will get to strut his stuff more as the debates kick in.

National will not be too unhappy to see Act shrinking a bit more. Despite Seymour musing about a confidence-only agreement (he says that was just a “last resort” option), both parties want a clean two-party coalition.

As yet, neither will say what that might mean in specific terms: what Act might ask for as its top preferences, and what National might give way on.

That is partly because it will depend on how strong Act is after the election compared to National and how much leverage it has.

That 45 per cent goal that was displayed back in June was an echo of the 2008 result, when Act got only 4 per cent. National won’t want Act dropping quite that far – especially if NZ First is rising. However, they have been wary about the influence Act might have if National’s election result was sub-40 and Act’s above 10 per cent.

Both National and Act are also carefully watching what happens with NZ First – in particular whether that party becomes more than a hypothetical scenario, and Luxon has to say out loud that he is not ruling a deal with Peters out.

Luxon’s immediate eye is on 2023. But any political party should also be thinking ahead to 2026.

An unstable government or a government that is hamstrung by a partner or goes too far for the sake of a partner risks being punished for it an election later.