Prime Minister Christopher Luxon tours a temple in New Delhi this week with head priest Gyanmuni Swamidas. Photo / RNZ
THREE KEY FACTS
Alastair Campbell, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s chief spinner, used to plan out the days on a grid.
Policies were broken down into “announceables”, good news stories about the Government were dug up and briefed to the media, as were bad stories about the Opposition.
All were planned out on a grid.
The idea was that every day, the Government had a plan for what people were reading, listening and watching. And every day, with luck, they were reading, listening and watching things that were favourable to its re-election.
The grid is also a helpful way of thinking about the daily and weekly contest of politics, what Joan Didion disparagingly called the “horse race” – “the reliable daily drama of one candidate falling behind as another pulls ahead”.
Alas for Didion, a large part of politics is indeed horse race – someone (or people, in our case) does eventually win.
This year has been remarkable for the fact that the Government, despite its immense resources, has so consistently lost the battle over the grid.
There was a reshuffle, a tacit admission of the crisis in the health system, there was the resignation of Andrew Bayly, the battle over whether he should have been sacked, the scrapping over DEI (of all things) and that’s before you even get to the lunches – late lunches, mislabelled lunches, lunches with plastic all culminating in a lunch that exploded (in what may become one of this country’s most infamous examples of that old political dictum “explaining is losing”, the Government is quick to point out only one lunch has exploded – not lunches, plural).
What makes this week remarkable is that for the first time in a long time perhaps, the Government has comprehensively “won” the horse race.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s Eat, Pray, Love-in with the Government of India has yielded a breakthrough in the relationship – the opening of trade talks. Agreeing to talks is a long way off negotiating an agreement, but it’s a good deal further along the path to an agreement than before. Credit to the Government, even officials thought this was a tall order.
Thursday’s GDP print, showing the economy was growing at 0.7% – higher than forecasts – was also good news. The Government had little to nothing to do with this growth (and the economy has cratered so much that it is still smaller than December 2023, soon after the change of government), but growth of any kind tends to favour an incumbent – the Government will bank it.
Despite all this, the week was less a case of the Government winning than the Opposition losing.
Labour had a very messy few days. It tripped up on an attack over the number of working groups started by the Government National and Act have initiated many working groups, making them look like hypocrites (but it looks like Labour still had more than the coalition) and has seriously muddled its messaging about where it stands on public-private partnerships (PPPs).
For months, Labour seemed open to some PPP procurement, but apparently under threat from its own base, it shifted late last week to fairly staunch opposition. It made this shift more confusing by justifying this opposition on the basis of dubious anecdotes about the cost of changing lightbulbs in PPP schools and an alleged ban on putting art on the walls (the ministry says there is no cost to change a lightbulb and no ban on artwork).
The Greens didn’t make life any easier for a future Labour-led government, with MP Tamatha Paul attending an event in Christchurch where, in her words, she discussed “what alternatives we could have to the police … and what radical police abolition could look like”.
Police abolition isn’t Green policy (which is officially to strengthen “positive interaction between the police and communities”) and it’s certainly something a Labour government would not be happy with. Labour is quite proud of its police recruitment record, and lifted spending on law and order from 1.4% of GDP to 1.6% over six years.
The Act Party picked up on the flub and quickly put out a press release and published Paul’s video on their social media channels.
None of this is terminal. Approximately zero per cent of voters will go into a polling booth in 2026 and tick a box based on Labour’s inability to articulate a coherent stance on PPPs or a Green MP tripping up on her own party’s policy on TikTok.
In fact, hardly anyone cared this week – it was a parliamentary recess. Where problems like this do matter, however, is on the campaign. Labour wasted days getting its story straight on PPPs instead of just saying it didn’t like them. Had Paul’s misstep occurred during the campaign, it would likely have descended into several cycles of the Greens clarifying their own position and Labour having to “rule out” bits it did not like. Both dramas would have wasted delays of perfectly good “grid”.
In an election in which the Government is likely to pose a “why risk it?” question of voters, the three parties of a future left-wing government need to have an answer (in 2017, it was a Memorandum of Understanding and Budget Responsibility Rules agreement between Labour and the Greens – deals that might have worked to change the Government, but at the cost of years of infighting within the Greens). The answer can’t be the messiness exhibited this week.
Part of the challenge – and part of why the Government was so keen to leap on Labour this week – is that Labour has thus far done a good job in winning back some of the business community while also pivoting to the left to shore up supporters bored and despondent after six years of government.
Business has warmed to finance spokeswoman Barbara Edmonds, who spent her first year in the role speed-dating firms around the country. That’s no mean feat, given business and the sixth Labour Government didn’t end on great terms.
Edmonds’ (and Labour’s) challenge is how to maintain this goodwill as the party actually begins to take a position on things. It’s easy to listen to businesses grumble about Revenue Minister Simon Watts’ decision to take a hard line on collecting tax debt; it’s much harder to hear their concerns about your proposed wealth or capital gains tax or whatever Labour decides to do on industrial relations (Labour’s Fair Pay Agreements last term caused a meltdown between Labour and business so severe it spilled out into a scrap at the International Labour Organisation in Geneva).
At the moment, Labour is doing a good job of promising a little bit to everyone, winning over some business audiences while the party as a whole tacks ever so slightly left.
The Government – National in particular – is keen to put a stop to this, by forcing Labour to take a stand on some hard policy.
All this is playing out in the context of precipitously declining popularity for the Government. The most recent Ipsos poll with New Zealanders rating the Government’s performance 4.2 out of 10 was a lower rating than at any point since the company began that poll in 2017. Labour is now rated better than National as the party best placed to deal with 12 of the top 20 issues facing New Zealanders – double the number of issues National was ahead on.
Things are about to get worse, too. Electricity prices this winter will put serious pressure on the Government’s already strained popularity. Prices will rise, that seems guaranteed, and businesses will close. That’s less than ideal for a Government whose solemn promise to voters was to right the economy.
It will put pressure on the coalition, too.
NZ First is pushing for the electricity gentailers to be subject to more strictly regulated earnings, like Chorus and the new council-controlled organisation (CCO) water companies. This has somewhat less support on the more free-market side of Cabinet. NZ First is also keen for the Government to build and own generation itself, which is also unpopular.
At the most extreme, the party is looking to draw up a member’s bill to operationally separate the retail and generation arms of the big gentailers.
It can’t at the moment, because this is too similar to a bill in the name of Green MP Scott Willis. If that or the eventual NZ First bill is drawn, there will probably be a majority in the House (NZ First plus the three Opposition parties) to send the bill to select committee – and Labour may come under pressure to send the bill all the way (this still feels unlikely – member’s bills probably shouldn’t be used to advance large sectoral reforms).
What would it say about the ability of the coalition to deal with energy prices, if one of its three members has so little faith in its unified policy that it starts voting with the Opposition on measures to address it?
Luxon’s ability to respond to that challenge while keeping his coalition (and caucus) will be the making or breaking of him and his Government.
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.
OPINION: A GDP surprise perhaps, but a pleasant and vital one.