Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern meets the Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison in Sydney in 2019. Photo / Supplied
OPINION:
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern might be flying to the United States this week, but the eyes of Wellington are fixed firmly in the other direction, as our political parties pore over the entrails of the Australian election.
Australia is often looked at as an incubator of a certain type of politics; it's the home of international political operatives like Mark Textor and Lynton Crosby ("the Wizard of Oz"), who cast a long shadow over Anglophone politics, brushing up the images of Don Brash and John Key, and helping UK Conservatives on multiple election campaigns.
Crosby was even given a knighthood in the UK in 2015 - a rare feat for an Australian, after then-Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull scrapped titular honours in Australia itself the same year (they'd only recently been brought back by previous Prime Minister Tony Abbott, but that other side of Australian politics - it's serial instability - though it might have something to do with Messrs Crosby and Textor, is for another time).
Our two major political parties both had senior operatives in Australia, observing the campaigns of their sister parties, as did the Greens.
As the dust settles (if dust ever settles in Australia) there appear to be two (or perhaps three) lessons to be drawn from New Zealand.
The first is a global trend: painful, out-of-control inflation which has mortally wounded an incumbent government that was struggling to rein in prices while delivering economic support to households. This is a trend being picked up across all Five Eyes Anglophone democracies, where incumbent governments are all polling behind their challengers (this is slightly different in the US, which doesn't use a Westminster system, although President Biden's polling is unquestionably poor).
Viewed through this lens, the election is bad news for Labour, which has begun to fall behind National in most polls, and would be unable to form a government in one (Taxpayers' Union-Curia).
Polling shows the political environments in both Australia and New Zealand are similar.
Ipsos issues monitoring, a poll that examines what's top of mind for voters, found concerns over the cost of living at another all-time high, with nearly half of all voters listing it as a top concern. This month's Taxpayers'-Union Curia poll put the cost of living as the most important issue for voters, with 25.8 per cent of people saying it was a major voting issue (just 3.5 per cent answered that question with "Covid-19", down from more than 30 per cent in October).
But there's a second way of reading Prime Minister Scott Morrison's loss, which is that he led a government dogged by inaction on climate change and questions over probity and its attitude towards women. Wealthy inner-city electorates peeled away from the Liberal Party, falling into the column of "Teal" independents - right-of-centre candidates who promised serious action on climate change and to grapple with the government's challenges around probity and sexism.
Read this way, the result doesn't look so optimistic for National, a party which has had multiple gender-inflected meltdowns since losing office in 2017 to the point where the word "National" seemed to be followed by the words "culture problem" as often as the word "party".
There's merit in reading the Australian election this way, but the differences are probably more striking than the similarities.
For starters, the attitudes of women voters appear to be starkly different on this side of the Tasman.
Far from abandoning National, women appear to be flocking to the party. According to the Taxpayers'-Union Curia poll, National has increased its popularity among women this year from 28 per cent in November, to 35 per cent in May, just three points behind Labour (in April, women favoured National over Labour by four points).
That said, the Liberal collapse in cities possibly contains a lesson for conservative parties in New Zealand and around the world. Questions of social justice predominate this cultural moment. The conventional wisdom was that social justice issues tended to destroy the Left - Barack Obama once joked these issues tended to whip left-leaning politicians into a "circular firing squad" in which they argued themselves into ever more unpopular, unelectable positions to appease their activist base.
New Zealand and Australia suggest this is no longer the case (if it ever was). The glut of knotty conscience votes put through the last Parliament - cannabis, euthanasia, abortion reform - galvanised the left side of politics and tore National apart. Euthanasia and abortion in particular led to ugly caucus spats that spilled out onto the floor of the House during late-night debates. History repeated itself this term, when the party imploded, yet again, over the issue of whipping a vote on conversion therapy. That history, and the example of the Teals, is a warning for National to ensure its conservative and liberal wings are able to live with each other. The liberals within these conservative movements have to have the ability to advance the social justice concerns of their largely urban constituents.
The politics of climate in Australia and New Zealand are incomparable. Elections in New Zealand are lost and won on the back of a single national electorate; the party vote, as you will hear ad nauseum next year, is the only vote that counts. Australia is starkly different. In a country where individual electorate contests really do matter, it's almost impossible to cobble together a coherent national platform that placates the concerns of people concerned about the effects of climate change on their livelihoods and people for whom their livelihood is dependent on worsening climate change.
New Zealand's National Party is also starkly different to Morrison's Coalition on climate politics. In 2018, former National leader Simon Bridges announced his climate change spokesman Todd Muller had a mandate from the party to negotiate the Zero Carbon Bill with Climate Change Minister James Shaw.
The announcement was not made in a leafy Teal-like seat, but agriculture trade fair, Field Days, a potent symbol that National was changing its position on climate change, but not to the extent that it would sacrifice its rural base. Since then, National has committed to the Zero Carbon Act (with the proviso that it change the agricultural emissions target within 100 days of being elected), and committed to the first three emissions budgets, and committed to publishing a plan for how to reach those emissions budgets before the next election.
Luxon has even been making noises about the inevitability of agricultural emissions pricing, but the current policy is to match Labour and the Greens on emissions reduction and to publish a pre-election plan on how to do so.
Unlike Morrison, who appeared to abandon urban liberal seats to shore up marginal, rural and suburban support, MMP has allowed National to tack towards urban population centres at the expense of rural seats.
Last year, there was a chorus of criticism that the party's refreshed board had no farming voice on it, and was too weighted towards people who lived in central Auckland (this has since changed with the appointment of Graeme Harrison to the board). National realises that under MMP, a contest between urban and rural voters, urban voters win every time.
The party's history means it still has credibility issues around climate change, but it would be a stretch to compare those credibility issues to Morrison's Liberal-National coalition, which nearly fractured over setting Australia's 2030 targets. National might not match Labour on climate change, there's no "nuclear-free moment" rhetoric on their side of the aisle, but it's difficult to see their climate platform as sufficiently negligent for urban voters to peel off vote for someone else.
There's nothing like the word "Teal" to send New Zealand's political world into conniptions of terrible punditry. For years, right-leaning voters have yearned for a "Teal Deal" with the Greens, as a way of kneecapping Act or New Zealand First, without realising that the more than a hundred Green delegates who must assent to any governing formation would sooner bury themselves in a mound of synthetic nitrogen fertiliser than agree to such an arrangement.
True, the only two electorates the Greens have ever won in New Zealand (Coromandel and Auckland Central) have been won from National, but that's about where the party crossover ends.
In fact, the success of the Greens at peeling a seat from National at the 2020 election suggests this year's Australian election might be evidence of Australian politics lagging New Zealand, rather than leading it. Chloe Swarbrick's victory in Nikki Kaye's former seat of Auckland Central, against a strong Labour and National travel can (and has) be read many, many ways - but one lesson is perhaps that Auckland Central voters were tired of a National Party dogged by poor behaviour, sexism, and more concerned with culture wars than climate change.
The third lesson one could draw from Australia is the decline in support for the two major parties, with smaller parties like the Greens and Teal independents surging in support. New Zealand also leads Australia in this regard, because of our electoral system than anything else.
We're currently governed by what was, on election night, the most popular governing party in a quarter of a century, but for most of our recent history, just under thirty per cent of the vote has gone to minor parties. This is something Australia is witnessing in this election, where support for the two major parties has declined, despite Australia's electoral system giving both a significant leg-up.
Votes bleeding away from the two major parties is something New Zealand is familiar with, much more than Australia. Perhaps that's the real lesson of this election: that on issues of climate, culture and party, New Zealand politics has, in the most recent cycle, led Australia. Like the mighty pavlova, this politics might have originated here, before migrating across the ditch.
Australians might even be taking note.
The last two Australian elections have involved New Zealand ad agency Topham Guerin taking on key marketing roles for the Australian Liberal Party, earning it the feared reputation in Australia Crosby Textor once enjoyed here.
This won't last forever. Politics is cyclical, not linear, but for the current cycle at least, it appears New Zealand has been the incubator of the new politics, rather than Australia.
For more from Thomas Coughlan, follow the NZ Herald's politics podcast, On the Tiles. New episodes out Friday
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