Monday
It took three weeks for the electoral commission to deliver the official election result. The incoming Prime Minister Christopher Luxon was unhappy with this, but the chief electoral officer Karl Le Quesne defended the delay, citing the extensive auditing required to ensure the vote count was accurate.
Last week the New Zealand Herald’s data scientists noted that the special vote counts for some electorates were obviously wrong. One voting station in Port Waikato registered 505 additional votes for the Leighton Baker Party and none for National. When the commission rechecked, it found data entry errors for 15 voting places and an entire ballot box that hadn’t been counted - none of which was uncovered during the three-week audit process. There will be an independent review into what went wrong.
But this has become an ongoing theme of public service performance during the past six years. The commission was paid $60 million to run this years’ election. In 2017 it was $32m. The trend of public agencies charging more and delivering so much less will be one of the incoming government’s largest challenges.
Tuesday
Luxon has repeatedly voiced a preference for keeping coalition negotiations out of the media. But New Zealand First doesn’t work like that: Winston Peters and his deputy Shane Jones need media coverage the way the rest of us need air. Today Jones indicated there’s a consensus building between New Zealand First and Act around a Treaty reset.
The Treaty of Waitangi was - famously - written in English and Māori using different terms with wildly different meanings. In the 1980s, government and the courts agreed to legislate in reference to the “principles of the treaty”, a set of assumptions that attempt to reconcile the incompatible versions of the document signed by the different parties and apply them to a modern political and legal system. There’s about 30 years of legislation and Treaty settlements based on the principles’ model. Act’s desire to throw this out the window via a referendum would probably lead to a constitutional crisis and civil unrest. Both National and New Zealand First have taken it off the table.
But Jones has indicated that he’s worried about the courts’ new habit of introducing tikanga - customary Māori law - into their judgments. Parliament is supposed to be sovereign: the courts merely interpret the legislation. But by including tikanga as a source of common law, New Zealand’s judiciary appear to have found a way to write the law themselves and even overrule those set down by Parliament. Jones is also suspicious of the tendency for institutions - especially government departments - to embrace Te Tiriti o Waitangi - the te reo translation of the treaty - which is also a shift away from the established principles. Many interpretations of Te Tiriti find that the iwi and hapū who signed the document did not cede sovereignty to the crown - which therefore has no right to govern. So, weirdly a department that adopts Te Tiriti probably shouldn’t exist.
Luxon doesn’t seem slightly interested in any of these issues - and National has no desire to spend its first three years in government locked into a bitter, racially charged dispute about Treaty interpretation. But National campaigned against co-governance and Labour’s expansive interpretation of the Treaty, and it won the election. So, it has a mandate to set out an alternative vision of what our nation’s founding document means and how it works in our law. Instead of a referendum it will probably throw it to a commission or working group with hand-picked members, which will recommend legislative reform. But someone will need to explain that work to the public and unfortunately for Luxon, that someone will be him.
Wednesday
The migration statistics for the year ended 2023 were released. It showed record high levels of outward migration as New Zealanders - especially young New Zealanders – leave, many for Australia. But these numbers are more than offset by the record high levels of inward migration, primarily from India, the Philippines and China. This represents a huge demographic shift: 237,083 migrant arrivals and 118,000 migrant departures in a population of just over five million. If it goes on like this, it will represent a radical change in the ethnic make-up of New Zealand. The most obvious short-term impact will be on house prices: we certainly didn’t build enough accommodation for 118,000 new New Zealanders. Long-term, the changes will be hugely beneficial. We desperately need young, skilled workers to offset our ageing population. But rapid demographic shifts nearly always provoke reaction. People get anxious and angry when they see their country changing too quickly.
Thursday
We still don’t have a government. It’s now the second-longest post-election negotiation period since the introduction of MMP. The longest was after the first election in 1996 when Winston Peters held the balance of power but went fishing instead of entering negotiations. On Tuesday the three leaders and their negotiating teams were supposedly meant to meet in Wellington. Everybody flew down there except Peters, who stayed in Auckland, reportedly to get his hair cut (he’s since said he was never expected in Wellington). In any event, everyone turned around and flew back to Auckland again.
This will be driving Luxon wild with frustration. He wanted to go to Apec in San Francisco to establish his international brand and meet other world leaders. He missed that. He has promised to introduce a mini-Budget by Christmas and he’s running out of runway to get that done. They want their ministerial offices staffed and running but they can’t hire anyone because they don’t know who has what portfolio. They’re wasting crucial time.
But none of that matters for Peters. Luxon is merely yet another prime minister - the fifth he’ll have governed with. For Peters these negotiations - the tactics, the games, the stalling, the triumphs - are the quintessence of politics. He can’t form a government with Labour and he has a smaller number of seats than Act: this is the least-promising negotiation position he has held. And yet he’s demonstrating his power over his larger coalition partners, making them come to him. He is the most important person in the country, the absolute centre of attention. And he will go on like this: he always does.
Those fixed smiles worn by Seymour and Luxon as they insist that things are going REALLY well will remain plastered to their faces for the next three years. The haircut was just the beginning.
