Opinion: I have some bad news for Prime Minister Chris Hipkins. He and his Labour party are going to get booted out of office.
The long, exhausting days are about to end, and his phone will stop ringing. He’ll check if the battery has died, but the answer will always be the same. No one has called.
Many MPs struggle with the devastating, and at times, humiliating transition from being important (if not a little self-important) to being a nobody.
Under Hipkins’s leadership, Labour’s numbers are in free fall, the lowest from the latest Roy Morgan poll, which has the party in real trouble at just 24%; the others are not much higher.
Remember, the thing to look for in polls is the trend – every poll in the market right now has Labour going steadily backwards.
Here’s the concerning bit for Labour. Is 24% rock bottom or with three weeks to go, could it slump even further? I firmly believe there are more lows to come.
With the mood for change seemingly soaring, this government may yet slide further down the polls; to save face, creating an effective and workable opposition will become its aim.
Where and when did it go wrong?
Before Covid, I predicted Labour would be a one-term government, such was their inability to make anything fly.
They were short on experience; having over-promised, they sent everything to a working committee of experts to evaluate and recommend what to do next. It was expensive, slow and in the end, revealing on so many fronts.
Labour had not done the genuine policy work in opposition – it gave no one much confidence.
As for them being the most open and accountable administration ever – surely you say that at the end of your time, not the start. That’s for others to judge according to facts, not how you feel as a government. Just saying something does not make it happen.
Labour wasted the country’s time with gimmicks in place of hard work: Kiwibuild was a giant hoax on the New Zealand public. Phil Twyford came up with the slogan but he had fooled the country into thinking he’d put more work into it than he had. He certainly hoodwinked me.
Claims they were great custodians of our money never rang true. Today, $48b more is spent annually than in 2017. What do we have to show for it? New motorways, trains, light rail and hospitals? No chance.
Plenty of promises were made and dates set. $1.9b went into mental health – if it’s been spent well, Labour has failed to let us know.
Then Covid struck. National voters toyed with Labour to keep the Greens out and it was at this point the rot set in. The majority vote meant no one was acting as a gatekeeper. Ministers started courting pet projects along racial lines: Three Waters was a vehicle for quotas where Māori had a 50% say.
Ardern’s lack of oversight on the rest of government would prove her undoing. Primarily, her inability to identify core voter issues instead opting for expensive structural changes in the public service, which suddenly served as lightning rods for those who had lost faith in her increasingly out-of-touch agenda.
Strong hand, woefully tone-deaf choices
Rewind to election night 2020. If anything screamed out of touch and arrogant, it was deputy leader Kelvin Davis making a complete twat of himself on national TV.
His misjudged ode to National was as embarrassing and badly executed as it was poorly timed. It was irrelevant, obtuse, lacking humility and gravitas – and cringeworthy.
It was also a sign of things to come as the majority vote went to their heads and Labour embarked on a programme of change.
A real push was made to use more te reo across departments. Co-governance was introduced and not explained – people were blindsided.
Centralise everything, devolve nothing. Do it all in secret and tell the public nothing.
Make changes to business without consulting the relevant sectors or if you do, ignore their advice.
A water distribution and wastewater agency was suddenly a vehicle for Māori aspiration and co-governance as in 50/50 with pakeha.
And on it goes.
The recession was biting, cost of living had already increased and yet still Labour insisted on setting up the hugely costly Health NZ and Māori Health Authority. We employed consultants not nurses.
Meanwhile, TVNZ and RNZ were being forced into a sham marriage no one wanted, and no one thought would work. Yet Ardern allowed these pet projects to consume her government’s time.
Labour lost touch with middle New Zealand in record time. The Māori caucus was ruling the roost. Ardern did nothing to rein them in and she was increasingly distant from what needed to be done. Realignment was needed.
In the end it came with Hipkins, but the damage had been done. Ardern had lost Labour the 2023 election. She knew it and she bolted.
No one is saying she had an easy job. But her inability to exit quickly from the last Auckland lockdown was costly on so many levels. Some businesses and voters will never forgive her.
Labour spent $48b dollars more than when they took office but no one felt better off and many families were materially worse off, or about to be. Inflation was taxing households like never before and mortgage rates were about to go sky high.
That’s when Ardern rewrote history with an astonishingly glowing account of her achievements in office; then out the front door she went, leaving a mess to be cleaned up.
But despite all the mistakes, the demise of this government sits firmly with the performance of the economy – record high inflation and fast rising mortgage rates. It’s the economy, stupid.
No New Zealand government has ever been returned to office during a recession.
Consequences of Labour’s collapse
With the likelihood of a devastating defeat, based on current polls, Labour would lose 30 MPs. Perhaps more.
When National collapsed in 2002, it found the following three years hugely difficult. Basic functions like being in Parliament and sitting on select committees was hard.
The new smaller caucus gathers to farewell the other half of the team. Then the reality sinks in. Senior public servants are off serving the other guys. The incoming government is getting all the fresh headlines and happy pictures. The losers are packing bags and saying goodbye to the dozens of staff who also get sent on their way.
Leadership wobbles come to the surface; battle lines are drawn and we all know what that means.
Labour is going to get thumped this election. Hipkins is going to lose, and right now all I see is him attempting to put some respectability in the margin of the defeat. But he’s not to blame. He may well lose his job as Labour’s leader, but he shouldn’t. He’s not the worst leader of that party.
It’s likely, however, that the caucus will want change. That would be silly given how competent Hipkins is but few MPs like being led by a loser. Too many egos and ambitions collude to unseat blokes like him and the clock is ticking.
You can’t accuse him of not throwing himself at the job. After all, “he’s in it for you”. Hipkins is a career politician – he has no plan B.
And suddenly we will have two former PMs in their early 40s and on the scrap heap, which is far from ideal. Ardern is gone and Hipkins will be next.
People want change. But let’s also be a bit careful what we wish for.
