Grant Robertson is only 2 1/2 years older than Efeso Collins, the Green Party list MP who died after collapsing at a charity event. Collins had just begun his parliamentary career. After serving in local government in South Auckland and unsuccessfully contesting the Auckland mayoralty, he was courted by Labour, National and the Greens, all of whom coveted his charisma, as well as his access to Pasifika votes.
He chose the Greens, who have long been uncomfortably aware that their support in South Auckland has been close to non-existent. They speak on behalf of the poorest people in the country but their votes come from the wealthiest electorates.
They hoped that Collins would change that. Most MPs drift through their parliamentary careers unnoticed. Collins clearly had a future ahead of him: his passing signified a personal tragedy and the closing off of political possibilities.
Robertson – one of the towering figures of our recent past – had announced his retirement the previous day. A product of Labour’s student-politics-to-parliamentary-staffer-to-MP pipeline, he was an influential adviser during the Helen Clark government, finance minister during Covid, Jacinda Ardern’s most Machiavellian strategist, one of the architects of Labour’s 2020 election triumph and for many years the strongest debater in the House.
Despite his obvious brilliance, Robertson’s policy legacy is surprisingly thin. Labour entered government in 2017 with few concrete ambitions. In Opposition, his Future of Work project anticipated widespread technological unemployment but he found himself presiding over a tight labour market and spent his second term struggling with an acute workforce shortage.
His 2019 Wellbeing Budget generated global headlines and committed an additional $14 billion in spending but failed to deliver the promised transformations in mental health care or child welfare. Most of the benefit rises in the 2021 Families Budget were eaten by inflation; child poverty statistics have worsened over the past three years.
His beloved income insurance scheme was a victim of Chris Hipkins’ policy bonfire, promises to reform New Zealand’s broken tax system were cancelled when Ardern ruled out taxing capital gains, and then again when Hipkins vetoed a wealth tax. Instead, Robertson spent the 2023 campaign grimly endorsing the scheme to exempt fruit and vegetables from GST, a policy met with contempt by nearly every economics commentator in the nation.
His finest hour was obviously Covid: there couldn’t have been a lockdown without the wage subsidy and other financial measures, and the lockdown is estimated to have saved about 20,000 lives.
Buying votes
Historians will litigate his stimulus packages and the subsequent house price bubble and high inflation. But one of his most significant contributions came near the beginning of his career. In 2005, Robertson was a staffer in Clark’s office. The party was locked in a ferocious battle for re-election against National led by Don Brash, who made a gigantic tax cut package the centre of his campaign.
Cutting taxes is an inefficient way to buy votes, though: most of the money goes to people who would never support you, or who planned to vote for you anyway. Robertson devised a more targeted policy: continuing interest-free student loans. This offered a larger payout to a smaller and more strategic cohort of voters and it won Labour the election. But targeted policies became a routine tactic for both major parties, and over the subsequent two decades, our tax and welfare systems merged into a trackless labyrinth of subsidies, rebates, tax credits and earner payments that are almost impossible to unwind.
These might be cheap compared with tax cuts but they’re expensive when you lump them together, and they have been ineffectual in addressing the nation’s social or economic challenges – because they’re not supposed to: they’re designed to win votes.
In a series of speeches and briefings since the election, Treasury has warned that the government faces a long-term structural deficit. It advises the urgent introduction of a capital gains tax – an ambitious recommendation given the vigour with which National, Act and NZ First oppose such a tax – and warns that returning the country to surplus may require serious cutbacks on core spending areas like health and welfare.
Labour is currently fighting a bitter internal war over tax policy: former revenue minister David Parker, an outspoken advocate for tax reform, has slipped down its pecking order.
Robertson will leave Parliament to serve as the vice-chancellor at the University of Otago, which is emerging as a sanctuary for retired left-wing MPs: Metiria Turei teaches at the law faculty, and former Labour MPs David Clark and Clare Curran hold senior governance roles. He is replaced by Barbara Edmonds, a former tax specialist who entered Parliament in 2020 and spent last year accumulating ministerial portfolios with astonishing speed as Stuart Nash, Parker and Kiri Allan either resigned their positions or were fired.
Safe hands
Edmonds has emerged as a calm and very capable pair of hands. When asked about her approach to the finance portfolio, she repeatedly emphasised prudence. With Carmel Sepuloni holding the deputy leadership, two of Labour’s top-ranked MPs are now Pasifika women. With the loss of most of the Māori seats to Te Pāti Māori and the Greens now holding three liberal urban electorates, Pasifika voters now constitute the party’s heartland.
The passing of Collins and retirement of Robertson were bookended by releases from Stats NZ revealing a country with rapidly shifting demographics. Like most post-industrial nations, we’re experiencing a rapid drop in fertility, especially among the ageing Pākehā population.
We’re also seeing massive outward migration as young New Zealanders leave, mostly for Australia. This was offset by higher birth rates among Māori and Pasifika communities and record-high inward migration, primarily from India, the Philippines and China. The future of New Zealand will look more like South Auckland or Edmonds’ electorate of Mana and a lot less like Wellington or Otago. The nation governed by figures like Clark, Ardern and Robertson is passing away, and a very different one is being born.
