Danyl McLauchlan analyses the past week in politics in an online exclusive story.
Saturday: Labour launches campaign with dental care policy
Last weekend, both the major parties formally launched their campaigns. Labour’s was on Saturday – Chris Hipkins was introduced by former Labour Prime Minister Helen Clark; notably absent: former Labour Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern – and the big policy announcement was free dental care.
Back in 2005, Grant Robertson was deputy chief of staff for Helen Clark. That was a very close election, and Robertson was the architect of the interest-free student loan policy: so many younger voters had large student loans and the interest charged on them was so oppressive that Robertson’s policy instantly created a large cohort of voters who would have been crazy not to vote Labour, no matter what they thought of Clark and her party. The policy probably swung the election. National’s leader at the time was Don Brash, who would have been the most economically radical and racially divisive prime minister in modern New Zealand history. So, Labour holds a lot of fondness for the student loans policy, and a strong desire to replicate it. What else would have the same impact?
Free dental comes up every election and it’s always been dismissed as too expensive. Labour’s policy reduces the cost by age-capping it – it’s only for under-30s – and by delaying the full policy for three years. But the real problem isn’t the cost: it’s the number of dentists. The dental council’s most recent survey – conducted in 2019 – counted 2465 practising dentists in the country. Labour reckons it will need to grow this by at least 200 to make its policy work. So, it is increasing the number of dental students – but it takes five years to train them. And public-sector dentists went on strike this week (alongside the senior doctors), claiming salaries in the industry were so low compared with Australia that the public system was in danger of collapse as more and more dentists migrated across the Tasman.
The genius of interest-free student loans is that it was an administrative change. Free dental will require a Labour government to act in the world, rather than make changes to the crown accounts, and that’s always been something it’s struggled with. During the 2020 election, Labour promised to deliver 20 additional mobile dental clinics to provide care for under-18s. Only five have been ordered, and the first is not scheduled to arrive until next year.
Sunday: National launches campaign with pledge card
National’s launch was on Sunday. Prior to the event, finance spokesperson Nicola Willis was interviewed by TVNZ’s Jack Tame, who pressed her on some of the details of her grand tax and transfer package, launched last week. A lot of the funding will come from ending Labour’s foreign buyer property ban for purchases of over $2 million and imposing a 15% tax on the transactions.
It’s not clear this policy is legal: it may violate some of our international double taxation treaties. Experts are still arguing about whether this is the case, but Tame also pointed out that National’s costings imply a simply incredible amount of foreign investment in the high-end property market to raise the money to fund its tax cuts. Willis expressed confidence in her costings, but refused to release the model that had been used to generate them. Which hardly inspires confidence. If National wasn’t able to generate enough revenue from taxing foreign investors, it would have to either borrow or cut spending to fund its tax policy.
National didn’t have a policy for its launch. Instead, it resurrected another Clark-era political gimmick: a pledge card. Clark wanted to differentiate herself from the governments of the 80s and 90s, which routinely broke their election promises. Clark’s card was a mechanism for voters to hold her to account. National’s adaptation of it is a pointed way of reminding voters that this current incarnation of Labour is a long way from the competent delivery of the Clark era.
Protesters from Brian Tamaki’s Freedoms NZ party disrupted both launches: they infiltrated Labour’s event, interrupting Hipkins’ speech, and had to be dragged out by security. It’s not great, but many politicians and political journalists went into this election year worried about the threat of violence on the campaign trail. If this is the worst it gets, that’s a good outcome.
Winston Peters – still competing against Tamaki for the anti-vax vote – promised to pay hundreds of millions in compensation to people who lost their jobs due to Covid mandates and those proven to have been injured by the vaccine. It’s yet another policy that Peters will dump the instant the polls close, and there’s a popular argument around Wellington that Peters’s New Zealand First is ultimately a public good: it sucks up votes that might otherwise empower people like Brian Tamaki, but never delivers on any of the policies.
Monday: Luxon attacked in negative ad campaign
Monday morning’s edition of the New Zealand Herald carried an attack ad against Luxon, funded by Labour Party ally the Council of Trade Unions. Featuring the words “Out Of Touch. Too Much Risk”, along with a photo of Luxon, the ad also appeared on billboards and posters across Auckland.
National leapt on this as a chance to change the conversation away from Labour’s potentially popular free-dental policy, and the rising chorus of criticisms of National’s tax policy as proof that Labour was conducting a negative campaign.
This election, voters have a clear choice to make about who will lead New Zealand. Christopher Luxon’s policies show he...
Posted by NZCTU Te Kauae Kaimahi on Sunday, September 3, 2023
Labour would be crazy not to conduct a negative campaign. Unless the price of petrol halves over the next two weeks, a scare-and-smear approach is its best bet. And once again, the ghost of 2005 haunts us. That was the year Helen Clark attacked Don Brash in very un-prime ministerial terms, calling him “cancerous and corrosive”. But Brash was genuinely radical; Luxon seems completely bland.
The anti-Brash campaign was boosted by a series of high-profile leaks – that he’d secretly collaborated with the Exclusive Brethren religious sect to run a parallel campaign, that he’d privately assured US diplomats that New Zealand’s anti-nuclear policy would be “gone by lunchtime”. Most of Labour’s anti-Luxon allegations revolve around questioning his religious views, and these seem to have diminishing returns.
Tuesday: Party policy analysis proves promise can’t be delivered
An important story from Business Desk journalist Oliver Lewis (paywalled) revealed that Treasury and the Infrastructure Commission raised “substantive concerns” about the Labour government’s wildly ambitious plan to build new tunnels for vehicles and light rail under Waitematā Harbour, at an estimated minimum cost of $35 billion. There are concerns the project will be carbon negative, but the major issue is that the government doesn’t have the capacity or the money to deliver on the Auckland infrastructure projects that it’s promised to build.
It’s likely Labour’s dental policy and National’s tax policy are insincere, but this is as close as we’ll get to a smoking gun, showing a political party promising the nation something they’ve been told they can’t deliver.
And another story of interest from RNZ’s Guyon Espiner showed Waikato University Vice-Chancellor Neil Quigley collaborating very closely with the National Party to develop its policy to build a new medical school to Waikato. Waikato also employed former National Cabinet minister Steven Joyce as a lobbyist, paying him over $1 million, and hired Joyce’s former press secretary to promote the policy. Universities are part of the public sector, and they’re supposed to be politically neutral: this seems an astonishing breach of that neutrality.
In US politics, right-wing politicians often employ a tactic called “owning the libs” – making jokes that breach left-wing taboos, then basking in the resultant outrage and media coverage. Act leader David Seymour has spent the campaign claiming that various progressive icons – Nelson Mandela, the Māori signatories of the Treaty of Waitangi – would have been Act party voters. On Tuesday, he announced that the country’s most famous suffragist, Kate Sheppard, would have supported him, kicking off yet another round of outraged media stories.
Wednesday: National makes EV pledge, Labour shares five-point economic plan
National’s taken a lot of criticism this year for its dearth of climate policy. On Wednesday, it released a vaguely pro-climate initiative: $257 billion to build 10,000 EV charging stations around the country over the next seven years. It would also scrap the clean car discount, otherwise known as the ute tax: this subsidises EV purchases by taxing high-emission vehicles. The discount has been very successful at driving sales of EVs, but the optics of the policy are horrible. The government is lowering the cost of Teslas for wealthy urbanites by imposing a tax that disproportionately affects provincial workers. The Green Party is furious, but the scheme was never going to last a change of government, and it’s surprising Labour hasn’t ditched it yet.
Labour has released a five-point economic plan. It’s going to focus on high-paying jobs, infrastructure, education and “a balanced fiscal plan”. It is very similar to the economic policy from 2020 and to National’s economic plans during its time in government – it’s hard to see much improvement in any of these areas. Anyway, Prime Minister Chris Hipkins intends to promote these aims by investing $100 million into an agritech venture capital fund and to visit India within his first hundred days of a re-elected Labour government.
Thursday: Poll shows Labour’s support collapsing
Two polls that came out this week show Labour’s support collapsing: Roy Morgan has the party on 24%, and The Post-Freshwater Strategy survey has it on 26%. Roy Morgan polls across the entire month, while most other pollsters aim for a more compressed timeframe. The Freshwater Strategy is a new poll, so we don’t know how well-calibrated it is. There’s a Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll coming out Friday, and that’ll give us a clearer picture of the state of the campaign. Advance voting begins in just over three weeks.
