There is a number that must be top of mind for New Zealand’s governing Labour Party right now: 163. This is the margin — the individual number of votes — that gave the party’s Northland candidate, Willow-Jean Prime, victory over her conservative National Party rival in the country’s last general election in 2020.
Prime took the agriculture-focused constituency on the northern tip of the country’s North Island by this razor-thin margin out of 45,830 votes counted.
This helped Labour win 65 seats out of the 120 in parliament — the first time any party achieved a majority in its own right in New Zealand’s voting system, which favours coalition outcomes. It happened amid a pandemic in which then prime minister Jacinda Ardern’s strong management of Covid-19 was winning local and global praise.
But Ardern has now resigned, and the task of new leader and former health minister Chris Hipkins, who will be sworn in as prime minister on Wednesday with deputy Carmel Sepuloni, will be to shore up support for a reprogrammed Labour Party and hang on to as many of those marginal voters as he can.
If Ardern was an extraordinary leader for extraordinary times, Hipkins’ job is more ordinary. The crisis response to Covid-19 has passed. Inflation and the cost of living are soaring and the country still faces a problem of deeply unaffordable housing after years of a tearaway real estate market and low borrowing costs.
In December the government predicted the country will fall into recession this year. Labour is lagging National in the polls, and with an election now called for October 14, “Chippy” Hipkins has nine months of campaigning and resetting ahead.
Labour will lose ground. Whether it will lose so much that it loses power is the question. “Labour’s party vote of 50% in 2020 will fall significantly in 2023,” says Grant Duncan, a political commentator and associate professor at Auckland’s Massey University. “They’re polling lately around 32%-35%. If Labour wants a third term in office they have to turn the tide of support that’s migrating to the right.”
The government faces hip-pocket cost-of-living issues. A 25c/l (R2.76/l) temporary cut in the fuel excise duty is slated to end by April, as are half-price public transport fares.
Child poverty remains a problem in the relatively wealthy country, with the latest figures for 2021 showing just more than 20% children of Māori and 24% of Pacific origin live in “material hardship” (the equivalent figure for children of European descent was 7.8%). These numbers have been coming down, but not as fast as the targets the government had set.
The departure of Ardern, who won the country’s biggest majority in her Mt Albert, Auckland, constituency in 2020 with a 21,246 vote lead over her National Party rival, marks the loss of a huge figure of decency and strength from local stages.
Ardern embraced the country’s Muslim community, mourned with them and banned semi-automatic rifle and large magazine ownership after the March 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings that left 51 people dead.
In December of the same year two eruptions of the White Island volcano killed 22 people — 20 foreign tourists and two local guides — once again calling on the public leadership skills she wielded with such flourish.
Ardern suffered misogynistic abuse, including threats to her safety, that Hipkins on Sunday called “utterly abhorrent” and that came in part from opponents of strict lockdown policies she imposed before abandoning the country’s Covid-19-eradication strategy.
In the run-up to the October 14 election — set to take place in the middle of the 2023 Rugby World Cup in France — the opposition National Party, led by former Air New Zealand boss Christopher Luxon, will take on controversial policies such as a major reshaping of water infrastructure management and a planned merger of national broadcasters TVNZ and Radio NZ, which critics say could mean the two media organisations becoming subject to government interference last seen in the 1970s.
The replacement of Ardern by Hipkins, who lacks the charisma of his predecessor, may also allow the governing Labour Party more freedom to change policy. “I’m not presently assuming that Ardern’s resignation is bad for Labour,” Duncan says.
Nothing is set in stone for October. After all, the second-most marginal electorate in the 2020 election was Invercargill — at the other end of the country from Northland, on the southern tip of the South Island — where candidate Penny Simmonds clinched it by just 244 votes. For National.
• Bleby is a senior reporter with The Australian Financial Review, based in Melbourne.
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