Here’s my prediction: Labour will not just win the October election, but it will complete a landslide of similar proportions to the 2020 election.
As more polls are published and the recent trend becomes apparent, National will panic again and dump leader Christopher Luxon, installing the “head prefect”, Nicola Willis, in a desperate hope she can do a Jacinda on Labour.
In 2011, MP and former deputy prime minister Jim Anderton, was comfortably leading the mayoral race to overturn incumbent Christchurch mayor Bob Parker when, according to an apocryphal yarn, he jokingly, but prophetically allegedly said “only an earthquake” would stop him winning.
Of course, the aforesaid earthquake occurred, Bob Parker, who was then seen everywhere in his hi-viz vest, won in a landslide.
Labour’s prospects last year looked as gloomy as Bob Parker’s had until the Christchurch earthquake struck. Labour, of course, began its re-invigoration, when former leader Jacinda Ardern launched her own earthquake via her shock resignation. Then came the devastation of the cyclones and the opportunity for strong response.
The rapid, adroit way the leadership change was handled (compare it to what happened with the Tory Party’s shenanigans after Boris Johnson quit) was the first step towards improved support. New leader, Chris Hipkins, has proved an astute choice partly because he had served a tough apprenticeship during the Covid crisis.
But he also showed his skills. He immediately tapped into the mood of the country. As well, he moved decisively in selecting his cabinet and resetting policies. He swiftly introduced the right mix of switching, dumping and instilling new blood in cabinet and then did his policy re-set, dumping unpopular policies like the merger of the state broadcasters and the hate speech legislation while promising to review Three Waters.
Both television station polls shortly after Hipkins assumed the leadership, showed an immediate bounce for Labour that surprised many people. Each showed support at 38 percent, with Labour and the Greens toe-to-toe with a National-ACT coalition.
However, it has been Labour’s response to the cyclones, like multiple Bob Parkers on steroids, that will be the decisive factor in October. In stark contrast to the incompetent, missing-in-inaction, “Mr Fix-it”, Auckland mayor, Wayne Brown, a prime-ministerial-looking Hipkins, and his cohorts have been there, they have acted decisively by declaring states of emergency, and have showed the public they have every reason for confidence. In politics, perception in most cases, is reality.
What has given me most confidence about Labour winning in a landslide is this letter published in the Dominion Post on Tuesday by Julie Hopcroft:
It’s not often over the last five years that I have seen eye to eye with this Government. However, I would like to record my admiration for its impressive response in the wake of what is being felt as a collective national tragedy: the devastation wreaked by Cyclone Gabrielle.
“In particular, Chris Hipkins, Kiripatu Allan, Kieran McAnulty and Michael Wood have stood out. Well done on the hard work already done, the honest acknowledgement of what is to come and the very humaneness of your responses Your response has been excellent and I comment you for it.
Hopcroft hails from Feilding, one of centres of the rural Groundswell anti-government, anti-Three Waters protests, and, while she doesn’t say she is an ACT or National supporter, she certainly isn’t a government fan.
Even the rabidly right-wing commentator Heather du Plessis-Allan acknowledged Hipkins hadn’t put a foot wrong in his first 25 days. So, when the likes of Hopcroft and de Plessis-Allan accept the competent job Hipkins and his team are doing, it gives the lie to Luxon’s cries of incompetence.
Luxon and the opposition have also largely been side-lined by Hipkins and his ministers taking action in a replay of how the government responded to covid.
The former Air NZ CEO has repeatedly been caught flat-footed and tin-eared. Witness him abandoning Auckland to fly to Wellington for parliament’s re-opening only to find Hipkins stayed in Tāmaki Makaurau to be on hand to lend support to Aucklanders.
Visiting Ratana, Luxon managed to offend his Māori hosts while lamely, obliquely appealing to racists by referring to the Treaty of Waitangi as “our little experiment”.
The Tāmaki Makaurau/Northland floods showed the country was already facing its most expensive flood damage in a century even before the fury of Gabrielle struck, but Luxon ploughed on like the Titanic captain, saying the costs wouldn’t change his tax-cut plans.
He said in parliament, in his response to the Prime Minister’s Statement debate, this week that cyclone recovery funding could be “compartmentalised”, again displaying his everything-is-so-simple CEO mentality.
The credibility of his promise not to cut health, education and welfare spending, while not increasing debt and cutting taxes is going to be increasingly exposed. A Dominion-Post cartoon of him on wrack and the torturer Hipkins is shouting: “What are your policies,” had it right.
Dominion Post Political Editor, Luke Malpass, who leans well to the right, declared Hipkins’ first major speech on the reopening of parliament “a strong speech” while he tore into Luxon’s performance as “low energy”, with “nothing new beyond the talking points Luxon used last year”.
Luxon’s job was made in more difficult by his “Fucking Useless” MP Maureen Pugh hogging headlines with a climate denial statement after which she was arm-twisted into the fastest and least sincere u-turn in history.
Hipkins and his Finance Minister, now also Cyclone Recovery Minister, Grant Robertson will have a couple of months together to put together a budget where a good deal of reprioritising will be done as the focus shifts to the basics. Hipkins, in his Prime Minister’s statement, repeated Labour’s mantra of the covid crisis, saying they will they will get cracking to do whatever it takes to recover.
Robertson already has experience through the covid emergency of reprioritising a budget and the public will take huge confidence from this.
If the next One News/Kantar and Newshub/Reid polls, due out shortly, show Labour making further progress, the pressure on the accident-prone Luxon will intensify. In the January Kantar poll, Luxon had a net approval rating of only 9 percent, while Hipkins debuted at plus 36 percent. If the party position deteriorates and Luxon’s approval slides towards negative territory, then Nicola Willis will be sharpening her well-honed knife.
The conclusion of Andrea Vance’s insider account of the National Party, Blue Blood, published last year, was that Luxon’s honeymoon may be short-lived and Willis, who supplanted Judith Collins as Lady MacBeth, had her knife poised.
If Luxon’s momentum falters, an impatient caucus will soon look around for another silver bullet”, Vance wrote and Willis, according to one of Team Luxon’s less-than loyal MP colleagues, “is there thinking about her future. She is deeply tactical.
(Simon Louisson is a former journalist and also worked two short stints for the Green Party).
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