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If you’ve been wondering why Labour has gone significantly quiet on policy lately, I reckon it’s deliberate. The silence is working.
Why say anything when your opponents are doing the heavy lifting for you?
Some elections are won on inspiration. Most aren’t. Most are lost by governments that voters have grown tired of, and right now Labour seems happy to sit back and let the coalition wear the daily grind of governing. The polls suggest it’s paying off.
National’s numbers have slumped. Luxon’s personal ratings are bad. Polls come and go, and I’m wary of reading too much into any single one. But this isn’t one rogue result. The same slide has shown up in poll after poll for months now, and at some point a pattern stops being noise.
The irony for National is that New Zealand doesn’t feel like a country in crisis. Public health remains under pressure and petrol prices hurt, but for many voters, life is largely carrying on as normal.
Governments don’t always lose support because things are going badly. Sometimes they lose it because nobody’s excited. Plenty of voters look at this government and see competence. That’s it. Competence, and not much else.
I’ve spoken to long-time National voters who tell me the party doesn’t deserve a second term. Others are eyeing up alternatives. It’s not anger driving them, it’s disappointment, and disappointment is harder to fix. A lot of that lands at the leader’s feet. Watch Luxon on any given week and he can seem less like a Prime Minister and more like a referee, trying to keep the peace between Winston Peters on one side and David Seymour on the other.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon
Kiwis have always backed leaders who look like they’re the boss. In fairness, Luxon has grown more assured in public over the past year. But politics is cruel. First impressions stick.
None of this should give Labour comfort about its own ideas though. National’s struggles are not an endorsement of the opposition. If Labour wants to govern again it needs to spend less time on identity politics and more time on the stuff people actually lie awake worrying about. Mortgages. Groceries. Getting in to see a doctor. Making it to payday. Labour’s promise of three free primary care visits sounds great on a billboard. Dig a little deeper and the questions pile up, because GP access is already stretched to breaking point and making visits free doesn’t create a single new doctor.
Is there a case for helping people who can’t afford care? Absolutely. But should taxpayers be subsidising appointments for people on good money who can? There’s also fine print. Those “free GP visits” might not involve a GP at all. In plenty of cases you’d be seeing a nurse practitioner instead, which is not the same thing, and Labour hasn’t exactly gone out of its way to spell that out.
Labour’s social media strategy is dreadful. Endless posts portraying Christopher Luxon as a promise breaker and a big mean man do not amount to a plan for government. It sounds less like a serious opposition and more like a child running to Mum because someone was nasty.
Chris Hipkins
Voters are not sitting around waiting for another grievance campaign. They want to know how Labour would make life better for people who work, pay tax, raise families and keep businesses going. Stop whining about Luxon. Tell us what you would actually do.
Neither side gets to feel smug. National has to show what it’s done to justify a second term. Labour has to prove it offers more than giveaways and subsidies. But if the election were tomorrow, National would be nervous. And it should be. Because the mood out there isn’t anger. It’s indifference. And in politics, indifference usually means voters have already started quietly packing their bags.
