Analysis: National on 34, Labour on 33, a total of 67. Two-thirds of us. And that’s two-thirds of the people prepared to express a preference. Twelve per cent of us don’t know or wouldn’t say.
Yes, one of the striking features of the latest 1News Verian Poll is that the combined total of support for National and Labour remains near (or not far above) historically low levels.
Sure, it was 63% in the previous poll, and 67% is a slight improvement on that, but it was 68% the poll before, and then, heading backwards through successive polls, 67%, 66%, 66%, and a year ago, 68%.
And on election night, 2023? Sixty-five per cent.
In other words, the support calcification continues in what we call the centre, by which we really mean the old dogs. National and Labour, arthritic, teeth desperately in need of repair, long past chasing seagulls on the beach, surrounded by barking pup parties that increasingly do not defer to them, do not respect their threadbare “wisdom”, and do not know their place.
There is such a strikingly visible irony here.
Speaking to Breakfast, Victoria University associate professor Lara Greaves and former National Party press secretary Ben Thomas gave their takes on the latest 1News Verian Poll. (Source: Breakfast)
As National is dragged down into the populist politics of its coalition partners, as Labour considers what to do about tax policy and how best to work with Te Pāti Māori, should Chris Hipkins (and co) need to court TPM to get into Government in roughly fourteen months time, an answer, surely, is: Do something, anything, to define and assert brands that have genuine meaning.
I’m not talking about resolute supporters. Tribal voters can spend days telling you what their party stands for. But diehards don’t decide elections. Floating voters do. And the big two don’t seem to be engaging them anywhere near enough.
Which means they’re both dependent, utterly dependent, on their coalition partners.
Or on finding leaders and policy (perish the thought) that the country might actually want to vote for.
Of course, with the exception of Labour’s unprecedented 50% in 2020, it’s always been versions of this under MMP.
But context matters here.
Sixty-seven per cent now. Sixty-five per cent on election night.
As I wrote in July 2023, election night 2020 had Labour on 50% and National on 25.6%. That’s a total of 75.6%.
Election night 2017 had National on 44.4% and Labour on 36.9%. That’s a total of 81.3%.
Indeed, prior to 2023, the last time there was an election in which the two major parties, aka the “centre”, received less than 70% of the vote, was in 2002. A generation ago.
It now feels habitual. Set.
And it’s hard to find any material signs that National and Labour are responding to that.
Nats not delivering
Back in 2021, only just over a year after he was first elected to Parliament, National’s answer was Christopher Luxon.
He became leader so quickly, it almost felt breathless.
And National won.
But there has never been a one term National government or National-led Government. Ever. And the fact that it’s even a possibility now tells us the Nats aren’t delivering what voters want.
Luxon’s pedigree, as he told us so often his tongue was in danger of repetitive strain injury, was as CEO of Air New Zealand. What he lacked in any perceptible political viewpoint, any kind of tangible aspirations beyond doing, you know, stuff for “ordinary Kiwis”, he made up for in management prowess.
And then David Seymour and Winston Peters smoked him like kahawai.
This matters because it’s so far from what the country was promised, and not just by Christopher Luxon himself.
We were told, repeatedly, for example, that the Treaty Principles Bill, finally voted down by 112 votes to 11, in the most brutal, embarrassing and unequivocal defeat of a government bill I can recall in three decades of covering politics, was the coalition-agreement price the country had to pay for getting a government of managerial prowess.
That’s clearly not how it feels to many of us.
Christopher Luxon is now at 20% in the preferred prime minister polling. Twenty.
That’s down from 28% a year ago, which wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement at the time. The “preferred” begins to become a misnomer at that level, doesn’t it? “Don’t Know” is at 31%. The Nats should see if she or he is free.
Matthew Hooton, whose Patreon is worth subscribing to, in part for his sometimes gleefully vicious dismantling of his own broad tribe, wrote yesterday, before last night’s 1News Verian Poll was released but off the back of a Taxpayers’ Union Curia Poll that was even worse for National, that, as Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon “has failed utterly to provide the basic leadership of the country the job demands”.
The problem is, Luxon’s leadership was his selling point. He was CEO of Air New Zealand, you know? Sigh. (In hindsight, he should possibly have mentioned that less often.)
Meanwhile, Labour are up four to 33%.
The morning’s headlines in 90 seconds, including poll numbers paint grim picture for leaders, Trump sending the National Guard into Washington, and where have all the coaches gone? (Source: 1News)
Labour hasn’t earned it
Labour will be chuffed with that. Particularly given how little they’ve done to earn it. And it’s significantly up on the 27% they achieved (and again, the word feels like a misnomer) on election night. But it’s important to note that Labour were at the same level in February, six months ago. And so were National. And it’s been a pretty tough winter since.
In other words, Labour are simply returning to where they were, not reaching new highs.
Second, Labour were at 50% less than five years ago. Third, and I love this joke so please forgive me for hauling it out again, there have been more sightings of Elvis than of significant new Labour Party policy.
You could say that Labour feel like they’re phoning it in. But it sometimes doesn’t even feel like they’re doing that. Maybe Willow-Jean Prime has lost the party’s phone?
Here’s a fun game. Go to Labour’s website and look at their “News & Updates” section. It’s pretty pro-forma opposition stuff. Multiple variations of “the Government sux”.
But David Lange once told me the best way to remain in opposition was to look like one. So, prior to the 1984 election, he did everything he could to look like a government in waiting.
Now, click on Labour’s “Announcement” section. Go on. You’ll see it on the right, just beneath the photo of Chippie.
“No news items to display.”
There’s nothing there. Lol.
(NB: Some time on Tuesday morning, in the hours after this piece was published, someone appears to have removed the “Announcement” section from the Labour website. Double lol! Dear old Labour, could they conceivably be doing less?)
So, off we go, one in three of us, not including the 12% of us that can’t bring ourselves to make a choice, or to admit to the choice we’ve made, in search of answers elsewhere.
Minor parties drift
Act thought it was them.
Nope.
The party that got 8.64% of the vote on election night and is sitting at 8% in this 1News Verian Poll. And, remember, that’s after all the attention, publicity, TV time, etc, that David Seymour received for the Treaty Principles Bill, in particular, and also the Regulatory Standards Bill.
Empirically, measurably, it hasn’t worked for Act. Writing about the Taxpayers’ Union Curia Poll, and a poll question about voter priorities, Hooton points out that “for all the Coalition’s focus on three particular issues, almost no one cares about them as their top issue”.
Just 2.8% of those surveyed in that poll identified “Māori/Treaty” as their number one priority. Less than 1 in 33 of us.
David Seymour keeps telling us we’re divided by it. But he hasn’t even effectively engaged a potential support base with it.
As I wrote from Waitangi in February of this year and last year and from Turangawaewae in January 2024, the Treaty Principles Bill occasioned a response from Māori that contained and affirmed a sense of identity and unity (kotahitanga) that general politics seems unable to emulate.
The message of both this week’s polls appears to be that National and Labour need to find a way to bring themselves to step into this space.
To stand for something.
The Greens have had, by any reasonable assessment, a dreadful year or two with personnel issues. And while they’re down two points, they’re still third.
New Zealand First are fourth. The party that polled 6% on election night, is at 9% now. Again, like the Greens, you know what they stand for, agree with it or not.
When it was a two-horse race
When I was young, well and truly pre-MMP, when I really did live in a home of National Party dad and Labour Party mum, and my parents would set out on election day to cast their vote, electorate only under First Past the Post, duly and seriously cancelling each other out, before heading home for a nice cup of tea, or something considerably stronger in the Campbell family tension of 1981, National and Labour were it.
Oh, yes, there were cameos. Social Credit seems particularly extraordinary now, viewed in the rear vision mirror of life.
But the choice was essentially a dichotomy. National, Labour. Labour, National. Mum and Dad. Off they went.
The polls out this week tell us the the big two are in a kind of stasis. Led by men who between them don’t reach the preferred prime minister levels Helen Clark, John Key and Jacinda Ardern all reached on their own.
“The centre cannot hold,” to quote that brilliance of WB Yeats.
Is it really even the centre any longer?
Or is National hostage to its coalition partners, and Labour hostage to such a wilful caution that the party’s in danger of rendering their policy platform invisible.
A solution may be in an economic outlook question in the Verian poll.
Asked if they thought the economy would get better, stay the same, or get worse over the next 12 months, 64% of the just over 1,000 people polled said the “same” or “worse”.
That’s a tough reality to live in. Very tough for some.
Who’s leading people out of that?
And who persuasively looks like they’re trying to?
