On Saturday the election hoardings went up. Francesca Rudkin was driving around Auckland watching the billboards being hammered into the ground and found herself feeling flat, thinking there were only nine more weeks of this to endure. That bothered her because, as she explained on Newstalk ZB yesterday, she actually likes elections. She likes the contest of ideas and is excited that her son will vote for the first time on November 7. Yet she is already worried that “this contest of ideas is going to be frightfully dull, and short on ideas”. Her description of what we have been getting so far was especially good: “It’s politics by warning label.”
Then this morning came a poll showing how far the big parties have fallen. The latest Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll has National down to 29% and Labour down to just 25.9%. Between them, the two parties that have dominated New Zealand government since the 1930s have only 54.9% support. The Post says this is the first credible nationwide poll it has been able to identify since the Labour-National duopoly emerged in which both parties are simultaneously below 30%.
It is only one poll, but it fits a wider pattern. National is weak, yet Labour is not harvesting that weakness. Both went backwards in this poll, while the Greens and Act made strong gains.
Toby Manhire identified the personal version of the problem back in July. Looking at a 1News-Verian poll that had Christopher Luxon on 18% as preferred prime minister and Chris Hipkins on 16%, he observed that “basically, two in three people prefer neither Chris”. His conclusion was that the prime minister heading the next government could arrive on “a wave of meh”.
The phrase has stuck with me because the “meh” now seems to extend beyond the two leaders. There is plenty of anger and anxiety about the state of the country. What is harder to detect is much enthusiasm for either of the two large parties proposing to run it.
Politics by warning label
Rudkin’s complaint is that the campaign feels “defensive, reactive and relentlessly focused on the other side”. That seems right. National’s campaign chair Simeon Brown appears determined that almost every political conversation must eventually arrive at Labour’s supposed collection of new taxes. Policies advocated by Labour, the Greens, Te Pāti Māori and Opportunity are bundled together as “Labour and their mates”, creating the impression that they will somehow all become part of one grand post-election tax package.
Labour is running its own version. Its warning is that National has another round of cuts lined up for schools, hospitals and public services which voters will only discover after the election. So the choice is increasingly framed around catastrophe avoidance: National says Labour will tax you; Labour says National will cut the things you rely on. Whatever you think of us, both sides effectively say, just think how much worse the others would be.
Political scientists sometimes call this “negative partisanship” — voters being motivated by hostility towards the other side rather than enthusiasm for their own. There is an obvious reason parties use it. Fear works. But when a party’s own positive programme is not especially exciting, increasing the perceived danger of the alternative becomes even more useful.
Peter Dunne opened a Newsroom column last week with a line that could almost serve as an epitaph for this campaign: “Elections are often billed as a contest of ideas, but the election looks much more like a grim struggle for power between the competing blocs.” His argument is that National has kept Labour occupied responding to attacks over tax and spending, while Chris Hipkins’ deliberately cautious “small target” strategy leaves Labour with relatively little else to seize control of the debate.
There are meaningful policies around. National’s compulsory KiwiSaver proposal is significant, and Labour’s capital gains tax and health policies are hardly trivial. But neither party has put it all together into a particularly compelling account of what New Zealand might look like after another three years of its government, let alone ten. The parties are much clearer about what voters should fear than what they should hope for.
Boring by design
The feeling is hardly new. Kerre Woodham said last month: “I do not think I have ever felt less inspired, less hopeful about an election, ever.” Back in January, political scientist Grant Duncan was already predicting “a close contest – between dull and duller”, joking that Luxon’s pitch amounted to “Make NZ Boring Again”.
Chris Trotter went further in LawNews, arguing that “Christopher Luxon is betting on boring.” His argument is more provocative than simply saying incumbents prefer stability. Trotter says “the general absence of excitement is what keeps potentially unhelpful voters at home”. In his reading, “strategic boredom” can help an incumbent by reducing the political temperature and making change seem less urgent.
That probably goes too far. There is no evidence National’s campaign strategists have consciously decided to suppress turnout by boring people. But Trotter does identify a genuine political incentive: National hardly needs a huge national argument about transforming the country. Such a debate could be positively dangerous for a first-term government polling below 30%. It needs enough voters to conclude that, whatever their frustrations, changing government would be riskier.
Labour has arrived at roughly the same place for different reasons. Hipkins watched his party get crushed in 2023 after Labour became associated with too many controversial reforms and unfulfilled promises. His answer has been deliberately modest: jobs, health, homes, some cost-of-living relief, and careful management of expectations. Labour wants the election to be a judgment on National, not a referendum on an ambitious new Labour programme.
The oddity is the mismatch between this caution and the size of the problems in New Zealand at the moment. Housing affordability, infrastructure, weak productivity, strained health services, power prices, an ageing population and the continuing departure of young New Zealanders are hardly minor administrative matters. Boring politicians are not the problem. Sometimes they are exactly what a country needs. But the politics feels unusually tentative for the circumstances.
The paywall starts here. Paid subscribers can continue for the Hyperpolitics argument, what the polls really suggest about disengagement, and who might benefit from an increasingly fragmented political system.