New Zealand’s geology and culture are often at odds. Famously prone to earthquakes, the South Pacific nation has, nonetheless, a low-wattage, “she’ll be right” attitude to life that does not lend itself to political landslides, at least not since it adopted proportional representation three decades ago.
But it just got an electoral earthquake. Despite the wear and tear of holding power for three years, Jacinda Ardern has led her Labour Party to an astounding 49 per cent vote tally and an outright majority, consigning the opposition National Party to a mere quarter of the vote. It was a rout, a “blue bloodbath,” and a swing to an incumbent party for which there are few if any modern parallels.
Yet it is hardly the decisive left-wing victory that it might appear to the outside world. If the New Zealand Labour Party is on a journey, it is one in which some important paths have been firmly blocked off, their vistas disappearing from view, even as other ones open.
There is no argument that Ardern has, in some respects, profoundly changed the political landscape. Her compassionate response to last year’s terrorist attack on Christchurch Muslims, combined with her impressively competent handling of Covid-19, have shown that kindness is not a political weakness but in fact a virtue, a form of strength.
I summed up her emerging “ethos of kindness” in a profile for Prospect last year, and it is an approach which has now been thoroughly vindicated in narrow electoral terms, gaining her unparalleled trust among centre-right voters. It has also completely changed the tenor of New Zealand politics, at least for the present. She dominates the political scene, and can now carry the country with her on issues that might otherwise have seemed out of reach.
Free school lunches, currently being piloted in a handful of schools, will be rolled out to hundreds of thousands of children. So-called fair pay agreements will allow workers who win good terms with one employer to get those conditions spread right across their industry. New Zealand’s equivalent of council house building will be ramped up, minimum wages lifted, dirty rivers cleaned up.
Economical with radicalism
Few of these policies are especially innovative, though; many are already standard in countries like the UK. And it seems unlikely that Ardern will surpass them in the next three years, for the simple reason that she never campaigned on doing so. Labour’s 2020 manifesto was notable principally for its lack of ambition. Its biggest initiative to address child poverty, one of Ardern’s signature issues, was a pledge to increase the amount that beneficiaries can earn before their benefits are clawed back. Its headline climate change policy was—wait for it—to make the public bus fleet zero-emissions by 2035.
And it is on economic issues, long the left’s weak point, that Ardern’s limitations are most evident. Labour’s only tax change this term will be to raise the top income tax rate from 33 per cent to 39 per cent, a move that will at best raise hundreds of millions of dollars, not the billions required to address climate change and child poverty. On the campaign trail, even a desperately enfeebled National Party was able to goad Ardern into ruling out a wealth tax, a key policy plank for her former coalition partner, the left-wing Green Party. Ardern dismissed it not just for the next three years but for her political lifetime. And she has previously done the same thing for a capital gains tax, a policy that is part of the furniture in many developed countries.
Meanwhile, the public discussion about New Zealand’s modest levels of Covid-induced public debt, forecast to peak at around at 50 per cent of GDP, which—for comparison—is around half of the ratio the US and the UK are now looking at, is nonetheless dominated by the supposed need to slash borrowing.
Ardern has, in short, been unable—or unwilling—to change the conversation about tax, spending, the size of the state, and government’s role in the economy. When it comes to tax in particular, the impression is of a party left trying to govern in a constantly shrinking space.
Centre forward
These are the paths that are being closed off; at the same time, others have opened up. While Ardern has given way on economic issues, she has cleared space on many social ones. New Zealand’s antiquated abortion laws have finally been modernised, a change that the election entrenches.
She has also won—and won big, without having to give ground on the standard conservative issues—crime, “security,” immigration, welfare spending and the like—and in that sense, at least, offers a real-break with Third Way triangulators in the mode of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. And now freed from having to work with the conservative New Zealand First party, her other more populist former coalition partner, Ardern may in fact take steps towards a gentler, more restorative approach to criminal justice issues. Tougher hate speech laws may also follow to protect minority groups.
In a wider sense, though, Ardern remains fundamentally cautious—progress will have to be forged through consensus rather than struggle, and will only be delivered in increments. Disdaining even the term “progressive,” she will govern from the centre, aiming to hold onto as many of those newly won centre-right voters as possible and hoping that, by gradually acclimatising them to change, she might win a mandate for slightly firmer steps in 2023. A plan that will only work if nothing trips her up between this rare moment of opportunity, and then.
Some landslides, in short, remake the landscape only gradually, if at all.
