Peter Dunne
Wellington, August 10, 2022
Speculation that the Prime Minister’s leadership of the Labour Party may be at risk because of this week’s adverse poll results is as exaggerated as it is premature and facile.
While her popularity has plummeted from the artificially stellar heights of a couple of years ago and is probably set to fall further to what would be a more realistic assessment, she remains the country’s most popular politician and preferred Prime Minister by a comfortable margin. Nor is there any obvious and credible replacement for her emerging yet within Labour’s ranks. None of the names that get idly mentioned from time to time as possible replacements, should the need arise, has any real public appeal, nor looks capable of leading Labour to an election victory.
Polarising Prime Minister
Nevertheless, the Prime Minister’s leadership is not without fault, as the sharp and steady decline in her opinion poll rating shows. She is becoming an increasingly polarising figure as the gap between her “aspirational” approach to politics, as demonstrated in her recent testy interview with Jack Tame on Q&A demonstrated, and the practical achievements of her government grow ever wider.
That should hardly be a surprise though. The Prime Minister made outlandishly extravagant political promises in the lead-up to the 2017 election, which any government would have struggled to get close to fulfilling in even the most normal of circumstances, let alone in the most severe pandemic the world has known in modern times.
Indeed, it is increasingly overlooked that until the outbreak of Covid-19 in New Zealand the polls were showing the government was on track to be the first one-term government since the third Labour government of the early 1970s. It was only the outbreak of the pandemic and the government’s response to it that saved her government from being held to account at the last election for over-promising and under-delivering.
Public confidence dives
In those circumstances, it was inevitable that the government’s and the Prime Minister’s ratings would start to take a massive hit once the country began to move on from the artificial environment and restrictions of the pandemic and return to something approaching normality. The remarkable aspect is not that it has happened, but that it has taken so long to occur. In part, this is due to residual support for the Prime Minister from the heady early days of the Covid-19 response, but it is more strongly and immediately due to the woeful performance of the National Party, even now still stumbling to get back on an even and reliable political keel.
A repeat of the 2020 election landslide next year now seems completely out of the question for Labour. Even the Party’s pollster is acknowledging that getting Labour’s support back into the back mid-40% range is going to be difficult and that the Party’s best chance of remaining in government lies with a combination with the Greens and possibly Te Pati Māori getting enough seats to be able to put together a government after next year’s election.
It is a grim situation for Labour with a third or more of its current list and electorate MPs now facing defeat next year.
Replacement is not an option
While it is natural and predictable that those increasingly endangered MPs might be looking around for a way of bolstering their chances of re-election, replacing the Leader cannot be a serious option for them to consider.
The recent experience alone of the National Party in hurriedly changing its Leader just before an election shows that would be an extremely unwise option to entertain. The Prime Minister’s popularity may currently be falling faster than that of her Party, and no matter unflattering Labour may find the comparison, it is worth remembering that Sir Robert Muldoon, who was considerably more unpopular than Jacinda Ardern, won against the odds re-elections in 1978 and 1981, albeit under the First-Past-the-Post system.
There is also the example of 1990 when Prime Minister Geoffrey Palmer was forced aside by Mike Moore just eight weeks before the election, on the grounds that he could save more Labour seats in what was looming as a massive defeat. In the event, Labour probably did slightly worse under Moore than it would have done under Palmer.
While the Prime Minister achieved a dramatic turnaround in Labour’s fortunes after taking over as Party Leader a few weeks before the 2017 election, she did so as Opposition Leader, not Prime Minister. Indeed, the last Leader to take over as Prime Minister during a term and win the next election was Peter Fraser in the 1940s, in the middle of the Second World War.
No indication from Ardern
The political situation is difficult for Labour right now, and may well be becoming terminal, although it is still too early to make that prediction with any degree of certainty. What is clear, however, in these circumstances is that they are a test of the Prime Minister’s leadership in just the same way the advent of the pandemic and the aftermath of the Mosque shootings were in earlier years. The Prime Minister has given no hint that she is about to walk away from all this, just because the challenge has got a lot tougher, and nor should she.
Many things have been said and written about the Prime Minister since she came to office. Some of it has been excessively sycophantic, some of it has been widely inaccurate, and some has been accurate and justified. Whatever else may have been said or written about her, she has never been accused of lacking determination.
As Labour faces its biggest mountain, Ardern well knows that she remains the Party’s best chance of conquering it and that to give up now would be to consign her Party to certain defeat. She does not appear to be that selfish.
So, those who gleefully speculate upon her imminent departure seem set to be disappointed. The Prime Minister will go when the electorate tells her to, and not before.
Peter Dunne is a former Minister of the Crown under the Labour and National-led governments from December 1999 to September 2017. He lives in Wellington and writes a weekly column on current affairs.
