Jo Moir
Wellington, October 10, 2022
Saturday’s (October 8, 2022) win for centre-right Mayors does not seal the deal for National at next year’s general election but sends a big wake-up call to Labour.
Local government election results for the left and right ebb and flow as much as the general elections do, and more often than not they are not in sync with each other.
Helen Clark’s Prime Ministership saw her having to work with John Banks as Auckland Mayor while John Key’s time in power coincided with Len Brown and Phil Goff in the job.
Wayne Brown overwhelmingly defeated Labour-endorsed Efeso Collins and Mayoralties held by the left swung right in Rotorua, Whanganui, Christchurch and Dunedin as well.
It has been a long and miserable winter for many in New Zealand dealing with the Covid hangover, a cost-of-living crisis and gloomy economic forecasts ahead.
Some positives and negatives
You would be hard-pressed to find many in the 40% of eligible voters who bothered to fill out their ballot papers and were feeling optimistic about the state of the world or their own backyard.
For precisely that reason, the tide has always come in and out on political parties’ success at local government elections – sometimes people are just fed up and want something that looks and sounds different.
National will be celebrating the swing toward centre-right Mayors but with another 12 months until the general election, there is also time for some of the negativity and cynicism to subside.
National could yet also suffer some potential backlash over the urban housing intensification that its deal with Labour for a bipartisan law helped spawn – forcing Councils to accept multi-storey, dense residential buildings across their territories and making them argue for any limited exceptions.
The worrying trend for Labour
That does not mean Labour has nothing to worry about – messages would have been running hot between senior Cabinet Ministers over the weekend trying to get a read on what exactly that voters are sick of.
There will no doubt have been plenty of “you have got to be joking” messages exchanged in the Labour Caucus when the Wellington results revealed not only had sitting Labour MP Paul Eagle lost to a candidate even further to the left, but he had come fourth in a race he was tipped to win long before he even announced.
That result seems less about a message to Labour and more a clear signal sent to Eagle.
Green Party Co-Leader James Shaw has spoken before of the conditions needing to be right to bother to try to win a seat in a general election and the same can be applied to local government. The incumbent not standing is a strong starting point, yet the unknown Green Party-endorsed candidate, Tory Whanau, went up against Mayor Andy Foster and won – beating a Labour MP and former Deputy Mayor with a huge Wellington name recognition in the process.
Ardern criticised
Until a year ago, most of Wellington had no idea who Whanau was. The result is proof that either she ran a great campaign or Eagle basically did not run one at all – the answer is most likely both.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern left it until the final days of the campaign to publicly endorse Collins and Eagle, whom both ran as independents endorsed by Labour.
Given how little endorsement had been given to Eagle by his Labour Caucus in the lead-up to Saturday, Ms Ardern could have simply said nothing at all on the basis they were both running as independents.
Instead, she has been criticised for a half-hearted endorsement and now the embarrassingly big losses on both counts have allowed conclusions to be drawn as to what it says about her own star power.
To be fair, even those in Eagle’s own campaign team were starting to doubt his motivations and principles before voting even closed.
What the local government results do tell Labour is that some of their work programmes might be more hassle than they are worth in the next 12 months, especially if energetic centre-right Mayors ready to make their mark are fighting them at every turn.
Big projects, confused purpose
The Three Waters issue is becoming a headache for the Government, as co-governance and the RNZ-TVNZ merger are all seen as big projects with a confused purpose that has huge bill to come with them. Expect to see some backdown on at least two of them.
Strangely, Ms Ardern has never really made a case personally for any of them – it is like a repeat of the Cannabis Referendum in 2020, where she decided to leave it for the people to make up their own minds and ended up just leaving a vacuum for misinformation.
Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta has been carrying the can on the Three Waters challenge while Willie Jackson is bearing the weight of the Co-Governance and merger fallout.
Ms Ardern seems to have decided that she does not want to attach her political capital to any of them. On Three Waters, it is more likely that the government will look to just rip the band-aid off and ram the legislation through as quickly as possible.
The criticism from Councils is often coming from a place of self-interest depending on what part of the country you are in and the debate has become more about representation (the co-governance issue) than the actual mechanics of it all.
Much as former Prime Minister Sir John Key did with selling off parts of State-Owned Enterprises despite a huge public backlash, he pushed on in 2013 and by the time it came to the election in 2014, voters had forgotten and overwhelmingly returned National to power.
The quicker the current government deals with Three Waters the further back in people’s memories it will be when the election rolls around next year.
There is a summer between now and the election, which will include fully open borders, international travel and the entertainments of old – remember festivals?
Summer before the General Election
It was Covid that won Labour the election in 2020 and an ironic twist it seems like the hangovers of the pandemic could be the thing that stands between Ardern and a third term.
Wellington’s Mayoralty race is a lesson for National and Labour in what to do as much as what not to do. National will be looking to take a leaf out of Whanau’s book and hope an unknown Luxon can resonate with voters and run a winning campaign.
Labour cannot afford to be complacent, or arrogant, and needs to work out exactly what it is selling to the electorate if it wants to avoid a defeat of Eagle-sized proportions.
Jo Moir is Political Editor at Newsroom based in Wellington. The above article, which appeared on the Newsroom website on October 10, 2022, has been published here under a Special Agreement.
Photo Caption:
Jacinda Ardern’s endorsement of Wellington Mayoral candidate Paul Eagle did not do anything to help him, but Eagle’s devastating loss seems to be less about Labour and more about him (Newsroom Photo by Lynn Grieveson).
