Opinion polls throughout New Zealand Prime Minister John Key’s first term in Parliament have consistently shown him to be the country’s most popular prime minister ever. That popularity has been translated into victory putting him and the National Party back in Parliament for the second time after last week’s election.
The party polled a record percentage of votes but narrowly missed the chance to be able to govern alone – one of the most difficult things to achieve in the country’s rather complex MMP (Mixed Member Proportional) electoral system.
But with the help of long time minor party allies ACT and United Future, both having just about won the election in greatly depleted numbers (these minor parties have been able to muster just a single MP each, just about avoiding political oblivion), Key’s National Party was able to fend off even the remotest possibility by all other parties to come together and propose an alternative.
With an increased share of vote, National improved its position over the 2008 poll and its leadership is undoubtedly relieved that it has ended up in a far stronger position than what many of the political commentators had predicted. Its biggest fear would have been to preside over an inherently unstable government, supported by a ragtag coalition of disparate interests and agendas.
Utterly decimated in the election was the Labour Party, which polled its lowest ever share of votes (just over 27 per cent against predictions of at least 30 per cent) in its entire 95 year history. Labour has been on a decline after Helen Clark lost the 2008 elections and left the party and the country to head the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in New York. It garnered just 34 seats against National’s 60, losing as many as nine. It lost some of its best parliamentarians in the process.
Among other loyal groups, Labour has traditionally drawn its support from a large number of immigrants living in New Zealand – particularly the electoral constituencies around southern and western Auckland. While it is not known exactly which way immigrants cast their votes, it is suspected that significant numbers simply stayed home or voted for the Green Party.
The big surprises of the election were the rise and rise of the Green Party (winning 13 seats and taking their share of votes for the first time to over 10 per cent) and the resurrection from the grave of Winston Peters’ New Zealand First Party (8 seats; 6.8 per cent). It is unlikely that the immigrants’ vote went to the nationalist and one time strongly anti-immigrant Peters in any significant numbers. The party did have an Indian candidate in the race, though. Reams will be written on how it managed this stunning victory in the coming weeks and months.
As many pundits had expected, the Maori Party was affected because of the twin effects of resentment by a sizable number of people who seemed against the party’s support of the centre-right National Party in the first term. The second reason was a split in the party because of the formation of the Mana Party, which managed to win a single seat.
National and the Maori Party are in talks for working together. Logically, the Maori Party should support National because, even for the sake of argument, if it supports a grand left-led alliance (including New Zealand First), there is no way such an alliance could muster numbers enough to govern. So it is quite likely that the Maori Party will end up supporting National because it is the only thing it can do to ensure its survival.
Difficult first term
A series of difficult situations have rocked National in its first term: the continuing global financial crisis, two devastating Christchurch earthquakes, the country’s worst mining disaster, growing unemployment, the flight of Kiwis across the Tasman to Australia and credit downgrades.
National’s main thrust throughout the campaign has been the economy: preventing the country going down the track of some troubled European nations. The country has already faced a couple of credit downgrades. Not reining in the ballooning debt was simply not an option. The party warned people if measures were not taken now, the pain would be far more severe later.
National’s panacea has been to sell down the government’s minority stakes in state owned enterprises, reform the welfare system, which costs the exchequer some $8 billion a year, reduce the size of government by combining departments and shedding extra staff numbers and controlling expenditure including rationalising aid programmes.
Despite a spirited performance in the final days of the campaign aided by media training, Phil Goff’s leadership of Labour failed to cut mustard. Clearly, the New Zealand voter rejected the party’s economic policy package, which essentially looked at borrowing even more in the short term to set the economy right. It also got its figures wrong during the campaign and was not able to substantiate its proposals with tallying figures.
National’s proposals were far from populist. In fact not too many political parties would go into an election with an agenda that talks about cutting budgets and introducing measures that will rationalise welfare and reduce government spending in non-priority areas, as well as reducing the size of government.
But the New Zealand voter seemed to go with its view whole-heartedly, despite Labour’s intense scare mongering of foreign ownership of New Zealand assets if SOEs were diluted.
Labour’s desperation
Labour’s desperation was also seen from news reports that it dropped leaflets to vulnerable mothers-to-be that under National, they would not be around to see their child’s first birthday because of cuts to the welfare programme. Leaflets are reported to have also warned beneficiaries of the welfare system that under National they would lose their state-owned homes.
Tighter spending under National will mean rationalised international aid budgets. Aid to new projects will probably be assessed differently. The “fewer, longer, deeper” philosophy toward aid, which has been taking shape in the past couple of years, will probably get a further impetus.
This means that there will be smaller numbers of carefully selected projects that the programme will fund but those that are more likely to deliver results over a longer period of time. In other words, island neighbours will have to work harder at convincing the New Zealand government’s aid programme to fund their projects in future.
The turnout at the election was the lowest in a long time and experts are looking for reasons why the popularity of elections is declining, which indeed is a global phenomenon in recent years. Younger people around the world seem to be particularly averse to elections – perhaps the same disillusionment with the establishment, politics and big business that has resulted in the worldwide “occupy” movement.
Key’s biggest challenge in this second term will be to kick start the economy, stimulate investment, create jobs and stem the outflow of young New Zealanders across the ditch to Australia. It will be interesting to see how his new government balances cost cutting while stimulating the economy and getting out of debt by 2014, which has also been an election promise.
Meanwhile, at the time of writing Labour’s leadership is in disarray. Leader Phil Goff and his deputy Annette King have announced that they would step down on December 13 and a new leadership will be elected. No leader has been able to fill Helen Clark’s shoes since she left in 2008: three years later, there is no unanimity in the party on who should lead.
David Cunliffe and relative newcomer David Shearer are in the running for the top position but there are deep divisions between the supporters of the two men within the party. Labour neglected the leadership issue in 2008 and if it does so this time round as well, it will find the going even tougher in 2014.