Hello again! A good old fashioned long post full of charts today as I prepare to head home.

National have not had a good winter. Two years from entering Government with close to 40% of the vote they are now sitting far closer to 30% in most polls, save for the 1 News/Verian which sees them bobbing about at 34%. This is not a catastrophic drop, not the kind of massive tide going out that Labour saw between 2020 and 2023, but for a first term Government it is a rare thing.

These voters will be heading off into a variety of directions. NZ First seem to be polling very well. Some may have fallen into vast sea of “don’t knows”. But some do seem to be switching back to Labour, who are now polling about level with National, after losing to them by about 11 points in 2023.

Knowing exactly who these “swing” voters are is difficult. Polling companies do not publicly release that much demographic data, let alone rich questions on ideology and the like. But we do have something we can use as a bit of a proxy - the New Zealand Election Study (NZES) from the last election, which just put out its data publicly a few weeks ago.

The NZES is an incredibly detailed survey of almost 2000 voting-age adults carried out every election for decades. It surveys not just the voters but also the non-voters, validates their party votes, and asks them a dizzying array of questions, from their views on the woman’s place in the home to whether they have ever called in to talkback radio. It’s the best single set of data we have to understand New Zealand politics outside of election results themselves.

But we aren’t trying to understand the entire electorate here, we’re trying to understand the people who voted National in 2023 but are softening in their support. In other words - swing voters. Not the hardened supporters of a party but the people who float from left to right between elections.

A rough proxy for swing voters

The people in NZES were asked about their views just after the election, meaning we have no perfect notion of who has swung away from National since. But we can create a bit of a proxy by looking at people who voted for Labour in 2020 and National in 2023. Not all of these people will have switched away from National now and if they have they may have gone somewhere completely different. We also have to keep in mind that new voters turn 18 every day while others die. But this is a proxy I used in 2023 to look at Labour’s lost voters1, and it did seem to be a useful way of analysing a major party’s softest vote. After all, if you voted for National when it was doing terribly in 2020 and then again in 2023, you are probably a core National supporter unlikely to move anywhere other than to another party on the right. If, on the other hand, you voted for Labour in 2020 and then National in 2023, you are probably a lot more open for voting for Labour again in 2026.

Throughout this post I will be comparing this subset of voters to the general elector population - that’s not all New Zealanders, but it’s not just voters either, as it includes non-voters. We will call them “switchers” or “the swing vote” interchangeably. A note of caution here: Because this is a subset of a subset, the margin of error is significantly higher - close to double digits at 95% confidence. So do not treat the differences between the switchers and general voters as a perfect measure but more a general directional vibe - and if the difference is in the low single digits, it is probably just noise2.

These voters made up about a fifth of National’s total support in NZES. That may not sound like a lot, but losing it to Labour entirely would certainly be enough to lose the election, all else being equal.

So who are they?

A white woman in her 50s

Let’s start by looking at things demographically.

The typical switcher was a 56-year-old pākehā woman living in a house she owns.

This does not mean all switchers were woman or in their 50s, just that the median age was 56, and she was more likely to be a woman than a man - about 70% of these switchers were women. This puts the pay equity debate in stark relief.

As you can see from the above comparison of this “switcher” population and general electors, they came from all voting age groups - but are far more likely to be in their 50s than any other.

And as you can see above, the vast majority of switchers (about 84%) owned their own home, either with their mortgage paid off or with some still to go. When you consider how much of an issue interest rates were in 2023, this is unsurprising - and should be welcome news to National, who are pinning a lot of hope on keeping these voters by driving interest rates down.

There are other demographic lenses, but they don’t illustrate as stark a difference with the general population. Switchers were more likely to live in a large urban area than anywhere else - but so are all Kiwis these days, and the differences weren’t massive. Switchers were slightly less likely to have a professional job than the general elector - but not by a big margin. And they were more likely to be white than the wider voting population - but not by a gigantic margin, given most of the 18+ cohort are white. On income - well see below. These differences are not outside of the margin of error and largely track the general population.

In other words, outside of gender and homeownership, these swing voters or switchers track the general population fairly closely.

That’s brute level demography out of the way - now what do they actually think?

Centrists who were very worried about the economy

Let’s take a look at how these switchers think about politics and themselves.

First up is the very simple measure we have for measuring how people position themselves economically, with 0 being as far left as possible and 10 being as far right as possible.

As you can see, very few switchers describe themselves as left wing. But about half describe themselves as somewhere between 4 and 6 in the centre, a quarter or so see themselves firmly on the right, and the rest don’t know. After all, these ten point scales can be difficult to really match to the political priorities of actual people.

Before we dive into the issue-based questions, let’s talk personalities.

Christopher Luxon was leader of the National Party at the last election, and everyone in this group party voted National - so unsurprisingly they generally had a lot more time for him than the general population. But this was not the adoration that these same switchers in reverse had for Jacinda Ardern in 2020 - here’s my graph from back then looking at people who voted for National in 2017 but then Labour in 2020 (in pink).

As you can see, Ardern had far higher favourability but with the general public (just 6% strongly disliked her, compared to 21% for Luxon), and specifically with her newly-converted voters, with 41% giving her the maximum possible rating, compared to 8% of Luxon’s. But perhaps this is unsurprising - Ardern after all won MMP’s only ever majority in 2020, she was very very popular at this time.

Let’s move on to some other party leaders from 2023. Here’s Chippy.

In something of a surprise, Hipkins doesn’t do that terribly here. While plenty of switchers rate him unfavourably (38% give him a 0-4), more actually give him a positive rating (5-10) - although the are clustered in the lukewarm “5” area. Data like this gives some credence to the Labour Party strategists who are keen to keep Hipkins around. These voters all chose National at the election, yet a lot of them don’t seem to really hate Hipkins.

Let’s take a look at the two other leaders in the eventual coalition.

David Seymour gets a far better hearing from these switchers than Winston Peters does, with just over a quarter giving Seymour a negative rating compared to well over half disliking Peters - with many giving him the worst possible rating of 0.

Again, not the hugest surprise. Anyone voting for National in election 2023 knew that a coalition with ACT was the only way to power and had made their peace with that, but National teaming up with NZ First was still not a certainty at election day. Also, Peters has been in Parliament since before Seymour was born - people know him and have an opinion on him, whereas many of these swingers were still ticking “don’t know” on Seymour.

We can take a brief look at another party’s leader who is still around now - Marama Davidson3.

These aren’t great numbers for Davidson, but there is a big bunch of don’t knows. As Hipkins tries to win back these voters for a governing coalition that would have to involve Davidson, that may give him some hope.

Let’s get away from self-ratings and look at some actual issues. As everyone knows, it was a cost of living election fought as inflation raged. No one thought the economy was in a great place in late 2023. But these swing voters really didn’t like where it was.

As you can see, most Kiwis agreed the economy was getting worse. But these swingers were far more likely to think it had got a lot worse. We also know that this impacted their vote more than it did for others - 80% of switchers said the economy or inflation impacted their vote “a great deal”, compared to 69% of general electors.

Economic issues were inextricable from Covid-19 at the time, the issue that had won Labour such a big mandate in 2020 but had devolved into huge protests against vaccination and lockdowns by 2022.

Switchers were not anti-vaxxers. Just 2% told the NZES they hadn’t been vaccinated against Covid-19, compared to 5% of the wider sample. And when asked about how they felt about the general Covid response their answers were a real mix, but largely tracked the general population - being somewhat less likely to say they were either disgusted or proud of the response. These voters were not on the lawn at Parliament, and it is unlikely they will be following the news on the inquiry very closely.

What about policy issues?

At base, these voters appear to be right-leaning centrists economically and left-leaning centrists socially, until you mention the Treaty.

For example, they generally match the regular population in strongly disagreeing with the statement “Abortion is always wrong”.

But if you ask them whether the Treaty settlement process has gone too far or not far enough, they are very unlikely to say “not far enough”.

On wider spending issues, they are much like many Kiwis in generally wanting spending on general social services like Health to rise, or at least stay the same.

Similarly for law enforcement, where their results basically match the general population.

But when you move away from services and ask about the benefits system a larger difference emerges.

A slight majority want less spending on benefits overall, and this difference can also be seen if you ask the question from a more philosophical standpoint.

As you can see above, switchers are far less likely to strongly agree (and far more likely to “somewhat” disagree) with the more egalitarian proposition that income differences are too large.

Part of me wants to dive down into more issue-based questions here. But another part of me remembers that most voters do not follow politics as closely as the median Museum Street reader. And the data bears this out for switcher - they are generally less interested in politics than the wider population.

Committed partisans are generally the most interested in politics and we are explicitly not looking at committed partisans. That doesn’t mean these voters are rubes briefly looking away from Celebrity Treasure Island at the news once every three years before casting their votes - but it does mean that the ins and outs of policy debates on say, the Regulatory Standards Bill, are probably not front of mind for them.

Seducing the swingers

There is no perfect formula for winning over voters like these. 2020 was a high water mark for Labour it likely won’t reach again - meaning a certain proportion of these voters lost to National will probably never come back. But MMP elections are fought over very close margins and while Labour would love to win back votes from the Green Party, nothing will bolster their governing chances more than winning back votes from the other side.

Current polling suggests National are having a lot of trouble keeping hold of these voters. This isn’t too much of a surprise when you take a look at how much the economy mattered to their vote in 2023, and how little the general economic picture has improved. There is good news if you look for it, and the prospect of mortgage rates coming down could help National a lot, but we are not there yet, and Luxon has had a tricky time of convincing voters that we are on our way there. This may sound rosy for Labour, but its current strength is clearly very reliant on the economy staying in the toilet and the party being a bit of a blank slate. By election time the economy could have changed a lot - and Labour will have to tell these swing voters what it would actually do differently, a change that is likely to involve some kind of taxation on property. That could be very difficult to sell to these voters - to really swing, you need a set of house keys.

This will probably be my last political post for a while as I settle back into my new job at The Post, which I start in early September. Do look out for my work there - there’s going to be a lot more of it than I ever managed on this newsletter! But I do hope to return for various bits of writing that don’t quite fit anywhere else.

Hello from Cyprus, a country divided into three different sovereignties : British-controlled military bases only kept alive with US funding, the disputed northern area only recognised by Turkey, and the larger Greek republic recognised by everyone else.

I’m here on holiday but one can’t help but be reminded in a place like this of just how uncomplicated little old New Zealand is. Cyprus too is a small former British colony a long way from the UK - but its journey to independence has been about as different as you can possibly imagine.

It’s also been a reminder of how even extraordinary political situations often become normalised over time, as the abject and unusual become everyday status quo. We passed over into Northern Cyprus with our passports the other day in Nicosia, into a disputed state over a “green line” that has been controlled by the UN for decades, and it felt like getting carded on your way into a club: Easy, routine, boring for everyone involved. After long enough people just find ways to work with this stuff, whether it be the 71-year-old temporary ceasefire in Korea or the enclave of West Berlin surrounded by the East.

Yet this status quo hides latent tensions which build up during these extraordinary/ordinary times. Eventually the Berlin Wall came down. For decades it was the fact on the ground that seemed impossible to displace - then with a few words in a press conference it was gone.

Jacinda Ardern governed through some truly extraordinary times. There was no disputed international borders, but there was a border placed on Auckland, complete with police checkpoints, something almost impossible to imagine in 2019. For a while all these emergency measures seemed, while not quite normal, not entirely alien either. They mostly polled extraordinarily well. But behind it all there was a latent tension building up - one that would explode onto Parliament in early 2022, and still fills some Kiwis with rage.

I’ve been thinking about Ardern lately as I was lucky enough to get an advance copy of her book - which I reviewed in The Listener. Long story short I think it is worth your time, as it does give you some insight into her mind during some extraordinary crises, and given Jenny Shipley, Helen Clark, John Key, and Bill English have all refused to write memoirs we should be somewhat happy with any PM that does. It is also deeply frustrating in how much it elides, in how much it doesn’t confront. There is not a true reckoning with how the pandemic response eventually became more and more arbitrary, or the way it radicalised a sizeable minority of the public. There is very little on her really thinking through how much of her project has been undone in swift succession by the new National Government, a fate that did not befall the achievements of the Fifth Labour Government.

In the review, I offered a small thesis on what exactly “Ardernism” was, this “Different Kind of Power” promised in the title.

This intimacy is crucial to the wider point Ardern is trying to make in the book: that she wants people to know they can be politicians while still doubting themselves, can be humans first and politicians second, and that indeed the first job will make them better at the second job. This is the closest thing to a one-sentence summation of Ardernism she ever really offers.

Ardernism was always more a sensibility than an ideology. It was a way of looking at the world and reacting to it, not a theory of change. It was being good in a crisis – and she really was. Reading about those fraught days in March of 2019 and 2020 again from her perspective is clarifying. Ardern was able to reach into a reserve of something in those two horrible months that few of our leaders ever have, a kind of pure political power that transcended the office and represented exactly what Kiwis like about our country, not just empathy and warmth but an organised resolve.

I think it is fair to say that Ardern’s ability to seem like a normal millennial women was a huge part of both her appeal for many and her repulsiveness for others. It was easy to see yourself in her - or see someone grossly unqualified for the job, someone who was always talking about her personal life1 and not the real business of governing. To be fair, any prime minister will suffer some degree of horrible personal attacks, and it seems women of any stripe get the worst of it. But it is also fair to say that Ardern being so clearly the driving force of the Government with her daily press conferences meant it was inevitable that principled attacks on the Government’s position often include serious criticism of her as a person. She was not a leading soldier in Labour’s army - she was Labour. Her departure and the party’s idling in neutral ever since make this more clear than ever.

And as the personal embodiment of New Zealand’s oldest political party she did not appear to have what it took to drive lasting change. Some of her legacy does remain - Best Start exists in some form, abortion is legalised, the Winter Energy Payments are still there, and the Zero Carbon Act is the law of the land. But there is a reason she spends so much of the book on her responses to crises: they will be what she is remembered for - both here and abroad.

It is the “abroad” part that leaves a bit of a bad taste in the mouth. The book is understandably written for a foreign audience - she translates “waka” and talks about being in her “junior year” of high school. Ardern did glitzy sitdown interviews with foreign media but relatively few with anyone in New Zealand. And when I wrote the review there was no book tour dates announced for New Zealand, although her people assure me she will be visiting.

While it is commercially absolutely understandable for Ardern to write for Americans and Brits inspired by her, it is frustrating in how much it clearly holds her back from really getting into the nitty gritty of some of the policy debates.

Perhaps it suffered because I read it just after another political memoir: Making A Difference by Ruth Richardson.

Richardson's book was also written a few years after she left power. But unlike Ardern she is very keen to put down the exact detail of many policy debates she was involved in, debates that still shape the country now, and offer a robust defence of them. She is keen to talk about how she changed the country, how she was stopped from changing it more by the timidity of her colleagues, and how she worked to embed that change in stone with the Fiscal Responsibility Act. Indeed, she prints the entire bill at the end of the book.

Ardern and Richardson are diametrically opposed politicians - but both were at some points in their life eager to seriously change the country. Richardson managed to, and spends her book explaining exactly how. It’s not quite clear yet if Ardern ever did.

Some professional news

Ardern’s legacy is not a topic that I am done writing about, but I am short on time and have some professional news I wanted to share here: I will be returning to Parliament in September to take up the role of deputy political reporter at The Post.

I am very excited to be a full-time political reporter again. I’ve been working in PR full-time in London for the last three years, and as you can probably tell from the fact that this newsletter exists, missing reporting a lot. I worked at Stuff for a decade before leaving for the UK so it feels a lot like returning to my home two times over.

What will it mean for this newsletter? Obviously once I start at The Post I will doing my full-time reporting and analysing and what not for them - so if you enjoy my work, do consider a subscription. But every now and then I’m sure I will have some topic far too esoteric or piece too long-winded to really make sense there, so do expect pieces from time to time. This newsletter has been far too much fun for me to simply drop now that I have a job again.

And until September, I’m running around Europe doing a bit of a freelancing and a bit of holidaying. So I’m sure we will talk many times before then. Thanks as ever for reading and subscribing - it really has been so much fun connecting with the readers of this newsletter, who engage properly with the content rather than just getting angry at the headline2. You are far too good of an audience to throw away, so I am sorry that I have written so rarely. Yamas!

Christopher Luxon is not having a good year.

The Christmas season kicked off with the confirmation that New Zealand had been suffering a serious recession in 2024, all ahead of a potential global downturn as a new US Government blows up everything it can. In early February the unemployment rate ticked up over a symbolically important 5.1%, while the new school lunch program provided a rolling maul of nasty headlines. Then a few weeks later his minister Andrew Bayly resigned after grabbing a staffer’s shoulder, a story that could have been cleaned up in a few days but dragged on for far longer thanks to his own inability to sound normal about it in an interview.

And behind all of it the polls shifted. The last 1 News/Verian poll of 2024 still had National way up at 37% support, eight points ahead of Labour. It’s February poll had them essentially tied, with National at 34% and Labour at 33% - and the left bloc actually ahead. Meanwhile the more frequent Taxpayers Union/Curia poll had Labour a nose ahead in January and March, with Christopher Hipkins clearing Luxon for preferred Prime Minister in the latest numbers.

If we are to trust the polls, Luxon appears to be a net negative for his party. His net approval rating was -10% in the March Curia poll, compared to +4% for Hipkins, and his preferred Prime Ministerial rating is just 20.3% - well below the 33.6% support for the National Party itself. Some difference between the party vote figure and the preferred PM figure aren’t that strange, but this is a wide gulf - in this same poll at the same point in the last term Jacinda Ardern enjoyed 38.7% in the preferred PM stakes with Labour winning just 36.2% of the party vote. Luxon has never risen above the 35% preferred PM mark while serving as Prime Minister; John Key in his eight years as Prime Minister never fell below it. This has all sparked the usual news and social media rumblings about his future.

It’s certainly not hard to imagine the National Party climbing out of this hole with a new face in charge. Many of its senior ministers are accomplished performers in the media who seem to be getting stuff done in their departments too, with Erica Stanford, Simeon Brown, and Chris Bishop’s stars shining particularly bright.

But leadership changes have serious transaction costs, especially in Government, and exceptionally when in Government with Winston Peters.

Jenny Shipley’s ousting of Jim Bolger in 1997 really is the best comparator here for a potential coup - given John Key resigned of his own accord and all the other psychodramas1 happened in opposition. Shipley did manage a few months of good polling, but then her coalition with NZ First fell apart, and Helen Clark ran off with a solid victory for the left. Peters had made a deal with Jim Bolger, his old National MP colleague from the 1970s and 1980s, not Shipley.

This is all history that the best minds in the National Party know intimately.

And even if some kind of deal with Winston (and David!) could be sown up, the transaction costs for a hostile coup remain formidably high. Anyone who moves will create weeks of nasty headlines for the Government and may not even win, instead simply destroying their own career for no reason. (Wielding the knife is a dangerous game - Peter Dutton almost became Prime Minister of Australia back in 2018 after openly challenging Malcolm Turnbull, but Scott Morrison ended up winning the subsequent leadership election.) Even if you do win the image the public gets is of a party in turmoil, a party focused on itself when it is supposed to be running the country. So barring a sudden resignation that looks like no one’s fault, which is incredibly unlikely, it is very hard to imagine anyone else leading the National Party any time soon.

What is easy to imagine is why the public are fed up: the economy sucks. Everything still seems very expensive compared to those halcyon pre-pandemic days, as lower inflation of course does nothing to wipe out the years of inflation already baked in. While interest rates are coming down, the average rate across all mortgages is still 6.29%, and council rates in many parts of the country have shot up massively. There’s a recession and even with huge numbers of people using the exit valve of Australia unemployment is at an uncomfortable level. Meanwhile the political messaging from National about all the things it is trying to do to stimulate growth is often drowned out by populist antics from its coalition partners, desperate to maintain their place at the top of news bulletins and in the hearts of people who wake up every day thinking about wokeness.

Luckily for National, they do have some time. The Reserve Bank is going to keep lowering interest rates, and perhaps some of their reforms to immigration and planning policy will bear some immediate fruit. But it has to happen a long while before the next election. The public give you a year or so of blaming the other guys for every problem under the sun. But not three.

Recommended reading:

• This deep dive on how ‘manosphere’ media figure Dave Portnoy mostly just reviews pizzas now is fantastic, and illuminates a lot about what makes this type of media the norm for many people.

• Incredible diary extracts from the last Tory Government whip (The Times, £).

• A lovely read from Anna Rankin on Whangamōmona.

• I’ve been enjoying Get In, the definitive book (for now!) on how Labour won power in the UK while being in a near-constant war with itself.

• Adam Tooze on how American global leadership has rarely been plain sailing.

New Zealand is not at its best right now.

I write this from afar so I have to rely on brutal headline indicators and the testimony of my friends and family. Unemployment popped up over 5% in the final quarter of last year, with one in ten Pacifica people out of a job and close to 100,000 young people not in education, training, or work. High interest rates and falling house prices have made more secure people feel far poorer. Those able to are leaving the country in record numbers. All this unsurprising as Aotearoa was in a serious recession last year - the worst six-month decline in GDP since 19911.

Wait a minute. 1991? Stop me if this sounds familiar:

• A Labour Government faces a tough election year after two terms in office, opting to change its leader at the last minute but not getting anywhere near retaining power. Said leader stays on as few really think the loss is his fault or want the job right away.

• Interest rates are incredibly high to deal with a very serious inflation spike.

• Unemployment is high and the economy is going backwards.

• The incoming National Government faces an immediate perceived need to cut Government spending as Treasury forecasts widening deficits.

These are the broad outlines of both the 1990 election and the 2023 one, and if you look under the hood the comparisons never really end. “TV3” was in serious financial trouble in 1990, entering receivership at one point. Talk of a referendum on a four year term was bouncing around. Petrol prices were high as turmoil roiled the Middle East. There was a big debate about cutting Government spending on a single ship purchase.

Many familiar faces were there. Winston Peters was causing no end of mischief, consistently critiquing National in his last election fought under that party’s banner. Phil Goff was a leading young minister and key ally of the Labour right, while Helen Clark was threading a very different path towards the centre left. Don Brash was just getting started on his very long term as the Governor of the Reserve Bank.

It’s not a perfect match. Things were a lot worse in the early 1990s.

Here’s a look at unemployment, using the first quarter of 1987 and 2020 as our basis. As you can see we start at a similar point - but the 1990s recession hurt Kiwi workers a lot more. Interest rates were in the teens, not the single digits. The country’s books were in a worse shape in general, giving Richardson far more ammo. Servicing Government debt cost a whopping 6.3% of GDP in 1990, compared to 1.7% in 2023.

This led to cuts undertaken by Ruth Richardson that were on an entirely different level to those ever contemplated by Nicola Willis. Willis has effectively cut benefit rates in the future by indexing them to price inflation instead of wage inflation; Richardson just straight up slashed them. Willis has changed the parameters for fees free university; Richardson allowed universities to set whatever fees they liked. Willis is looking to save money in health; Richardson looked to directly introduce a profit motive, with her Government at one point suggesting a $50 free for overnight hospital stays.

Richardson’s many cuts saw Government spending shrink from 39.9% of the economy in 1991 to 37.1% in 1993 - which might not sound like a lot, but is quite a bit to manage in two years with spending of this magnitude. Willis is forecast to manage a trim from 33.6% in 2024 to 33.3% in 2026 - a cut of 0.3 percentage points compared to the 2.8 percentage points Richardson achieved2.

And it wasn’t just spending - National also gutted unions with the Employment Contracts Act in the 1990-1993 term, a law change so sweeping that there is still a lively debate in union circles about whether or not they should have undertaken a general strike. Brooke Van Velden is doing a lot to give more power to employers right now, but she has a lot less room to move than Richardson and Bill Birch did, as key parts of the the Employment Contracts Act remain in place.

Richardson earned more of a backlash than Willis and Luxon have ever managed. At this point in the 1990-1993 cycle, Labour was about ten points clear of National in the polls, as opposed to the single point they appear to be ahead by currently. Richardson required security help from the Diplomatic Protection Squad. And yet National won in 1993.

The 1993 election is one of the most intriguing in modern New Zealand history. National won just 7100 more votes than Labour, with neither party managing to get much more than a third of the vote, an amazing result in any election, but particularly one under the First Past the Post system that had largely locked any other party from winning any seats. These two titans of postwar politics, who had both undertaken vigorous reform programs while many voters looked on aghast, seemed utterly spent forces.

And best of all for voters who hated both of them, they had a way to show it - the MMP referendum held alongside the election. This referendum would create an entirely new world of coalitions and party votes and ways for voters to say not just that they didn’t like the Government, but that they didn’t like the Government in a specific way. Minor parties were already springing up everywhere, even before the system that would make their continued relevance possible, with Jim Anderton winning almost a fifth of the total vote for his left-wing Alliance and Peters making a strong showing in the first general election outing for NZ First.

As Helen Clark told me for my MMP series in Stuff they “they wanted to put a ball and chain around politicians’ ankles.” We are in very many ways still living in the world that those three years at the start of the 1990s created3.

But what does this mean for the next election?

It’s very hard to tell. Under MMP Labour’s 1993 results would probably have seen them lead the Government. But as we have canvassed, there are major differences between our two eras, and it is very unclear if the backlash that is currently facing National will keep growing or peter out as interest rates drop and the economy (one hopes!) picks up. There is, if you are a National Party partisan, plenty of potential upside. National didn’t just scrape a win in 1993 - it actually managed to retain most of its vote in 1996, giving it the chance to lead government for another three years.

Outside of electoral politics, I wonder what might happen if we see discontent build to the level it did in the 1990s without the outlet of the MMP referendum and subsequent humiliation of the political class. A referendum on a four year term gives one a far weaker avenue of telling the politicians you hate all of them. Where that energy go instead?

Recommended reading:

• If you are interested in this period outside of our little country, When The Clock Broke by is a fantastic book about American politics in the early 1990s.

• I’m about to finish The Collapse of the Third Republic by William Shirer, a clear and engaging account of the fall of France in 1930 and all that led into it. You will learn a lot about coalition politics in a very different milieu.

• This exceedingly well-written FT profile of Peter Mandelson, dark prince of Blairism and new UK ambassador to the US. To his credit, George Parker asks Mandelson a question he very clearly did not want to be asked.

Shane Reti - or “Doctor Shane” as Judith Collins would always call him - is a lovely man.

The first time we had a proper interview he spent about 10 minutes explaining his mission to build a Hundertwassser Art Centre in Whangārei, which had nothing at all to do with the story I was there to talk about, and then whipped out a whiteboard to explain the interview subject. I forget the details of the story itself, but I remember his manner easily endearing him to me, as one would expect of any decent GP.

But a good bedside manner does not make you a good minister. And experience within a field does not necessarily make you well-suited to run it.

Reti was demoted out of the health portfolio and kitchen cabinet by Christopher Luxon today, amid some very poor polling for National and widespread reports that the healthcare system is not in fact able to save much money without any cuts impacting frontline services. Whether the problems in health can really be placed on Reti’s door is not an easy question to answer: he’s not the one holding the purse strings, or the one who created an integrated jobs market with the richer country of Australia, or responsible for the fact that our population is getting older, and new ways of helping them do so at greater comfort cost a lot of money.

Then, it is hard to say that there is nothing Reti could have done better. He has not exuded ministerial confidence. He has not managed to get much of the sector onside, or paint a compelling vision of where it is going. And he is surely somewhat culpable in the Pharmac debacle at the last budget - which saw his Finance Minister eventually forced to spend $604m of this year’s budget last year, twice what she had committed in the election campaign.

Reti’s fall can seem surprising given his successful career on the pointy end of the health system as a GP in a deprived area. Shouldn’t that experience have made him just the man to shepherd through National’s program here? Well, no.

The first problem is with the specifics of the Reti case. Being a good GP involves being good at medicine and at running a small business. These skills may well be useful for being a minister of health, but they are not directly related in the way you might think. Knowing how to take someone’s blood pressure1 is not particularly useful when you are managing a budget in the tens of billions of dollars and the union boss across from you is threatening to strike, or indeed, your old peak body is demanding more money2. The problem is one of scale: As a GP it is normal to spend a lot of time caring for a single family, as minister you have to allocate resources so that the health of five million Kiwis is looked after.

(There is also a very small country tension you get from actually knowing people in the sector you have to regulate. You could well have to declare so many conflicts of interest that you lose a lot of crucial “delegations” - roles, essentially - to your associate. Or of course you risk a corruption allegation.)

The second problem, and I think the real core of the matter, is that past careers have a very limited value as a frame for political analysis.

Sometimes, they are the main recommendation for a new MP on their way to power - did you know this guy used to run Air NZ? More often they are whipped out only in the negative as a boring partisan attack on MPs whose main job before politics was other politics, such as the absurd attacks on Jacinda Ardern’s teenage job at a Fish and Chip store.

But really, a career largely in politics can lead to you being an incredibly successful politician. Helen Clark and Bill English spent most of their professional lives as politicians before becoming Prime Minister, with English doing a stint at Treasury and Clark working as as lecturer in their 20s before election to Parliament at the dawn of their 30s. They were both incredibly consequential and successful politicians.

You could say the same about Chris Bishop, who worked for politicians and then as a lobbyist before entering Parliament, or Chris Hipkins, etc etc etc. The list of successful politicians who have never done much not related to politics is long and bipartisan, and can be extended to world-changing politicians like FDR.

This shouldn’t be surprising - getting things done in Wellington is complicated. If you’ve been up close to others doing it for many years you will probably be better at it than someone whose only experience of Government is adversarial.

Conversely, there are plenty of people whose past careers do seem to have set them up well for the job of running a country or ministry. Dwight D Eisenhower’s experience in World War II as the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe was undoubtedly crucial to his successful presidency. John Key’s massive success in business set him up for massive success in politics. And it is clear that being a natural performer was crucial to the electoral success of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump.

There are also people with impressive success outside of politics who can’t really make it happen inside it, such as David Shearer. And there are people who have only ever worked in politics or Government who really do falter once they have a sniff of power - like Jami-Lee Ross. I am not sure there is really a particularly meaningful pattern one can draw here.

Politics is a skill in and of itself and most people don’t know if they are any good at it until they actually try. Subject matter expertise is certainly of great use, but a good minister doesn’t need to be down in the details, and if they are they may waste their precious time there. This doesn’t mean they should just outsource their brains to their policy officials, but they should be comfortable with knowing that some limit on their knowledge of the minutiae is sensible. Being comfortable with this, yet also being comfortable enough with your brief that you can engage in the really big questions, argue your side in Cabinet, swot down the Opposition in Question Time, and have a long back and fourth with a journalist, is the meat of being a good minister. I don’t think there is any “profession” that really lends itself to this.

And yet, when writing about politicians one needs some content to work with. And since most maiden speeches are anodyne and most modern MPs are terrified of saying anything interesting to a journalist about their beliefs, we naturally circle back to their former careers as something to pick over and analyse. It probably does matter. Just a lot less than you might think.

Margaret Thatcher used to love Prime Minister’s Questions.

If you’re not familiar, the UK Parliamentary system has a weekly procedure where the Prime Minister is subject to at least half an hour of sustained questions from the Commons. Thatcher wasn’t Prime Minister when the tradition got going but she did make a major decision that has lasted: opting not to transfer any of the questions to her cabinet colleagues, but instead taking every one head on - whether it was about foreign policy, health spending, monetary policy, anything.

As Tom Hamilton and Ayesha Hazarika argue in a fantastic book about the process, this allowed Thatcher to massively consolidate power within her own office at Number 10, rather than with Cabinet as a whole, because she suddenly had an excuse to be in every other minister’s business. After all - she could conceivably be asked about basically anything one of her ministry did, so she had to be briefed on those decisions and potentially offer input on them. Cabinet Government isn’t supposed to be quite that centralised, but PMQs gave her an excuse to make it that way.

Thatcher’s PMQ takeover came to mind while reading the Cabinet Circular1 taking the power to review Regulatory Impact Analyses (RIAs) away from Treasury and to David Seymour’s new Ministry for Regulation, released in the dying days of 2024.

If you’re not familiar, RIAs are bits of paperwork that Government departments have to produce before they do almost anything which, in an ideal world, make clear that what they are doing makes sense. Public servants have to identify what the actual issue being addressed is, detail the action to be undertaken, detail the risks inherent in the action, and compare it to the status quo (doing nothing!) and occasionally some other options. These papers are generally proactively released to the public, giving journalists and other sickos a deeper look at the thinking behind major decisions - whether that be public servants arguing against a political decision a minister has made, uncomfortable risks involved in the policy, or just a few roads not taken2.

Since the last National Government set up the modern RIA process Treasury have had a team whose job it was to assess the RIAs. This basically made sure that departments weren’t cutting corners in their analysis and also obviously gave some power to Treasury, who traditionally see it as their remit to both:

1. Stand somewhat apart from the Government of the day and speak uncomfortable truth to power when needed.

2. Stand in judgement of every other department and their spendthrift/squishy ways.

The new circular takes this power from the Treasury team and hands it to the new Ministry for Regulation.

Intuitively, this makes some sense. The Ministry for Regulation gets to regulate regulations!

But the circular also steps up the level of involvement of the new Ministry in the business of every other Government department, by pushing for earlier involvement in policymaking.

You can see this by comparing the new Cabinet Circular to the one it replaced, which was released in 2020. In 2020, it was recommended that agencies should get in touch with their quality assurance team early, before a regulatory proposal is even developed:

The Treasury’s Regulatory Quality Team and the relevant Treasury policy team will provide feedback on these areas at the request of the agency policy team. This feedback is most effectively provided in the early stages of policy development – for example, during the planning of a consultation exercise or the drafting of a discussion document, which may eventually lead to a regulatory proposal […]

It is strongly recommended that agencies seek this feedback, including from their own Quality Assurance panel or specialist. [Emphasis mine.]

While in the new circular, it is mandated:

government agencies are to contact the Ministry for Regulation as soon as possible after policy work commences on an issue that may result in a regulatory proposal being recommended to Cabinet; The appropriate point may be when preparing a first briefing for a Minister.

In other words, we are leaving a world where agencies are encouraged to contact Treasury early to one where agencies must contact this new Ministry of Regulation as early as possible.

The difference is subtle but not unimportant in the context of coalition government. Treasury at core is responsible to Finance Minister Nicola Willis, and before her Finance Minister Grant Robertson - key figures in the largest party of their respective governing arrangements. It’s hard to conceive of any future MMP Government where the largest party gives away this crucial power. As such, it makes some sense for Treasury to be marking the homework of every other Government department - as it had an institutional bias towards independence at some level and a structural allegiance to a member of the largest party in Government.

Now, agencies will technically be mandated to contact a brand new agency, controlled by a coalition partner, before even getting to a briefing for their minister. Even if Seymour or his office have no interest in modifying said proposal, it at the very least could give them the useful political intelligence of what issues other ministers are dealing with, and the options they may take.

It would be easy to get carried away here - after all as a full member of Cabinet Seymour already gets some level of oversight on all kinds of matters far from his own portfolio, as do NZ First. And there are simply so many things going on in Government that it would be hard to use this new power to massive effect without burning bridges Seymour needs for his own policy priorities3. Ministers don’t like other ministers being all up their shit.

But it is still true that Seymour, who has set the political agenda to a large degree without this power, is gaining quite a bit more. After all the circular comes alongside the larger Regulatory Standards Bill, which sets an ACT Party view of “good” lawmaking into law and creates a new board, appointed by Seymour, able to pass non-binding judgement on whether existing laws meet these standards.

The transfer of a “deputy prime ministership” - an essentially meaningless role when the Prime Minister is in the country - pales in comparison with the power Seymour is gaining over the machinery of Government. To be clear, there is also a future where this power essentially lays dormant - where agencies twist Seymour’s standards to fit whatever they want to do anyway and he doesn’t have anywhere near enough time to busy himself in the business of any other minister. Yet if he wants to use this power, he certainly has a lot of it.

In much of the English-speaking world, the right wins when talking about defence.

In the UK and Australia anyone who wants to become Prime Minister embraces the centre right orthodoxy - that America must be kept happy and the security state spared austerity. Canada hews a different path, but still cooperates with America’s nuclear weapons system. And America itself only flirts with isolationism after decades of presidential candidates competing to out-tough each other on military matters, from Hilary Clinton saying Barack Obama didn’t have what it took for the “3am phone call” to Donald Trump calling for a renewed nuclear arms race.

Down in New Zealand things are very different.

It’s not that the right never run up wins on defence policy. It’s just that they all pale in comparison to the massive win the left of the Labour party managed in the 1980s, when it wrote into law that nuclear-powered weapons and ships could never visit New Zealand in any form. That same Labour left seem to have won another large defence policy victory over the weekend, with the party announcing that it now opposes New Zealand joining the new AUKUS security pact.

No one can know exactly what the usually centrist Labour leader Chris Hipkins thinks of this policy personally. But one is reminded of his predecessor David Lange’s line to the US ambassador when explaining Labour’s nuclear-free policy in the 1980s: “Ambassador, I would be grateful if you told your president that he stands for election once every four years; I am potentially up for election every Thursday at caucus.”

Yet the real win this 1980s group on the Labour left had was not getting their leader to back the ban, it was moving the Overton Window by so much that the National Government of the 1990s - the most right-wing in a generation - could do nothing to change it. This is well-illuminated in a fascinating conversation transcript I’ve unearthed between NZ Prime Minister Jim Bolger and President George Bush from 1991 that I don’t think has been reported on in this level of detail1.

Bolger: “I want to revoke the legislation”

The US had put the New Zealand on the deep freeze after the Government first barred its ship from visiting and then put that ban into law, effectively kicking us out of ANZUS. One of Ronald Reagan’s staff in 1985 had briefed out that we “could hardly be said now to be in the status of a good ally” and would see our trade access harmed. Newspapers closer to the Reagan presidency like The Wall Street Journal went as far as praising the French for bombing the Rainbow Warrior.

In 1991 after newish Prime Minister Bolger backed President Bush’s first Gulf War things started to warm back up, with the two leaders grabbing a meeting on the sidelines of a United Nations meeting in September of 1991. According to the memoir of a diplomat who was there, the pair were both drinking whiskies in a side room of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York. A transcript of the full conversation has been declassified and makes for some incredible reading.

The two leaders, who had met a decade prior, have some chemistry. But the purpose of the conversation is Bush pushing for New Zealand to change its nuclear-free policy, especially in the light of Bush’s then unannounced move to take nuclear weapons off surface ships.

The President: I am glad to have this quick chat with you. I have heard from our able Ambassador all about of what you have done. That's just fine. I would like to ask Brent Scowcroft here to plant a ray of hope in our relations.

Gen Scowcroft: We will soon be announcing something big with respect to nuclear weapons.
The President: Really, pretty big.

Gen Scowcroft: What we will announce will have an effect on your policies, we believe.

The President: What you have done with your law makes it complicated with us and with the Australians. And now, here we are, we are cooperating in the Gulf and there have been things that you have been willing to stick your neck out on. If this problem were not on paper, we could make progress.

Bolger spoke about this meeting recently, and reportedly said that he “did not concede anything” on the nuclear free policy, “and hoped [New Zealand] never would.” But while the transcript shows Bolger resisting making any promises to overturn the ban, it certainly shows him telling Bush he’d like to.

Let’s dig in closer. First Bolger reminds Bush National had “inherited” this policy, and then discusses National’s woeful polling at the time (TVNZ/Heylen had National at 22% at the time, 20 points behind Labour), saying the party was too far out on a limb to reverse the ban right now.

Bolger: I have to get some wealth for New Zealand. We are really down in the polls, but I am totally optimistic. All the polls are against us, but I am confident that we will be reelected in two years. It is also important that we be credible, and that is why we have to stick to our policy on ship visits.

After some joking about trout fishing and some bromides about how the countries should really work this out (Bush suggests Bolger just tell everyone he’s a “World War II guy”), Bolger says he really would like to revoke the ban - but it would just result in Labour instantly reversing it the moment it got back into power2.

Bolger: In terms of the future, I want to revoke the legislation. But we cannot just change overnight. We cannot turn the legislation over. I want an amendment that allows you -- and the Chief of Defense Forces of the United States -- so that you can come back. I want the Chief of New Zealand Forces to be able to participate in exercises of your forces. If I said right now that I want to change, after I am gone, the opposition instantly will repeal any changes.

Soon after the conversation, a leaked telex suggested the US believed New Zealand was going to try to repeal the legislation.

Now, who knows exactly what is in Bolger’s mind. His long march towards social democracy since retirement has included him now forcefully joining Helen Clark in rejecting AUKUS, and perhaps he was just saying what Bush wanted to hear.

But it certainly seems like he wanted to get that pesky nuclear ban out of the way - yet couldn’t. This is quite something when you consider the massive range of things that Bolger did do in the 1990-1993 term, such as slashing benefits and other public spending, introducing user pays in hospitals, and introducing the referendum that would create MMP. This Government could and would do a lot - but it could not do this. Labour had made the issue far too toxic for National to touch.

In the decades since we have seen how powerful this issue is for Labour. In 2004 Labour Foreign Affairs Minister Phil Goff released briefing notes his ministry had taken at a meeting then-National leader Don Brash had held with the US ambassador, where Brash had reportedly said the nuclear free policy would be “gone by lunchtime”. This bit of political ratfuckery undoubtedly played a part in Brash failing to win the election, and kept Brash’s successor John Key from ever touching the issue.

But is AUKUS nuclear free? Obviously the original deal involved nuclear subs, but whatever was going to be in the “pillar two” New Zealand might join was a lot more mushy, and harder to make toxic for the New Zealand public. There’s also an open question about whether the policy feels as important to New Zealand as it did back in the 1980s, when the threat of nuclear war and the reality of nuclear tests were far more salient. As China asserts itself in the Pacific, might this be a matter where National retake the initiative on defence policy?

At this time it’s hard to tell. Yet you can certainly see why Labour thinks it can win here, given Trump’s re-election. It’s far easier to reject the US when it is embodied in a man so disliked in New Zealand, and when the idea of a security “threat” from China still feels a bit far-fetched. Yet even Trump has a term limit. Xi does not.

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Recommended Reading

• Terence O’Brien, the diplomat who helped set this meeting up, discusses it in his fascinating memoir.

• I’ve been enjoying The Post’s “Annual Report” series looking at the first year of the Government, including Anna Whyte’s look at backbenchers to watch, and Thomas Manch’s interview with Winston Peters where Peters gave Luxon amazingly faint praise.

• I’m halfway through Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner and it is just fantastic, both thrilling and very interesting. The perfect holiday read.

• The new season of the Wolf Hall adaption is great.

• The Spinoff have evolved from a TV review site into a importance force in New Zealand journalism, hosting some of the funniest and smartest writing about our country you can find. I encourage you to back them in their current dire straits if you are able to.

Richard Nixon had a favourite line in the chaotic leadup to his victory in 1968: “There’s nothing wrong with this country a good election can’t fix.”

Nixon’s line has stuck with me as a useful way to think about the ideal of an election. Wouldn’t it be great if a single vote in a single election really could change everything for the better? But it also begs its opposite: If all problems can be fixed with a ‘good election’ - can everything fixed be broken with a bad one? What about two?

Donald Trump has a warped version of this line, telling his supporters to “get out and vote, just this time….you won’t have to do it any more. Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote any more.” This is another kind of ideal - the election so consequential you can not just turn off from politics for four more years, but turn off from politics for good.

There are certainly elections that we can look back at as hinge points1, as moments where if the vote had been different a lot of history would be too. What if the Florida recount had been slightly changed and Al Gore had won - does he end up invading Iraq? What if FDR had not won in 1932, or the Nazis not cobbled together a majority in 1933, or NZ First not gone with Labour in 2017? Now, we may have a new one - what if Trump hadn’t won in 2024?

Here’s a follow up post to my preview on the US election, looking at some lessons from Trump’s convincing victory.

White collar professionals are not a governing majority

About 38% of Americans 25 years or older have a bachelors degree or higher. Harris won this group by about 13 points. This was not enough to win the election.

This isn’t something that we are all just learning now. Joe Biden also won college voters by a wide margin, but he put this coalition together with plenty of working class non-white voters to win the actual election. There were signs then that this coalition was not rock solid, but Democrats didn’t do enough to shore it up.

It now appears that Trump actually won a majority of voters in households making less than $50,000, after making huge gains with Latino voters in particular. It’s not just the white working class backing Trump any more, it’s the working class in general.

Given the results, it is now easy to look back at the campaign Kamala Harris ran and see how little it did to truly reach out to these voters.

Part of this issue was forced on Democrats through Biden’s late-game exit giving them nowhere near enough time to run a real primary - meaning Harris herself was the only candidate on offer.

Harris lost the 2020 primary for a reason. She has barely ever had to compete against a Republican in an election and oozes blue state lawyer. One of her big moments in the vice presidential debates with Mike Pence was her saying “Excuse me, I’m speaking” - a line that clearly resonated with many women sick of men interrupting them, but also encapsulated an attitude many voters find repellent, with its emphasis on politeness and a very professionalised decorum.

Another useful phrase is one Harris inherited from Hillary Clinton. When Clinton was running in 2016, President Obama and many other supporters liked to tell people she was the “most qualified candidate in history”. This line stuck around after the loss and was also attached to Harris, often trotted out to explain to voters why they should actually love her. This was not a good idea: credentials are good for winning you a better life, not a presidential election. And lecturing people about how they really ought to like your candidate, as Obama did this time as well, does more harm than good.

As Adam Tooze and many others have pointed out, for working class voters it is people like Harris who have been in positions of authority for much of their life, whether as teachers at their school or as managers at their work. It is natural to hold some distrust for these people who seem to be running your life, and also setting so much of the terms of the national debate, whether as TV anchors or late night hosts. It is especially hard to back them when you feel your life is getting worse and they tell you you’re just imagining it.

Trump might have a degree and be a big success, but he will rarely talk down to you. He is far richer than you and is brash about breaking the rules where it suits him, like you would be if you won the lottery, instead of being a bit richer than you and seemingly obsessed with setting the rules in the first place.

Part of this is undoubtedly sexism. Barack Obama was also a lawyerly type, even if he was far better at turning that side of his personality off, and he won two solid wins. But I think it is too simple to blame it all on gender. South of the border in the famously macho country of Mexico, Latinos overwhelmingly elected a woman president this year. There are women who could win power in the US, but it will be hard, and they will have a far better chance if they don’t feel anything like your boss.

The working class vote is a prize worth having. Unionisation is on the rise in the US. AI may proletarianise many of the laptop class eventually. Democrats need to win what was once their traditional base back to have a sniff of real power.

This is probably the biggest lesson for New Zealand political parties, although we obviously have vastly different systems and societies. Uni graduates aren’t a majority in New Zealand and won’t be any time soon.

The incumbency curse is inescapable

Not to write off the entire last section, but if Donald Trump had been in power for the last four years and Harris had run against him, she probably would have won. The “incumbency curse” after the inflation spike has seen sitting governments of left and right defeated all around the world - including in New Zealand, Australia, and the UK. Back in the 1970s a similar inflation spike took down basically every sitting democratic government.

So at a certain level this election was unwinnable, was even over-determined. Harris lost not for one reason but for many, each of which might be enough on their own. But inflation is the biggest one. The US had a better time of it than most others, but at the end of the day voters really hate it when things cost more than they used to, and they blame the Government for it.

Trump is a world historical force

Napoleon was history on horseback. Trump is history on a golf cart.

It is very hard to think of a recent president who has reorientated the world as much as he has, from the complete victory of free trade and neoliberalism to one in which banks are urgently modelling what an across-the-board 10% tariff on all US imports might look like. In his first term, Trump lacked the patience and stamina to pass much significant legislation, but everything else he does - from Supreme Court picks to trade wars - are big enough deals that we all have to sit up and pay attention. Plus he has all those nukes.

Part of this is the reality of US world dominance. Even normal non-disruptive US presidents make big decisions that change the lives of millions of non-Americans. If the US was one of three or four similarly-sized powers the world would be nowhere near as obsessed with the Trump phenomenon. But that is not the world we live in - we live in Trump’s world. Who knows where he will take us.

For my many sins, I am a US politics tragic.

It is a political system that is in astoundingly poor health compared to our own, one where a state with the population of Canterbury gets the same representation to one with the population of Canada1, and yet it is impossible to look away. I am far from the only Kiwi with this sickness and NZ politicians of all stripes consistently look to the US for tactical inspiration, so I thought it seemed appropriate to set out some of the things we may learn over the next week.

Was the last few days just Democratic hopium?

As I write this, Blue America is beginning to hope again.

It’s been a harrowing month for Democrats. Swing state and national polling has slowly softened for Kamala Harris since a highpoint around her debate with Donald Trump in September. These have not been huge shifts - the polls are extremely tight - but they have been enough to give off that It’s happening again feeling.

The last 48 hours have seen a significant vibe-shift, thanks to predictions from the sort of people Democrats love more than anyone else: Experts who agree with them.

The first surprise was from Ann Selzer, whose final poll for Iowa put Harris at 47 to Trump’s 44. Iowa was not really considered a swing state in this cycle - Trump won by 8 points last time - but Selzer’s well-earned reputation for being an extremely accurate pollster able to push away from “the herd” has made people take a lot of notice.

After all, if Harris just runs it close to Trump in Iowa, that would suggest far more strength for her in the other crucial Midwest swing states than the general consensus.

The other is from veteran Nevada journalist Jon Ralston, who has predicted based on early vote data that Harris will (very narrowly) win Nevada. Biden won Nevada by two points in 2020, so this shouldn’t be such a boost to Democrats, but the state has followed its fellow southwestern states with high Latino populations into getting far redder in the four years since.

These two indicators are not the entire story - there have been some other decent polls for Harris - but they are a big part of the emotional story. Very soon we will know if these two bits of stray data are mere ‘hopium’ or real leading indicators of a Democratic win.

Is the Dobbs Effect still active?

If you’re not familiar, the “Dobbs” case was the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v Wade and threw abortion rights back to individual states. Since the decision Democrats have massively overperformed in a range of elections - from the 2022 midterms when they held the Senate and only barely lost the House, to special elections (think byelections) across the country. Simultaneously, ballot measures concerning abortion have consistently been won by the pro-choice side, even in red states like Kansas and Ohio.

This election 10 states have their own ballot measures, including swing states Nevada and Arizona. Harris has naturally been pushing this button very hard - it was her best section of the debate and features in many ads, including a recent one where two women secretly vote in the opposite direction of their MAGA-coded husbands. You can definitely make a case that this, combined with those ballot measures, will push female turnout up and give Harris the edge she needs.

The counter-case can also be made. Perhaps the ballot measures actually give women an escape hatch - they can vote for abortion rights and Trump at the same time. Perhaps the Dobbs decision is long enough ago and not tied enough to Trump to really matter. We should see if this is another “Roevember” fairly soon.

Has polling fixed itself?

US polling had a bad 2020.

It was actually far worse in 2020 - when the polling correctly predicted the winner - than in 2016, when it did not. In 2016 there were some terrible state-level polls, but the overall national polling was not that far from the truth - after all Clinton did win the popular vote. In 2020, the polls might have correctly picked Biden, but they did so by a far larger margin than they should have - the average error was 4.5% in the national polls and 4.3% in statewide polls. This was the largest error in the national popular vote for 40 years.

Pollsters have done a lot of things to try to fix that, likely including what some experts describe as “herding” - cowardly weighting their polls so they aren’t outliers in either direction.

Needless to say, the polls are tight enough that you only need to see a “normal” polling error in the Democratic direction for Trump to sweep in a very convincing win. Given his overperformance of his polls in 2016 and 2020, this is hard to convincingly rule out, although many have tried.

Yet a normal polling error in the other direction is also possible. After all the polls underestimated Democratic strength in the 2022 midterms - if that kind of error happened again it would be a huge Harris win.

Does high turnout help Republicans now?

It has long been traditionally and understandably assumed that low turnout helps the right and hurts the left. Basically - the rich folks who were reliable voters generally swung right, while poorer voters who were less organised generally swung left.

This made a lot of sense in the politics of the 20th century, when having a university degree generally made you more likely to vote Republican than Democrat. Among white voters, this has now hugely flipped - there is no better predictor of a Democratic white voter than whether or not they have completed four years higher education.

This Republican dominance of the degreeless has shown signs of spreading from whites to other ethnic groups who generally favour Democrats and often don’t have degrees - Latinos and African Americans.

But this massive shift will only result in big wins for Republicans if these groups go out and vote. And there is some suggestion from those special elections that this shift has happened to the degree that Democrats are now the reliable voters, while many Republican-leaning voters may stay home.

This educational realignment is far from contained within the United States. It’s one of the main metatrends of Western political life in recent decades and we will get a huge new datapoint for it soon.

How fucked is free trade?

Excuse my french. Since 2016 the US Government has become more and more hostile to free trade, with Joe Biden going even harder than Donald Trump was to “shield” American workers from the efforts of Chinese workers to make things cheaper than they can.

The free trade glory days of post Cold War era don’t seem to be coming back any time soon, no matter who wins. But Trump is promising a significantly stepped up program of tariffs - sometimes 10% on all imports, sometimes 20%, and up to 60% on China.

It goes without saying that Donald Trump saying he will do something is not a promise you should take to the bank. But he has worked hard to surround himself with people who won’t say no to him like so many did in his first term, and he will want to do something on trade if he wins. The repercussions of the world’s largest economy doing this are hard to put in proper perspective, but they will definitely hurt New Zealand.

Then, so will Harris’ policies. Just not to the same degree.

You could say the same thing about climate change, which is intricately tied up with trade given China is the world’s pre-eminent EV and solar panel producer. It’s not that Harris winning means big wins for the climate movement, it’s just that she will probably do somewhat less damage than Trump would.

How will the historians see Biden?

I reckon this one is pretty cut and dry. If Harris wins Joe Biden will go down into the history books - which will largely be written by liberals - as one of the most important presidents in decades, one who managed to defeat Trumpism once at the ballot box and once by stepping aside. This combined with his serious domestic policy record could see him eventually outshine Obama in terms of early 21st century Democratic presidents.

If Harris loses, Biden’s decision to wait so long to pull out will doom his record. He will become a punchline.

Two questions for the longer term

How do the Democrats pick up the pieces if they lose?

Losing this election will not doom the Democrats - the nature of two-party systems is it is very hard to really die within them.

But it will give the party several months of turmoil and likely a bigger shift to the right on immigration politics than the one it has already taken.

The scale of the loss and congressional results will matter here. If the Democrats manage to somehow win back the House while losing the presidency (unlikely but far from impossible) they will have a base within the Federal Government to fight Trump. Yet they are very unlikely to keep the Senate - which means four more years of Trump Supreme Court picks which will make it even more right wing than it is currently. That could well change the position of top Democrats on Supreme Court reform in 2028.

The sense of loss might slowly fade around 2026, when the Democrats would probably have a good midterm election that could give them back some real confidence. Nothing is ever certain, but the Senate map is much kinder to the Democrats in 2026, and the party in the White House typically has rougher midterms. And hey, at least Trump would be term limited in 2028. Speaking of.

Trump 2028?

Back in 2020, a lot of people didn’t think Trump would or should run in 2024. Many were in his party and have now sworn fealty to him once more.

Trump will turn 82 in 2028 - about a year older than Biden is now. That brute fact would seem to rule him out given the Biden experience.

But people don’t really expect Trump to speak in complete sentences or submit himself to proper medical exams. Being a cranky but funny old guy who goes on little journeys within each of his sentences is part of the charm

Still, there is always the possibility of the party stepping in more effectively than it did in 2016 or 2020. After all this would be a third straight loss of the popular vote for Trump, a measure the Republicans have only won once since 1988. It would probably rebound in hundreds of other promising careers being snuffed out.

Yet his eight years of dominance leaves the party a very different beast. Perhaps Glenn Youngkin and Marco Rubio can take it in a different direction, but the base seems more likely to want a “Trump 2” of some sort, if he does stand down. That could be one of his sons, it could be another outsider (Joe Rogan?), it could be JD Vance - although I suspect he would be far too tainted by the 2024 loss.

Think about it for a bit, and it starts to seem more than possible that Trump takes it all for one last spin.

Recommended Reading

• I just finished Nixon Agonistes by Garry Wills - it is one of the best political books I have ever read. Wills is everything you want in an analytical journalist: Extremely well-read (he’s a trained classicist), ideologically heterogeneous (he wrote for National Review but was disgusted by Vietnam), and able to take the little facts of a single political career and stretch it out to tell a full story about a country. It’s hard to find a copy in print but there is a recently-recorded audiobook on all the services.

• Madeleine Chapman lays out the case against Mike King very elegantly.

• Adam Tooze has a great piece on “Bidenomics” and where US policy is now heading.

• I can’t recommend the NYT’s ‘The Runup’ podcast enough, and all of the episodes will be useless very soon - so do go listen. The Pennsylvania one is particularly enlightening about why so many poorer African Americans are breaking for Trump (or not voting at all.)

• Twitter will be the place to be for the next week. Follow the Nates (Silver and Cohn) and your preferred party’s various data wranglers. Get ready to lose some sleep.

Hello again. Since we last spoke I’ve been writing a few pieces for The Post - one on whether Chris Hipkins could learn how to talk about tax from Keir Starmer, and another from an interview with him where he revealed Labour’s polls have the left bloc just two points behind the Government.

One of the many shibboleths in NZ politics is the impossibility of diversifying our tax system.

The last true change was in those pre-MMP days of major reform when you could get away with a lot more. Roger Douglas created GST in the mid-1980s - aiming to tame inflation and give our tax system a major new income source. Four decades later it contributes a quarter of our total tax take, and its simplicity and ease-of-use is world-leading.

Indeed, our tax system is very simple across the board. This makes it very easy for individuals and companies to understand how much tax they owe, and IRD’s recent technology upgrade means no normal wage earner ever needs to bother with those shady ‘we get your tax return for you’ charlatans1. Each $100 in tax costs IRD just 43c to collect. That’s better than the UK (51p/£100), and surprisingly worse than the federal US Government (34c/$100).

But how simple is too simple? As many have pointed out, we are unusually reliant on income taxes - either on individual income (about 52% of the total) or corporate income (18%). That means about 70% of our tax take is from the money people bring into either their company or their wallet each year. We’re not in this table from Australian Tax Office, but we’d be right near the top of the table.

The problem many people see with this - including the OECD, the CEO of ANZ, the CEO of BNZ, the IMF, Jim Bolger, Treasury, and the Labour Party at various times - is that our reliance on regular income taxes leaves us in quite a pickle demographically and economically. For one, if the demographic predictions are right and we end up with far more retirees relative to working age people, the tax system just won’t be able to keep up with the massive demands these older people will make on our health and social security systems2. And for two, although not all of those CGT-proponents agrees with this in the exact same way, our taxation system unbalances the economy in such a way that we all invest in real estate too much, driving up house prices.

Yet a proper CGT has never even made it to select committee because the forces against it are very strong: the National Party, the huge bloc of New Zealanders who quite like their real estate investment, and the desire within the Labour Party to win elections. Will that ever change?

Well, I’m not sure. But if the Labour Party was dreaming up an opponent for such a fight you can imagine them sketching Christopher Luxon.

Luxon is nowhere near our richest Prime Minister. Yet he carries that wealth in a very different way to Key, who never took the Wellington accommodation allowance, put all his properties into a blind trust, and could simply talk about his wealth in a way that didn’t sound weird. And that was all before this week - when it emerged that Luxon had sold two properties for hundreds of thousands of dollars in capital gain. It appears (I’m not his tax lawyer) that one of those sales would have been caught under the Bright Line Test, with a tax bill of up to $70k3, if not for his Government changing those rules on coming to office.

To be clear, I don’t think Luxon changed the rules to benefit himself specifically, as hundreds of people in my Twitter mentions seem to. I think he changed those rules because the National Party has had a clear policy to do so since long before Luxon was in Parliament, and it would have been in that party’s manifesto whoever led it. National are in general a party that represents the status quo of our taxation system. Any leader of the party - even one that rented - would have enacted the same change. The amount of money Luxon is saving is not hugely material to a man of his means.

Yet it looks terrible. Getting really excited about abstract concepts like capital gains is not the easiest thing in the world, but it is a lot easier if you associate it with one guy you don’t like. And people simply haven’t warmed to Luxon as they’ve warmed to previous prime ministers who came to power in general elections, as the preferred PM polls show. The world would be a better place if all of politics was focused on policy issues and party positions on them, rather than the fairly insignificant personal details of our political leaders. But that’s simply not the world as it is.

Is this enough to get Labour over the hump and able to win an election while promoting a change to the tax system? Probably not by itself. It’s especially hard to know when Hipkins still hasn’t decided what to run on. The problem with running on a CGT versus a wealth tax is that the income from the CGT will be patchy (especially if you exempt the ‘family home’) - meaning it’s hard to immediately start spending it on something voters might like, like new hospitals or commensurate income taxes. The Tax Working Group thought it would raise about $8b over five years, which could be spent on a decent income tax cut worth $15 or so a week. It wouldn’t surprise me if Labour simply update those numbers to match the current circumstances. But they were only projections.

Which is one of the reasons David Parker and Grant Robertson instead were looking at a wealth tax, which would tax the richest 46,000 Kiwis annually on their assets, instead of just when those assets were sold. This kind of tax has the advantage of being a lot more regular and less patchy, while avoiding the prospect of people just holding onto their assets to sell the next time National are in Government. The principle is a bit harder for many to stomach - you’re taxing something sitting still rather than being transacted - but this is also the principle behind rates, to be fair.

Whichever path Hipkins chooses - including just ignoring this issue altogether - is fraught with massive political risk. But Luxon just gave him a helping hand.

Recommended reading/watching

• I went to see Alien: Romulus last night and it ripped. If you like claustrophobic horror with 70s style sci fi tech you will have a great time.

• I just finished Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter by Ryan Mac and Kate Conger. Highly recommend if you are an addict like me and want an insight into how the world’s biggest addict ruined your favourite drug.

• I found this piece on Ukraine losing from John Ganz useful.

I’ve been thinking a lot about China lately. It’s hard not to.

China is once again living rent free in the heads of the western foreign policy establishment, a full lifetime after the debate over ‘who lost China’ in the late 1940s breathed life into the American right. But this time China is not a war-torn land of peasants - it’s the predominant industrial power in the world.

This puts it at the heart of not just debates about security and the economy but about climate change. For while it remains the world’s largest emitter, it is also the world leader in green technology, and accounts for about 40% of installed renewable capacity in the last five years. No one else seems to have worked how to make solar panels and EVs anywhere near as cheaply as China can, and it seems unlikely they will soon.

I wrote my North + South column about China this month (pick it up in stores or on Libby with your library card!), attempting to wrestle with the moral complexity of all this. How do we deal with the fact that our largest trade partner is run by nasty autocrats who seem quite keen on interfering with our politics? Do we really want to pal up with the more militarily aggressive US on this?

But I also wanted to write a bit here about my personal experiences in China - partly because I’m trying to get better at doing this newsletter more, and partly because this isn’t the kind of piece I’d try to place anywhere. I don’t make any big claim about these experiences revealing anything incredibly new or trenchant about this continent-sized country. My China was inescapably the one a Western visitor gets to see, especially as I don’t know the languages and literally look like the cartoon spy they warn their citizens about. But it was still the most interesting place in the world.

I first visited China as a pre-verbal infant in the early 1990s. I don’t remember it at all but there are photos of me with a huge mess of red hair being gawked at by various older men. This was right in the middle of the Jiang Zemin era, when China was starting to really see the fruits of the Dengist reforms that opened up its economy. My parents tell me it was a very difficult but very rewarding trip.

I next visited in 2009 as a 16-year-old, visiting some family who were posted to Guangzhou and going through Hong Kong and Yunan in the far west. This trip got me somewhat hooked on the country. There was so much here - from the incredible jagged peaks of the mountains to the water wheels in Lijiang to the endless alleys of Guangzhou’s markets, where I could buy snakes or scorpions or pirated DVDs if I had the money. I also remember, very clearly, a young homeless boy with a no legs desperately trying to get the millions of strangers who were walking by to help him. I had seen homeless people in New Zealand before - of course I had! - but these were usually adults. I also remember trying to take a photo of the CCP office and being stopped.

But I learnt the most about China when I was last there in 2016, on an Asia NZ scholarship. Asia NZ is a think tank largely funded by the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) which at the time seemed to operate with a bit of revolving door between the Ministry and the organisation. Asia NZ had an official mission of encouraging Kiwis to thrive in Asia and build connections, and this seemed to meld exceptionally well with the thinking of MFAT at the time, in particular with regards to China. (I should be clear here and say that everyone I worked with at the Foundation was wonderful, and increasing understanding with Asian countries is a worthy cause!)

The NZ-China relationship was at a very different point in 2016, both in Cabinet and in officialdom. John Key was Prime Minister and was a relentless promoter of two-way trade, visiting while I was there to sign various cooperation agreements, welcome Chinese investment into NZ, and meet President Xi. This was some years into the Xi reign, and it wasn’t all warmth and kisses - there was a seemingly perfunctory warning to Key not to mention the South China Sea, and a similarly-perfunctory promise from Key to restate NZ’s position on the matter if it came up. But it was a long way from where we are now, with Key’s chosen successor promising to name and shame cases of Chinese espionage, and many repeated statements about China’s appalling record in Xinjiang.

To be clear, I don’t think relationship solely changed because New Zealand got spikier. China has definitely changed in the last decade. Xi has massively consolidated power. He has purged untold numbers of officials for alleged corruption, including many rivals. The country as a whole has become more self-confident and willing to sabre rattle on the world stage.

All of this to say, I can see why the Asia NZ Foundation don’t seem to offer the specific internship I took up in 2016 any more - a job at the state-run Shanghai Daily.

My internship not doing much

The Shanghai Daily is an English-language paper owned and controlled by the local communist party. I knew going in that it would be a quite strange experience, and I was not likely to emerge with many incredible clippings.

Reader, I did not do much. I came in with some story ideas that wouldn’t require much in the way of language skills - these were shot down quickly. That I was used to (I was a very junior reporter!) but I was not ready to not really be given anything else to do afterwards. I tried in vein to find work to do and eventually got given some English-language videos to subtitle (ah those halcyon pre-AI days) and to go to a few openings for business/product launches and the like. They got me to write some stories about the flag referendum, which they were very interested in as a symbol of NZ throwing off the yoke of the UK. But this was nowhere near enough work to fill a day1.

The other staff on my day shift were incredibly pleasant. They took me out for lunch and attempted to teach me rudimentary Mandarin (I could never quite get the tones). They asked me untold questions about New Zealand and why on earth I was doing this internship. One spoke with the confident kind of British accent one usually only finds in about two London boroughs - when I asked him if he had gone to school in the UK he replied simply “David Attenborough, darling”. From my circumspect questioning, I was able to ascertain that everyone else working there were members of the party, which is utterly unsurprising - you have to be to really get anywhere in China. They treated this membership with a kind of cool but weak irony, like a trust fund kid explaining gingerly why he doesn’t have a summer job.

At night, a group of old English hacks would troop in to sub-edit the copy the day-shift writers had turned in, turning it from the strange but largely correct English of the middle-class Chinese reporters into more fluent English. But in truth much of every day’s edition was just copy from Xinhua, China’s news wire, sometimes ‘retopped’ with a local angle.

The main thing I came out of the work experience with was an appreciation for competitive discipline in NZ media. Sure, it’s always nice to have time to write long and important pieces and not ‘feed the beast’ of daily coverage. But without the rigour of always trying to tell my audience new things first and keep my job I fell into the worst kind of lethargy. Signals from your audience about whether they are fundamentally interested in your work are very important.

Seeing the Middle Kingdom

Luckily I had time to do more than twiddle my thumbs in a media office.

Shanghai had a burgeoning and very fun art scene, as well a big expat community to drink overpriced beer with.

China had an incredible system of cheap and fast trains that really unlocked the vast nation. (The high speed rail network has since more than doubled in length.) On these trains eager young people would introduce themselves to me via the translation function on WeChat, then explain their lives to me. The train was also good as a reminder that urban China is still not the whole story - that there are countless little villages on riversides with no tall buildings or rich people.

I never felt in any way unsafe - even when I accidentally got a bus to a town that had an identical name to the town I was staying in, but was 60km down the road. You might get scammed as tourist in China, or even picked up by the police for questioning if you don’t register where you are staying with them - but you probably won’t be physically harmed.

I went to Beijing to see the hutongs - traditional high-density low rise neighbourhoods of narrow alleys that are being slowly erased from the city, but still give you a taste of Chinese neighbourhood living as it has been for centuries - communal and quiet. Across these neighbourhoods sat little jian bing stands - a kind of savoury pancake usually filled with egg and meat, made fresh after you order for the equivalent of less than $1NZD. This food was cheap, even for China, but I saw several older ladies bringing their own eggs to be cooked inside the crepes - making them even more affordable. There is some canniness one never grows out of.

I went hiking in Huangshan, made famous as (one of) the inspirations for Pandora in Avatar. It was beautiful, but as with hiking in much of Europe it made me really appreciate the benefits of our small population - they had rubbish bins every 20 metres, and they were almost all full.

But where some places had too many people, others had nowhere near enough.

I travelled through Inner Mongolia to the famous ‘Ghost City’ of Ordos, specifically the brand new Kangabashi District - supposedly built for amount a million people but featuring a population in the tens of thousands. It certainly lived up to the hype. Think an urban area as built up as central Auckland but where the only other people you see are tending to the gardens on the huge public parks, or are clustered around a single mall where there is some real economic activity. I just strolled into a few apartment blocks that had been left half-built or empty, much as I would in a post-apocalyptic video game. Indeed, I have never had a day that felt more like a video game in my life - there was a creepy abandoned fun park and everything.

This kind of overbuilding was due in part to local officials trying to one up each other, but also to the massive Chinese real estate bubble - which led to about a third of the country’s economy being based in housing at one point. The country is in the process of deliberately but slowly popping that bubble. This is a high wire strategy where many people and companies are losing massive amounts of value, but the economy is not quite falling over. If they can pull this off it will be very impressive.

I also went right up to the north west and Dunhuang, on the edge of the Gobi Desert, and down through Gansu to the “Rainbow Mountains”. Here there was more of a backpacking culture than elsewhere, and I met plenty of young Americans and Brits halfway through degrees in Chinese universities. This group was obviously self-selecting, but I’m struck now looking back how warm all the Americans were to China - how much they respected the language they were learning and the complex culture they were visiting. You could barely move for the cliches about the ‘oldest continuous civilisation in the world,’ about how their connection to the past was so much stronger than ours because they could still quite easily read the script from thousands of years ago. I trotted out a lot of these myself.

There’s been a big strand of semi-revisionist history in the last few decades that puts China back in the centre of world history - arguing that for most of recorded history it has been the richest and most advanced nation in the world, with the West a poor cousin that is having a (perhaps temporary) upswing. The historian William Dalrymple has just published a book that moves this focus southwards - from China to India, which he argues was the real centre of the world. I don’t have anywhere near the scholarly competency to really weigh in on this one, but I will say that the myth remains incredibly powerful in China - that they are on their way back to their rightful place at the top of the world.

My time in China made me think this was possible, but not inevitable. You didn’t see any young Chinese people bringing their own eggs to make into Jiang Bing. Becoming middle class is a wonderful thing for an individual, but it can be troublesome in the long term for a country that wants to dominate, as it reduces birth rates and makes people expect more comforts. Perhaps the window for hypergrowth has closed for good and China will become ‘Big Japan’ - rich but not getting much richer, with few ambitions to become a global hegemon. Perhaps we are seeing the kind of growth that turned the US from a clutch of protestant Brits into the most powerful nation the world has ever known.

The Chinese people I met did seem to buy into this myth of national regeneration - even if some did it a bit ironically. But how could they not? The state might not let them use Facebook without a VPN, or form an independent labour union, but over a single lifetime it had given them a quality of life unknowable to their parents, had taken the country from being 80% illiterate in 1949 to 3.6% illiterate in 2015. No one I met approached the kind of rabid nationalism seen in the Global Times or seemed to care about something like the South China Sea, but they were proud of their country. Of course, I mostly met people from the successful middle class who could speak English, and talking China down to a foreigner is not exactly smiled upon by the state. I didn’t go to Xinjiang to see that state at its worst. Yet this attitude of positivity did not feel put on.

China isn’t a democracy. But that doesn’t mean the opinion of these people - especially the middle class ones - aren’t extremely important to the way the country is governed. Indeed non-democracies are generally the systems most interested in public opinion, as they need barometers outside of elections to ascertain how well people think the country is going. It is not a monolith of a country, where everyone thinks the same things or is moving down the exact same path. If we are in New Zealand to keep plotting an in-between course, one where we rely on China economically but the US militarily, we we will need to understand not just what is going on in Xi Jinping’s mind - but also what those real people think.

Recommended reading

• If you want to read more about China, I really love the books China in Ten Words and Oracle Bones. The Three Body Problem is great too.

• Thomas Coughlan on why Wellington isn’t dying.

• Eloise Gibson on tailpipe emissions.

• Duncan Greive on ten years of The Spinoff.

• John Lanchester on what finance is for - featuring an incredible study that found the odds of flipping a coin are not actually always 50/50.

• Matthew Maltman on how zoning reform increased NZ’s construction productivity.

• Alice Neville on the Govt’s mission to reduce crime.

There’s this meme that’s good. It started under the last Government but continues to this day. Whenever John Key comes up - and sometimes when he doesn’t - several people on Twitter claim that he is the current Prime Minister, and eagerly engage in fights with anyone who disagrees. This kind of trolling feels uniquely Kiwi and reminds me a lot of Trilly Elliot using the People of NZ account to tell everyone to store their milk out of the fridge. I smile every time I see it.

But the meme is backed by a real structure of feeling - that New Zealand in 2024 is basically New Zealand in 2016, when Key left office.

This is obviously not literally true.

The Sixth Labour Government left a real policy legacy that I’ve written about at some length. Much of its ecomomic pillars have been wiped away by the new Government, but other major bits of change stand - such as the legalisation of abortion, the abolishing of DHBs, new parent benfits, the Zero Carbon Act, some level of fees-free tertiary, the Winter Energy Payment, the ban on foreign home buyers, etc etc.

Yet there can be a feeling that while we’ve all switched into a new pair of togs, we are still swimming in the pool Key carefully built in the 2000s and early 2010s.

The best political leaders don’t just win elections. They create the conditions in which them winning an election and having a mandate once they do so are inevitable. That was the case in 2008, when Key managed to win an argument against Helen Clark and Michael Cullen he had been making since 2004 when he became finance spokesman. That argument essentially went: New Zealand needs a business guy in charge to deliver modest tax cuts and a modest reduction in the size of the state, all without harming any middle class benefits like Working For Families or superannuation, a guy who will focus on making farmers and other businesses more free to get economic growth moving, stop so many young people going to Australia, make schools more rigorous, the cops and courts more repressive, and get public servants in the frontline rather than sitting around in Wellington being woke, or “PC” as they would call it back then. Sound familiar at all?

That argument was won by Key and it is hard to see it being entirely repudiated.

Our tax structure is broadly where it was when he left office. GST is 15%, the Bright Line Test is back to two years, agricultural emissions are untouched, and there is no comprehensive taxation of wealth or capital gains. Tax is largest way that Cabinet shapes the economy and the settings his Cabinet set mostly remain.

The National Party remains a vehicle largely built in his image. It is far more firmly rooted in the Auckland business community than it once was (Key was the first National Party Auckland PM since Muldoon!) and far more focused on that city’s burgeoning migrant communities. His hand-picked candidate is now leader of the party and prime minister, with his former staffer as finance minister. His interventions in both National Party discourse and overall national discourse remain serious news events. They have “roads of regional significance” now.

He does not quite have total hegemony. Judith Collins, one of Key’s main critics within the party and a thorn in his side during government, still managed to become leader. The party has amped up its criticism of China - a state he is still on very good terms with. No one is talking about the flag any more.

And it’s worth stating that the John Key Project was more than just John Key - it was also very much Stephen Joyce and Wayne Eagleson and plenty of other people.

Yet if we zoom out, can we really say that Labour won an argument in the same way?

I’m not one of these people who argue Labour didn’t “win” the 2017 election. They ended up in Government while National ended up in opposition. More people voted for the three parties that made up the Government than the two that didn’t. But it was a victory that felt built on an argument half-won. Kiwis were clearly somewhat sick of National and had started to sour on Key following the bungled flag referendum. The housing crisis was biting and National lacked good answers on it. People wanted to swim in rivers again and see more money put into health services.

But while Labour could convince the public there were big problems, the only solution of Labour’s the public seemed to really back to those big issues was the boondoggle of KiwiBuild and banning foreign buyers - not structural reform to taxes and zoning. The Government struggled to make a consisting and convincing argument for its own existence over the 2017-2020 term, with moments of real political victory mixed with endless backdowns on Labour priorities.

Then Covid-19 happened and scrambled everything, winning Labour huge support as it showed clear competence and leadership, all while National consumed itself. Yet the thumping Labour win in 2020 was built on a manifesto that largely restated ambitions from 2017 (Fair Pay Agreements) and complex machinery-of-Government measures it had found itself embroiled in (Three Waters). The biggest shift was a brand new income tax bracket that applied to 1.1% of the population and was a useful way to make the National Party seem out of touch. The argument was won, sure, but the argument was basically “let us look after you through this time of crisis,” not “let us build a different New Zealand together”.

There are many reasons Labour found it harder to win the overall argument than Key had. National has the benefit most right-wing parties enjoy - the public simply trust them on the economy more - without as much of the weird edginess that infects parties like the US Republicans. Helen Clark’s third term in 2005-08 made it look tired and more focused on media-amplified memes like showerheads than real issues. The GFC (which started early in New Zealand!) made the average voter feel poorer.

But it’s not like Labour has never managed this kind of step change before. Clark herself created the conditions of her own victory in the 1996-1999 term, or arguably long before. Like Key, she managed to seriously change the country and leave it that way - which is why we all still have KiwiSavers, Working For Families, and a Supreme Court.

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No one can hold this kind of hegemony forever. The current National Party are far less popular than Key’s National Party ever was in Government, and Christopher Luxon has never reached his heights of personal popularity. The Government have made some huge unforced errors (like spending a huge portion of next year’s budget to make up for a disastrous broken promise that should never have been made), which Key was better at avoiding. Key never had to deal with coalition partners with as much power or energy as ACT and NZ First. This doesn’t mean the party will lose in 2026 - indeed I think they are the favourites - but it will be a more challenging election than 2011 or 2014 was for Key.

Similarly, the next time Labour win it is unlikely to do so in the same way it did in 2017, and the next time National sweep to power after that the party might do it with a very different kind of leader to Key or Luxon.

But for now? We remain Keyland.

A note from me: I really am sorry that this newsletter has been so sporadic. I have a fulltime job over here, a monthly column in North & South (read it!), and to be honest I’ve been enjoying the European summer quite a bit. But the days are getting shorter now and I’ve been missing writing about the most important topic in the world (Twitter memes), so hopefully I’ll be back in your inbox soon.

Recommended reading/watching

• Thomas Coughlan has (predictably) some great analysis of the Government’s transport funding announcement and the eventual hole it faces.

• Jack Tame has been on fire on Q+A of late. I recommend his grilling of Nicole McKee.

• I am big fan of the New Zealand Election Study (where is the new one please?), so it’s great to see Gabi Lardies take the data out for a spin in The Spinoff.

• I recently finished Demons aka The Devils aka The Possessed by Fyodor Dostoevsky. It is truly one of the great political novels - and a great book about the importance of serving food at events. Don’t buy a copy until you’ve compared a few translations in the bookstore to find the one you like.

• I have been working my way through the films of Billy Wilder and recently saw The Apartment for the first time. Leaves other rom coms in the dust. The dust!

• I enjoyed this piece about Wellington cheerleaders from Julie Jacobson in The Post. Despite living in London right now I remain one of Wellington’s biggest fans, and I plan to build my life there again soon.

Good morning and welcome to least news-pegged political newsletter of them all.

I was listening to Thomas Coughlan’s podcast on the budget the other day and he mentioned a classic press gallery drinks thought experiment: What if Winston Peters had gone with National in 2017? What if Bill English had not been the second ever National Party leader to lose two elections, but instead had a chance to lead the first four-term Government of the MMP era?

It’s certainly a fun scenario to think through, and not one that is particularly outlandish. National won more votes than any other party in 2017, and offered NZ First a potential two-party Government, with no need for another minor party like the Greens or ACT to get in the way. We now know, of course, that Peters was in the middle of suing several National Party figures over the leaking of his superannuation details at this point - but one has to take a few leaps to imagine any alternative history. So what might have happened?

What National would have given to Winston Peters

Getting back into Government would have required some kind of deal with NZ First. What might that have looked like?

Peters himself wrote about how he saw the coalition negotiations early in the term of the Labour-NZ First-Greens Government, saying he wanted to address “nine years of drift; Neglect of provincial and regional New Zealand; Homelessness in a land of plenty [and] a government willing to sell out to people who do not have the country’s best interests at heart.”

This is obviously a narrative crafted to explain the decision to go with Labour, made when he was still in coalition with the party, but we can extract some bits of policy focus. Indeed you can simply port over some bits of Labour’s 2017 agreement with with NZ First to National.

In general, NZ First would have looked to make it look like they had made National more centrist, particularly on populist economic policy. Here’s a look at what I believe the big things would have been.

• A win on housing, the main issue in the 2017 election, would be needed. A foreign buyers ban would be a big ask, but some restrictions would be possible. The state house build was already revving up a bit, and NZ First could definitely have won some kind of promise to build a certain number.

• Some kind of Provincial Growth Fund would have offended English, a former Treasury staffer and Budget hawk, but this aversion would not be insurmountable.

• Similarly, the “Waka Jumping” law goes against a National Party inclination to leave electoral law alone, but it wouldn’t be too big of a dead rat to swallow.

• An intention, never carried out, to bring down net migration.

• Peters would have got a promise to raise the minimum wage - probably by about as much as it would go up anyway, but maybe a little bit more.

• An offer for students - perhaps a version of fees free focused entirely on trades training.

• Some kind of offer on cheaper GP visits.

• More cops.

• NZ First would have got the racing portfolio, either open or secret control of fishery policy, and perhaps the foreign affairs portfolio.

But what else would have happened?

The Key-English Government, part four

National had the problem any fourth term Government has when promising new policies at an election. Anything truly creative and big is generally done in your first few terms. New policies at this point are either additive, require repudiating your own Government, or face the inevitable question of “well why haven’t you done that in the nine years you’ve had already?”

That doesn’t mean there wasn’t any new policies happening at this point. English was full bore into “social investment”, although it was still a bit unclear how this differed from “early intervention”. And National were ready to open the purse strings up a bit more as the Government books got into better shape following the GFC and Christchurch earthquake.

The biggest immediate shift would be that National’s tax cuts it had passed in 2017 would have gone into effect. This would have moved the lower two income tax thresholds up significantly, while also eliminating the Independent Earners Tax Credit, which National are right now quite ironically relying on to make their new tax cut package more progressive. Other tax cuts in 2018 or 2019 would definitely be possible.

Some of the other policies would be weaker versions of things Labour was pushing for and had largely won the argument on. For example: Labour wanted to increase paid parental leave to 26 weeks, National wanted to increase it to 22 weeks. Both parties were pushing for boosts to Working For Families, but Labour went for bigger ones.

In infrastructure the Roads of National Significance program would have continued apace, and PPPs would have been in far wider use. One imagines quite a few highways around the country would have an extra lane by now. National were also promising boosts to suburban rail.

In criminal justice the three strikes policy would not have been removed and police would have been given new powers to search people’s homes without warrants. It’s likely that the problem of Australians sending their technically Kiwi criminals here would have still been big, but National and NZ First’s response would have been “tougher”.

In health National were promising boosts to allow for more elective surgeries, but not funding on the level Labour was. Jonathan Coleman had created a range of interesting initiatives in mental health that could have been expanded into wider programmes.

In education the charter schools would have continued, and National was keen on introducing the ability for every primary school student to learn a second language - although its not clear this would have happened very quickly. National Standards would have survived.

Treaty issues would be interesting - in this scenario National would no longer be governing with the Māori Party, and NZ First might have pushed against the various bits of quiet co-governance already in train in 2017. Christopher Finlayson would still be Treaty Minister at this point, and would likely have steered a fairly similar course in terms of actual settlements.

Housing is a particularly interesting one. This issue was the thing hurting National the most at this point, and it had already started to rev up the social housing build programme. During the election it promised to double the First Home Buyer grant that it has now scrapped seven years later. And Nick Smith was in the midst of boosting funding for housing infrastructure.

As long-time readers will know, I’m strongly of the view that Labour’s biggest housing policy of all was the NPS-UD Phil Twyford introduced in 2020, which forced councils to zone for far more housing around transport links. It is not inconceivable to see someone in National introducing a similar change - after all it built on the experience of the 2016 Auckland Unitary Plan, and National MPs who were just becoming quite important at this time such as Chris Bishop certainly would have backed it. Then again, National had nine years to sort out planning reform and never managed it, and revolt from its homeowner base caused it to renege on its deal with Labour to allow for more townhouses - so perhaps not.

National also had a policy of getting debt to 15 per cent of GDP by 2025. It’s very doubtful that would have happened, because of what my next section will cover.

How crisis would have shaped the 2017-2020 term

I’ve largely focused on election policies from 2017 in the section above, which is a bit unfair because over three years National would have come up with all sorts of new policy I can’t fully envision, given those three years didn’t happen.

But another big reason is that this was a term riven by crises.

A few months before the election the disease Mycoplasma Bovis was detected in New Zealand cattle. Just months after it was confirmed to have spread to four separate farms. The Government undertook an expensive but eventually successful effort to entirely eradicate the disease. There is no reason to think that National would not have done the same thing and taken the same $1b fiscal hit.

The March 15 terror attacks a year and a half later shook the country and compelled the country into immediate legislative and diplomatic action. Given the loopholes used by the killer to purchase weapons and the inevitable public outcry, I believe National would have undertaken some kind of legislative crackdown on guns had it been in power, although it likely wouldn’t have gone quite as far as Labour did, or been quite as rapid. It’s hard to see English helming anything like the Christchurch Call or gaining the huge international recognition Jacinda Ardern did after the attacks, but as an extremely experienced politician he would not have handled the situation badly.

Which brings us to the crisis to end all crises: Covid-19.

No one knows exactly what National would have done in power when Covid arrived, but I think we can get a pretty good idea by looking across the ditch. Australia was ruled by a centre-right party of similar instincts and undertook largely similar policies to New Zealand, including lockdowns, managed quarantine of arrivals, and massive fiscal stimulus.

Indeed, these were all things that the National opposition called for in New Zealand, so it seems likely they would have occurred in some form under English. There would be differences around the edges. I think National would have pushed a similarly incredibly expensive wage subsidy but not a lot of the other ‘jobs for nature’ style stimulus spending. MIQ would have been a rolling political nightmare whoever was in charge, and National would have faced many similar questions about who was let in and who wasn’t - although I think it might have started to lift controls a bit earlier, and perhaps would have allowed more employer-sponsored MIQ places for foreign workers. Lockdowns would have been a little lighter and perhaps lifted a bit earlier, as National MPs are generally more receptive to business concerns than Labour ones.

But big picture I think English, Joyce, and Coleman would have enacted a largely successful strategy that, given our geographic and societal advantages, could well have led to the same golden period of Covid freedom we enjoyed in 2020 under Labour. And for that reason I think the party would have won the 2020 election.

Wait, really?

Yes.

2020 was a good year to be an incumbent. Many of those in power received some kind of polling bump as citizens got used to seeing Government ministers every single day announce new ways they were either keeping them safe or paying them money. The centre-right governments in the UK and Australia were both polling north of or around 50% in the middle of 2020. Their real issue was they didn’t have an election at this point to capitalise on this surge.

But New Zealand did, and I believe National would have won1.

Labour in Opposition for the fourth term running would have been…interesting. Ardern would likely have stayed on after the election, but I’m not really sure how powerful she would be as a opposition leader, as opposed to a prime minister. Perhaps she could have stayed above the fray and let the rest of the front bench go extremely hard against National, perhaps she would have muddied herself in the attack. Perhaps she would have just quit once she became pregnant - given she was a fairly reluctant leader of the Labour Party in the first place this is far from impossible. It’s very hard to know!

I do think Labour would have found many ways to successful attack a fourth term National Government governing with NZ First. The party might even have led some polls in 2018 and 2019, which would have seemed like a revelation after a decade behind. 2017-intake MPs like Kiri Allan would have shined particularly bright.

But that wouldn’t stop the Government getting a huge boost in 2020 during the pandemic - and exploiting it. In such uncertain times, wouldn’t voters prefer the “strong and stable” extremely experienced Bill English to the Labour rabble, who at this point hadn’t governed since the long ago days of 2008?

It goes without saying that had National won in 2020 it is almost certain it would lose in 2023.

Much as 2020 was great for incumbents, 2023 was terrible. Voters all over the world have blamed their Governments for inflation and high interest rates and punished them accordingly. Add in the natural forces of gravity against a party in power five terms and it would have been curtains.

But who would be leading Labour? Would Ardern have really stuck out two election losses? Would Grant Robertson be sitting in the ninth floor right now, or Chris Hipkins, or some other new super-star MP who had come in at 2020?

The possibilities are endless, once you change one little bit about the past. Which is why these are so fun! Thanks for sticking with this and thanks for reading.

Reading recommendations

• Andrea Vance’s blockbuster scoop on serious allegations about census forms being used to help TPM.

• Tova O’Brien’s scoop on trouble within the ACT Party.

• Thomas Coughlan on the Budget.

• Me in Stuff on Joe Biden’s war on cheap Chinese EVs. At a certain point you have to ask - is the US more interested in saving the planet from catastrophic climate change or stopping China be as powerful as them?

• Me in Stuff on the UK election.

• Speaking of the UK election, there’s really too much good reading to recommend in one go. If you’re a freak like me, just get amongst. Sam Freedman on Substack is a good place to start.

While idly sifting through Treasury’s proactive release of mini-Budget papers, I spotted an interesting line.

“Due to the sensitive nature of the proposals being put forward, the Climate Implications of Policy Assessment (CIPA) team has not been consulted to review these results.”

This passage appears in Treasury’s appraisal of the emissions impact of the Government cutting the “feebate” (aka the Clean Car Discount) and ETS spending subsiding industrial decarbonisation.

You may ask - why are Treasury the ones looking at the potential impact on the climate and New Zealand’s emissions budgets of Government decisions? It’s certainly a reasonable question! Especially since the Ministry for the Environment (MfE) have a a whole team set up to review the climate impact of various Cabinet decisions, checking the work of other agencies. This was a big win for former Climate Minister James Shaw - that all Government decisions with a climate impact get a proper assessment, which was then peer reviewed by this newly set up squad of public servants at MfE.

In this case, Treasury didn’t consult this team, “due to the sensitive nature of the proposals being put forward”. In other words: They were worried about leaks.

This is quite funny given both the policies were National Party manifesto commitments, but clearly the actual emissions impacts (they make the 2030-onwards climate budgets much tougher) were deemed too important to risk becoming public early.

Some worry about confidentiality is understandable - the Government’s first few months were rocked by a series of serious leaks. But I’m more interested in what this might say about the attitude of the new Government towards MfE itself.

MfE’s rapid growth under Labour

When Labour was elected in 2017, MfE was a minnow of an agency, with just 349 staff.

Size isn’t everything - Treasury had less than 500 people! - but it is something. Treasury has no real competitors in the public service1, while MfE’s advice on things like agricultural emissions would always be going up against MPI’s take (2455 staff in 2017), while its advice on energy would be up against the hulking mass of MBIE (3366 staff).

But the Sixth Labour Government had a lot of environmental policy, from cleaning up waterways, to creating a brand new Zero Carbon Act, to consenting denser homes, to reforming the RMA.

And so it went on a hiring spree. MfE roughly trebled in size over six years, growing from 349 FTEs in 2017 to 1049 by 2023. Much of this growth was in policy advisors - there were 520 as of 2023, more than the entire staff of the Ministry just six years earlier. And they produced a lot of policy, largely to the liking of the last Government. When they partnered with MPI, as they did for the attempt to price agricultural emissions? Not so much.

Every institution has a view of the world, no matter how impartial it claims to be. Ministries can mould themselves to shape new Governments somewhat, and individual might have deeply heterodox views from their peers, but you can generally see patterns in how certain agencies respond to things.

Treasury’s famous instruction guide for the Fourth Labour Government’s economic policy is one such instance of this, but it is hardly alone.

Another example I’ve written about here before is the different ways MfE and MPI see climate change. In their contrasting Long Term Insights Briefings, MPI suggested climate-driven food scarcity would actually be a good thing for New Zealand economically, as it would drive up the price of our exports, while MfE had a very different view.

The way forwards

The Government are making cuts across the public service, so some loss of staff at MfE are inevitable. The Government has asked them to trim 7.5% - larger than some other agencies, but not drastically large. If other agencies shrink by a similar amounts then MfE does not lose relative power.

Thus far these cuts have taken the form of voluntary redundancy - which might prove fairly popular. The payouts can be quite strong and a lot of the policy folks will be very hireable elsewhere.

Ideologically, it might seem obvious that National would want to cut jobs at MfE, preferring advice on things like farming from MPI, or energy from MBIE, who are both far more interested in economic factors. The cutting out of the CIPA team from the Government’s flagship climate policy thus far certainly suggests something of that nature, although that could also just be Treasury itself.

But MfE will be crucial for the Government’s replacement of the RMA, which they have a lot of experience with, having helped to replace it under the last Government already. They are also at the heart of the very controversial fast tracking bill, running the process itself as well as helping to develop the policy.

That doesn’t mean all is fine sailing for MfE. But they are definitely an agency to watch closely.

Have a great day.

Kiwis are increasingly distrustful of mainstream news media. You can see this in AUT’s new release of its annual survey, which found just 33% of the country trust the news most of the time, or from opening any social media website.

AUT’s survey provided plenty of ammo for mainstream media’s traditional enemies, particularly as the media itself wrung its hands over the results. Often these enemies are media entrepreneurs who use their difference from the mainstream media as their main selling point - generally while delivering little more than opinion and analysis built on facts established by the MSM they love to hate. Others here and abroad just don’t seem to like that there is a power source they can’t control which can say mean things about them: See basically every time a local businessperson uses the phrase “tall poppy syndrome”.

But I’m not here to write another stirring diatribe about the importance of good widely-read news reporting, to explain the economic sources of our decline, or to paint all of those 67% of Kiwis as idiots. Even if we ignore the people who have a quasi-financial interest in hating journalism, there are some good faith people who point out that other industries don’t just complain about their customers when the customers sour on their product1.

Instead I want to offer one partial-solution. Show your working.

Now, I am far from the first person to suggest something similar, and there are people who have been in the business longer than I’ve been alive in New Zealand who are doing work to fix this problem. But as I am writing from (hopefully temporary) exile from daily reporting I figured I might be able to be a bit more frank.

Before I explain why showing our working is so crucial, let me lay out an unbaked theory on the increase in media distrust.

• News websites do feature more opinion content than traditional outlets used to, and every opinion article is a chance to make someone hate you. This is because opinion is cheap and often very well-read, while journalism is expensive and sometimes unpopular.

• The above problem is part of a wider issue with internet journalism: We have too many metrics now, and the metrics incentivise cheap content that draws eyeballs in the short term, not quality content that builds trust. Those incentives can be (and often are!) ignored, but do have some impact. This is a world away from the bundled world of traditional newspapers or TV bulletins, where audiences were generally fed their vegetables alongside dessert.

• People read the news as a series of atomised and disconnected articles now, rather than as a single bundled product. When you just see some disconnected articles shared on social media by someone mad at them instead of the whole news product it is easier to dismiss the rest of the content.

• The highpoint of media trust recorded in this specific survey was in 2020, when the country was under something like war mobilisation against a virus, and was remarkably united politically.

• The Public Interest Journalism Fund became a meme. The meme spread so far because it had the tissue of truth (the Government was funding journalism) hiding the big dumb lie behind it (the Government was not buying off journalists for uncritical coverage, NZ On Air is a statutorily independent body that has been funding journalism for decades, and the clause about the Treaty is not a smoking gun.)

• The country is changing in various ways and the news media is often where this change is experienced, and is thus consciously or unconsciously blamed for it. If you hate the rightward-shift of the electorate it is much easier to blame the media than the country as a whole. If you hate increasing social liberalism it’s easy to blame a media conspiracy pushing “rainbow ideology”. This is intensified by the natural inclination of online media to write provocative headlines.

• There are far fewer reporters than there used to be and the ones left over are clustered near centres of power or chained to their desk. You can’t see them on the sidelines of your local school rugby game any more - they are in a room somewhere in Auckland or Wellington.

This is not a complete picture and I’m not the first to point these issues out. But I think we can start to address these issues by lifting the curtain a bit.

Why explaining is winning for reporters

The most common defence we have to all the problems identified above is that the readers don’t get it. They don’t understand the process that goes into professional reporting, so they equalise a blog post and a piece of news that cost tens of thousands in lawyers’ time to get published. They don’t understand that some days reporters are expected to write three or four major stories because of how the internet has decimated the advertising market. They think because you believe an MP saying a certain thing is newsworthy you either hate or totally agree with said politician.

This defence is far from perfect, but it has merits. And the best way to deploy it is not to quietly complain to each other on social media, it is to be as transparent as possible about all the decisions that go into a news story.

Let me use some examples from my own career, not because I am anything special, but simply because I am the one writing this piece. (There are many reporters who already do a better job at this than me.)

I try to respond to people on Twitter who complain to me or ask questions my reporting. I don’t reply to everything or to people clearly trying to bait me, but where. I can I find that engaging is useful and disarms the haters somewhat, who often see you as an entity not a normal person.

Often those who are the most cynical about me accuse me of having sat on the balcony during the Parliament protests about the vaccine mandates. I usually reply with a link to one of the YouTube videos of me walking through the protests livestreaming every single interaction I had, from cordial interviews to attempts to bar me from entry. This usually ends the argument!

I was far from the only reporter to go right into the protests, but I have taken the obvious lesson from the experience: Showing your working works. If a reader can see with their own two eyes the exact process that went into you reporting something, they are far less likely to assume ulterior motives or evil manipulation of facts - after all they get to experience the same thing as you.

You can extend this to pieces of written journalism when you have the room to do so.

In a recent piece of mine on the public service for Stuff I was at pains to explain the reporting decisions I had to make in order to make the story possible, such as using the Public Service Commission’s definition of what a public servant was. I was happy to admit that this was not a perfect definition, but it had the virtue of already existing. Despite the piece covering very politically sensitive grounds, I have not received much hate from anyone who seems to have read the story.

I think what is crucial here is not just showing off, but also showing humility. It’s easy and very satisfying to write the sentences the New York Times often writes, the ones about how they talked to 47 sources for a story or something2. It’s harder to admit in the terse language of news writing what you don’t know - where there are gaps in our collective or individual knowledge of a topic3. It’s hard too to admit to assumptions - but we still should do so. Sometimes those assumptions are very defendable and should be explained - like say the assumption that political polls that meet certain professional standards do represent the views of the country. At other times the process of checking some hunch or assumption is the meat of actual reporting.

This doesn’t mean constantly second-guessing yourself. It means treating audiences as adults who deserve to see some of the ingredients of the meal, not just what’s on the plate. When done well - and many reporters are fantastic at this already - it brings audiences with you and makes them properly trust your reporting. Hopefully even those who disagree with your reporting decisions can pinpoint why they disagree with them, and may decide that you have made an innocent mistake, rather than a biased one.

There are limits of course. Some reporting processes are opaque to protect sources. Mediums that aren’t online have space constraints that make this kind of explanation of reporting decisions impossible. If you spend all your time arguing about your reporting process online you won’t have enough time to go out and get more stories.

But I do think we should lift the curtain a whole lot more. Because in my experience what it generally shown behind that curtain is not anything partisan, but just a group of overworked people trying to tell stories that both inform and excite readers. Where mistakes are made - and they are! - they generally come not from bias but from a lack of time to do the job properly. Explaining all of that can only help.

Recommended reading

• It’s been a long time, again! In the weeks since we last talked I’ve started a new monthly column in North and South, so pick that up if you want to read more of me. I’ve also written a long piece about the challenge facing Chris Bishop in housing for Stuff.

• Stuff’s running tally of public service cuts are a great example of showing your working.

• This piece from +972 on a new AI tool used by the IDF.

• Thomas Coughlan’s exit interview with Grant Robertson.

• The Infrastructure Commission’s scathing view on Auckland Light Rail.

• Times Radio on the Labour MP they made up.

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Our brains were not built for mass society.

Even in a relatively small country like New Zealand it is impossible to really comprehend the sheer number of people making individual choices that add up to public life. We can use the magic of polling to ask very specific questions at very specific times, like who exactly people will vote for, but this knowledge is limited: We understand a single stated output but nothing like the mass of large and small inputs that fed into it. We are given a murky snapshot of a single peak several days ago, and as pundits or political tragics we sketch in the rest of the mountain range, based on our own preoccupations, something we saw online, or the highly-selective range of people we talk to. Other data like election results or the use of certain Government service is similarly limited. It illuminates but only with the thinnest of rays of light.

And yet mass society is in fact governed and talked about by a group of people with regular human brains, making regular human decisions. This is only possible through the use of political fictions.

Political fictions are a somewhat more developed form of “legal fiction”. A legal fiction is essentially (I don’t have law training) a rhetorical device used in order to help make a complex judicial decision. The classic one is “the man on the Clapham omnibus” - a supposedly reasonable and right-thinking man who one can use to think through how ordinary society might perceive something.

This one jumped right on over into politics and lives under a variety of names, from the “Waitakere Man” to “the median voter” to the “swing voter”.

There is no one median voter, completely in the middle of all political spectrums. Talk to voters for any length of time and you will find them seriously heterogeneous, with a bundle of views typically associated with one party but then other views far to the left/right/up of another.

That this median voter does not exist does not make the concept useless. It makes sense for politicians and pundits to try to think through how someone who might jump between parties thinks of issues, although breaking these voters down into distinct groups is probably more useful. I’ve done it myself! But it is a fiction. And it is not alone.

Here are some more political fictions that play a large role in New Zealand public life:

• The Budget. The workings of the state are so variable and complex and responsive that the actual “appropriations” of money legislated for are never what is actually spent. Projects go over or under, more or less tax revenue comes in, greater or fewer kids go to school or adults turn 65. Most of it is extremely informed guessing and planning. It is undoubtedly very useful.

• The beltway. There are undoubtedly issues that matter more to people involved in public life than those who don’t read political news closely. But that group of people is amorphous and there are plenty of issues that get labelled “beltway” (or “fringe”) before gaining greater prominence.

• The “X party base”. I use this one a lot as it is very useful as a term to describe something a bit more than the party membership but a bit less than everyone who voted for a party at the last election. In reality these bases are not as stable as they might appear, and will always be shifting if only because older voters are always dying and younger voters are always turning 18.

• “Evidence-based policy”. There is this imagined paragon of policy that is non-political and just takes the facts as they are. Certainly, some policies based on more evidence than others, and this might even make them better policies. But the process of gathering evidence is far from a neutral process and different sets of evidence can often disagree.

• “The family home”. Now, obviously family homes do exist. But a brief look at New Zealand’s tax battles over the past decade shows the wider concept of “the family home” is something more than the literal house a family lives in. What if said family rents it out when they move overseas for a few years? What if it is held in a trust? What if it is part of a farm? These questions are not unanswerable and IRD try with their “main home” exemption, but it’s clear the wider concept is not so certain.

• “Mum and dad landlords”. Given that landlords are generally older people, many of them will have children. This does not materially change anything about their behaviour as landlords.

• The “working class”. New Zealand has very few manufacturing jobs left, but some kind of male manual worker is still what most people think of when describing the “working class” - looking less at income levels and more at a set of other social signifiers. In reality the group of people who work for a living in non-professional jobs are more likely to be cleaners or carers or some other type of service worker.

This is a non-exhaustive list, and I’m open to accusations that this definition of “political fiction” is a bit too broad - that I am taking in things that are simply useful concepts like “swing voters” and mixing them with the real business of governing.

But it is that business of governing where I think the biggest political fiction exists of them all: The notion of infallible governing competence.

Governing as a game of QWOP

I started to think about this post after attending a very interesting lecture from the LSE’s Abby Innes, about her provocatively-titled “Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail”. Innes sets up Thatcherite/New Labour/Brexit Britain and Soviet Russia as twinned opposites: Closed political movements that are so committed to some kind of materialist utopia that they fail to adapt themselves to reality and instead decay. There are clearly differences between neoliberalism and full-bore totalitarianism, but Innes was more interested in the quite funny commonalities, like the constant need to set dates five years or so in the future where everything would be worked out.

This is not an endorsement of her entire analysis or anything, but one commonality that Innes hones in on does seem particularly useful: A belief in infallible governing.

When it comes to the mechanics of government, both systems justify a near identical methodology of quantification, forecasting, target setting and output-planning, albeit administrative and service output-planning in the neoliberal case and economy-wide outputs in the Soviet. Since the world in practice is dynamic and synergistic, however, it follows that the state’s increasing reliance on methods that presume rational calculation within an unvarying underlying universal order can only lead to a continuous misfit between governmental theory and reality. These techniques will tend to fail around any task characterised by uncertainty, intricacy, interdependence and evolution, which are precisely the qualities of most of the tasks uploaded to the modern democratic state. […]

For all their political antipathy, what binds Leninists and neoliberals together is their shared fantasy of an infallible ‘governing science’ – of scientific management writ large. The result is that Britain has reproduced Soviet governmental failures, only now in capitalist form. When we understand the isomorphism between Soviet and neoliberal statecraft, we can see more clearly why their states share pathologies that span from administrative rigidity to rising costs, from rent-seeking enterprises to corporate state capture, from their flawed analytical monocultures to the demoralisation of the state’s personnel and, ultimately, a crisis in the legitimacy of the governing system itself. This time around, however, the crisis is of liberal democracy.

Essentially, Innes argues both systems drink their own Kool-Aid. They believe that through the right type of goals-based measurable governing one can build a utopia, they just have different ways of getting there: Pure planning or pure markets.

A lot of Innes’ argument is specific to the UK, where the state does appear to be in more visible disarray than in New Zealand.

But I think there are things to take from this idea. A lot of the discourse surrounding Government suggests there is generally a “right option” to take and that knowing this is as simple as reading the advice correctly and taking the right soundings. Innes argues that Governments actually need to do more experimenting - to try things and throw them away if they don’t work. But doing this would require politicians to be honest about the fact that they are not perfect creatures capable of always divining what is right. It would require them to admit that sometimes they barely know what is going on in Government, because modern states are giant leviathans constantly doing thousands of things at the same time. And it would also require the media acknowledging this complexity.

Consider KiwiBuild. It was a policy seemingly built on the supposition that once in Government Labour would simply be able to turn a tap named “new houses” and shoot out 100,000 in ten years. In order to keep the dream alive and quantifiable once in Government a target of 1000 in the first year was set. It gradually became obvious that this would not be possible.

KiwiBuild was rightly critiqued as an embarrassing failure. But I have no doubt that the lessons it taught both Phil Twyford and the wider public service were probably useful ones - indeed, ones that might have been carried over into the more successful state house build or the zoning law reform Twyford pushed for. This doesn’t mean the colossal fuckup of KiwiBuild was “worth it”- it just acknowledges that things aren’t always so simple.

Another good example of this complexity surrounds the upgrade of the Interislander ferries, a project cancelled by Nicola Willis soon after taking on the role as Finance Minister. I have no idea if that was the right decision or if the binary option of “right and wrong” is useful here. I doubt anyone does. Officials who have thought about this far more than you or me certainly have a view, but they are not super-human. I don’t think Willis being a Stephen Hawking-level genius would make any difference to the fundamental series of choices she had to make when cancelling the project.

Procurement for these large-scale projects is where you get to see the really pointy end of governing hubris - the kind of thing that saw Jacinda Ardern promise light rail in an impossible timeframe. Governments constantly write or commission detailed analyses of projects and what they should cost, only to be proven wildly wrong by the complexity of reality - or perhaps just taken for a ride by contractors who underbid, or can’t really conceive of complex projects themselves. Said states write very detailed contracts that private actors fail to comply with, and the state responds by simply writing even more details into the next contract. It becomes harder and harder to admit that neither side really has any idea how to build big things efficiently any more.

Part of this is a failure of imagination. We talk about the “ship of state” as if new ministers can turn the rudder one way and see the ship go left or right. But really governing is more like that “QWOP” game where you have to make someone run by controlling all their limbs individually, only instead of pressing a key to make a thigh move forwards you have to write a Cabinet paper. The levers you push and pull always take months to take effect and the impact they make is almost always is hard to sort from the noise. It is very hard.

This notion that politicians could govern perfectly but simply don’t feeds into two ideas that I think are harmful: That politicians are all corrupt and/or idiots, and that there is some kind of AI could be trusted with their job. Worse, politicians themselves seem to occasionally believe it, especially while in Opposition.

If we were to let go of this idea of infallible governing, we could retain the very useful notion that governments and ministers can get things wrong, and that they can get things right. But we could stop pretending that some kind of perfect politician exists who could get it right all the time, and we just need to elect them. We could stop buying into the intellectual arrogance that presupposes that a few measurable goals came make public servants suddenly achieve outcomes they couldn’t before. And we could talk more honestly about what can be achieved in three years of governing.

It is hard to imagine breaking out of this paradigm. But not so long ago the main political fiction was the divine right of kings. Things change.

Recommended reading:

• It’s been a long time! I have written two longer reads for Stuff I think readers of this newsletter will enjoy: This one on whether we have too many public servants, and this one on whether we have too few MPs.

• James Meek with a very clear-eyed take on where things stand in Ukraine. Goes well with this older piece that explains that Russia can build a shell for about one tenth of the price the West can manage.

• Ezra Klein making the most cogent case I’ve seen for the “dump Biden and replace him at the convention” argument.

• Joel MacManus has been doing fantastic work on the NIMBY panel trying to stop Wellington get more housing.

• This new Patrick Radden Keefe story about a mysterious death in London is completely unputdownable.

• Isaac Chotiner has been doing unmissable interviews on Gaza, including this one with a pediatrician which I will never forget.

• The ABC series Nemesis on the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison Government in Australia is great. ABC iView seems to work everywhere.

When I wrote my 23 predictions for 2023, I expressed some hesitancy about the practice.

On the one hand, I think they introduce some welcome accountability to the profession. If your predictions are printed in a prominent enough place people can go back and check them once the year is out, and decide if you got things wrong for the right reasons or the wrong ones. Because you will always get some stuff wrong.

On the other hand, the whole idea kind of leans into that notion that we are reporting on a particularly complex sport, rather than the operation of power - that the ultimate stance one needs is one of detached but knowing irony.

I retain this apprehension about the practice. Indeed, I think it has become stronger. Why? Well because I had really bad year!

But accountability is crucial in this dirty old game, even if this is a free newsletter from the other side of the world. So let’s look at my 23 predictions.

1: The result of the New Zealand general election will not be completely clear on the night, as the difference from the yet to be counted “special votes” will be potentially crucial to deciding who governs.

Result: 6/10. The special vote was crucial and there was a wait for them before coalition negotiations began. But the overall question of who was going to be in Government - Labour or National - was clearly decided on election night. So I think I get a few points but not the sweep.

2: At least three quarters of votes will be cast before election day. This is not a particularly heroic prediction - it hit 68% last time, up from 48% in 2017.

Result: 0/10. Wrong, idiot. It was just 48% - essentially reverting to the 2017 mean. It looks like the higher turnout in 2020 (82% compared to 78% in 2023) had something to do with a higher rate of advance voting. Ie: The people who vote every year are probably election-day voters, the ones who flit in and out are more likely to vote early. But the larger change was probably the lack of a pandemic - and perhaps fewer voters being absolutely certain early on.

3: Chlöe Swarbrick retains the seat of Auckland Central. The Greens don’t come anywhere close to winning any other electorate.

Result: 1/10. Swarbrick did win. But the Greens didn’t just come close to winning other electorates, they straight up just won Rongotai and Wellington Central, the two electorates I grew up in and should thus know the best.

4: David Seymour retains the seat of Epsom. The ACT Party don’t come anywhere to winning any other electorate

Result: 1/10. Are you sensing a pattern? I definitely underestimated the ability of minor parties to romp home in 2023, both in the party vote and in seats - ACT’s Brooke van Velden won Tāmaki.

5: Te Pāti Māori increase their total allocation of seats, although not necessarily by winning another electorate.

Result: 6/10. I mean nothing in this prediction is wrong, but it definitely underplays their result quite a bit - they won six of the seven Māori seats!

6: NZ First don’t make it back in. (I think. To be honest I could be convinced. But right now I don’t see it.)

Result: 0/10, go home, stay home, 1 2 3. Despite my silly little attempt to soften this one I was still completely off. Never write Winston off.

7: If Labour are not returned to Government, Jacinda Ardern will not still be leader by the end of the year. Grant Robertson will take over at first but will not necessarily be in it for the long run: Other contenders for the throne include Chris Hipkins and Kiri Allan.

Result: 2/10. Well I mean look, Jacinda Ardern is not leader any more, and Chris Hipkins was definitely a contender to replace her. But I predicted her going after a loss, and predicted an immediate Grant Robertson takeover. Kiri Allan was considered a bit of a contender as she resigned - but was far from a contender by the time the election loss rolled around. So pretty wrong.

8: If National lose Nicola Willis will take over as leader, if Luxon does go. If National lose by a slim margin and he decides to stay on he could do so.

Result: 0/0. National didn’t lose so this one is kind of a wipe.

9: There is some kind of legal action over who gets included in the TV debates.

Result: 0/0. Nope.

10: And the big question? I think when you look at the fundamentals around the economy, and the consistent trend in the polls, it’s more likely than not that National leads the next Government. Thanks to the pandemic people have seen a lot of the Government in the last three years, and I think this combined with some big mis-steps have contributed to a sense of fatigue with the Government that is usually earned after nine years, not six. But to get a bit Nate Silver here, I’m dropping this down from the status of a full-on prediction, because there are just far too many things that can happen before election day to know this something close to sure. In other words, I’d happily bet $100 that National win. But I wouldn’t bet $1000.

Result: 8/10. Like the cowardly idiot that I am, I was too chicken to make this a full prediction. If I had I would have given myself the 10 points.

11: The budget features a decent amount of money for middle and lower earners, either through a tax cut or some other payment.

Result: 0/10. A pretty mealy-mouthed nothing of a prediction, and yet still one that was largely wrong. The big headline announcements from Budget 2023 came not in the form of direct transfers but through things like ECE and cheaper prescriptions.

12: Labour promise a new significant spending policy if they win in 2023 - either in the early childhood space or in dental.

Result: 10/10. Finally some fucking wisdom. Labour delivered on early childhood in the Budget but made it not come into effect until March of 2024, making it essentially an election promise. And they also announced as massive extension of subsidised dental care.

13: Rachel Brooking wins the Labour Party selection for the safe Labour seat of Dunedin being vacated by David Clark.

Result:10/10. More wisdom from my past self.

14: Fleur Fitzsimons wins the Labour Party selection for the safe seat of Rongotai being vacated by Paul Eagle.

Result: 7/10. I was right about the selection. I was wrong about the seat being safe!

15: The TVNZ/RNZ merger is delayed, scaled back, or abandoned altogether.

Result: 10/10. It was abandoned.

16: Barbara Edmonds is made a minister.

Result: 10/10. Not the hardest prediction, but I will take these points where I can get them thanks.

17: UK Labour retain a strong poll lead over the Conservatives, although it slackens significantly as the memory of the Trusstastrophe fades. No general election is held. Boris Johnson makes some sort of attempt to win back power.

Result: 5/10. Labour retain a strong poll lead over the conservatives and no general election was held. It has slackened slightly, from 47-25 to 43-25 per the Politico rolling average, but not “significantly” as I predicted. Johnson resigned from Parliament and is back to being a columnist, for now. So a bit right, but a bit wrong.

18: Donald Trump faces a much steeper climb to win the 2024 GOP nomination than expected, with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis leading in a lot of polls. He doesn’t seem to really rise to the challenge. (There are no actual primary elections in 2023 so we won’t have a clear idea of the eventual winner.)

Result: 0/10. DeSantis doesn’t lead in any polls any more. Nikki Haley has had some good New Hampshire polling but is not leading Trump. Total defeat for my prediction.

19: Joe Biden announces that he will stand again in 2024. He faces no serious primary opposition.

Result: 8/10. Strictly true - Biden’s not really got much of a primary challenge from Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson. But he does have a weird quasi-primary challenge from a Kennedy.

20: The end of the fuel tax cut in New Zealand is fairly messy for the Government.

Result: 6/10. I don’t know if “messy” is quite what I’d call it but it certainly didn’t help Labour.

21: Global inflation slows down significantly from its peaks, without disappearing. There is still fighting in Ukraine at the end of the year.

Result: 10/10. We don’t have a full global figure for the whole year but inflation is down across the board.

22: China’s reopening sees a horrific amount of death for its elderly, many of whom are not fully vaccinated.

Result: 6/10. The data from China is not good enough for me to be sure on this one. We know that there was a big surge in deaths in February particularly. Some estimates put the death toll well over a million.

23: The number of people on the public housing waitlist continues its very slow decline.

Result: 0/10. Wrong! It started to rise again, from 23,129 in December to 25,433. It’s also not “people” it’s “households” so will actually be far larger than that - so particularly bad work, past Henry.

Full result: 106/2201. Not even a pass!

Enjoy your summer!

Mōrena! The year-ender season continues to creep backwards. Spotify Wrapped dropped in November this year and Pitchfork published its first ‘best of 2023’ list on November 20, when we weren’t even 90% of the way into the dang thing yet. At some point these organisations will be dragged to The Hague for these crimes, but for now we all just have to accept that the season now no longer consists of December and a bit of January, but December and a bit of November.

In that spirit, and since I have a newsletter I get to write things in, here is my list of the best things I saw and read in 2023. It’s not particularly political, so if you only signed up for my red-hot analyses of NZES data, I’m sorry.

My favourite films from this year

I’ll be honest, nothing blew me away like Avatar: The Way of Water did in 4D last year. It helps that it was literally blowing air and water at me while I watched, but boy what a time in the cinema. Big Jim supremacy.

There was a welcome dropoff in superhero drek this year - they still released plenty of it, but its strangehold on the meta-culture seems to have been broken by the Barbenheimer phenomenon and failure of The Marvels1. Hopefully at some point soon you will be confident when walking into a cinema that you won’t have to have binged full seasons of two different shows to properly understand a new film.

Number 5: Rye Lane

The best rom-com in yonks succeeds by not having much of a conceit. I guess it mostly happens in one day on one long walk - much like Before Sunset, just in South London instead of Paris. But really it’s mostly just two well-written characters who you like getting to know each other. It probably helps that they are both movie people and I saw it in one of the cinemas featured in the film (on Rye Lane!) - but this really is just a sweet film to cheer oneself up with. Unlike my next pick.

Number 4: The Killer

I am a huge David Fincher head and think his work on Zodiac and The Social Network gives him a claim to be one of our greatest living directors. His very clinical look, which requires hundreds of takes and some dim-ass lighting, has become the kind of house style of Netflix2, where he helped to create House of Cards and filmed this movie. But despite it being widely imitated, it’s still just incredibly exhilarating to watch. Even if it is in service of a pretty thin story about a hitman on the run.

Number 3: Killers of the Flower Moon

Look, it is definitely too long. But when you are working with real historical fact sometimes you just want to put it all on the page, to show how cruelty actually works: It’s not always meticulous or well-planned. Sometimes it’s just opportunistic, or repetitive, or relies on one idiot nephew telling another idiot what to do. The final scene where Marty essentially turns the whole thing into a true crime podcast? Just fantastic.

Number 2: Oppenheimer

This kind of movie is extremely my shit, in that it is mostly about mid-century US politics, not physics. God imagine how boring this movie would have been if it was actually about science, and not the much more interesting subject of power.

I don’t always love Nolan but he is firing on every cylinder here.

Number 1: Poor Things

Yorgos Lanthimos usually makes very cold and weird movies: See The Lobster, Dogtooth, and my personal favourite The Killing of a Sacred Deer. These movies are often funny, but not fun.

Emma Stone seems to have broken through to his warm Greek heart however. Her second collaboration with him is still weird and is still very dark, but is also bursting with life and tenderness. I can’t really explain the plot except to say “horny Frankenstein”. Very much worth your time.

My favourite films I first saw this year

One of the best things about living in London is how easy it is to see old films at the cinema. I won’t go into as much detail on these ones as this post is long enough.

• Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus is the film pictured at the top of this post, and simply blew me away. It’s about amorous nuns in a convent in Tibet, although it was actually filmed entirely in studio, which is wild. Only surpassed for me by another classic of Powell and Pressburger: A Matter of Life and Death, a film where a guy literally appeals his death in a court in heaven. Somehow it works.

• The Night of the Hunter is a movie about a man stalking children that terrified me. An unrelentingly bleak nightmare, which is not something you expect for a black and white film from the 50s. Wildly beautiful.

• Sunset Boulevard was the best movie I saw this year and needs no introduction.

My favourite books I read this year

I was going to do a whole list of new books from this year, but only a handful of the books I read this year3 are actually from this year, making a “top five” thing a bit silly.

So here are the five best things I read for the first time this year, organised by format rather than rank.

Best politics book: George Orwell’s The Lion and the Unicorn

One of the funniest things about contemporary political discourse is the use of the word “Orwellian” to mean “thing I don’t like”. It is usually wielded by people who would despise the firmly socialist Orwell were he alive and writing today.

Probably because he is so over-referenced, I’ve neglected reading him much in adulthood, to my own detriment. David Runciman’s excellent new podcast put me right and onto this fantastic essay, written in the darkest hours of World War II, when the UK was facing the Nazis alone and looked set to lose. You get that right from the first line:

“As I write, highly civilised human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.”

We are so used to reading about World War II from the faroff vantage point of history. Reading about how a very intelligent person thinks it is going to go as it is happening is a clarifying shock. The essay is framed around how exactly England might win the war: His answer is democratic socialism, which doesn’t end up happening like he thought it might but does kind of happen after the war.

Yet in making this argument it reaches far further: His wife Eileen puts it best, describing the essay as “how to be a socialist while Tory.” This is why the essay has lived on and been quoted by Conservative Prime Ministers. It features some of the best writing about a living breathing political nation I have ever read. As an artifact of history it is fascinating, but even aside from that it is just a strong read.

Runner ups:

• Rory Stewart’s Politics on the Edge is about as good as contemporary political memoir gets.

• Kerry Howley’s Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs is an uneven but very interesting look at surveillance politics.

• Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future is an earnest attempt to use fiction to write a series of essays about climate policy.

Best fiction book: Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These

I’m late to this one.

Small Things Like These is a novella about a working class town in Ireland in 1985. It is more specifically about a moderately successful coal merchant having a moral crisis when he sees something he shouldn’t have at a church-run laundry. Many books deal with these kinds of themes, but I can’t remember reading anything that quite shook me as much as this did, or took me in as deeply into one family’s life. And all in a book you can read in one sitting!

Runner ups:

• Graham Greene’s The Quiet American was my favourite until I read the above and also blew me away. A book about the Vietnam War written long before it started. And a book about how having American-style moral certainty can be far more dangerous than being a crusty old British cynic.

• Cormac McCarthy’s Stella Maris is entirely made up of conversations with a therapist, something I would usually find tiring. But in this book it is not just exciting but terrifying.

• Eleanor Catton’s Birnham Wood is a nail-biting thriller about the country we all call home. At points I couldn’t really work out if it was satire or not, but it is a whole lot of fun.

• John le Carre’s A Perfect Spy. My favourite non-Smiley le Carre. Almost biographical, so pairs well with his recently published letters, or the new doco based on his actual memoir.

Best history book: Replenishing The Earth by James Belich.

Noted Kiwi historian James Belich takes on an insanely ambitious question: Why did the English-speaking world shoot ahead of everyone else for a few hundreds years? The answers are not as simple as the ones usually offered in this big sweeping world histories - it’s not just Guns, Germs, and Steel or whatever - but are consequently far more satisfying.

As ever with Belich, it’s full of wild statistics and new ways of looking at the past, for example:

• At a time it was reasonable to predict that “The Tasman World” of Australia and New Zealand would soon surpass the UK in importance and size, with Melbourne at its heart.

• Almost 10% of Pakeha males experienced bankruptcy during the 1880s.

• The US was poorer than Argentina and Cuba in 1800.

• One German early immigrant couple apparently has 3500 Kiwi descendants.

• Most English-speaking “newlands” (think Canada and New Zealand) doubled their population in a ten-year period at some point in the 1880s, a wild amount of growth we can barely conceive of now.

• The actual process of emigration was more dangerous than we realise. One in four children died on one particularly disease-ridden ship between Britain and Victoria in 1852.

• New Zealand formed 400 newspapers in its first 40 years as a country.

I could keep going!

Runner ups:

• W.B. Sutch’s The Quest for Security is a great but slanted primer on early New Zealand social and economic policy up til 1966.

• Christopher Clark’s Revolutionary Spring is a game attempt at taking on the revolutions of 1848 in a single book.

• Sam Tanenhaus’ Whittaker Chambers is a fascinating insight into an almost forgotten scandal in US history that helped spark the McCarthy era and Richard Nixon’s career. In this instance there really were reds under the bed.

• Stephen Kotkin’s books on Stalin have lived with me for the last few years, and I finally finished the second one this year. Essentially a history of the world via one man’s desk. So meticulous you will fall asleep sometimes, but what an achievement.

What were your favourite books and movies of the year? Let me know in the comments or by replying.

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One day not so long ago a new Government came into power promising a sweeping set of repeals and reforms as part of a “100 day plan”. This Government was a little bit late getting its work going because of lengthy coalition negotiations, so when it got started it tried to move with pace, setting aside some of the usual weak guard-rails around new lawmaking, like full select committee processes or rigorous impact analysis. The Opposition was predictably outraged, telling the House that “the Government thinks that the most important things they are doing don't deserve a proper impact assessment,” while the Government argued it had a duty to move at pace given the issues at play had just been the subject of a general election.

I’m not talking about 2023 of course, I’m talking about 2017. Labour had just come to power and was moving as quickly as possible to implement an extension to Paid Parental Leave, a Healthy Homes Bill, fees-free, and the families package, which cancelled tax cuts and used the money for a variety of spending measures.

Like National now it was attempting to move fast to make clear to the public that it was delivering on its promises, to set up a sense of change and momentum. And that clearly got in the way of some scrutiny - the Healthy Homes Bill was picked up as a resurrection of an Opposition member’s bill rather than as a brand new law, and Paid Parental Leave skipped select committee as the Government argued the issue had been argued enough.

But officials did get a chance to write up some analysis for these changes, even if they had already been decided on. They did these in what are called “Regulatory Impact Statements” (RISs) - formulaic papers that are supposed to be produced for basically any change that involves a Government changing a law1.

There’s one on the Healthy Homes Bill where MBIE officials try to estimate what the vague promises Phil Twyford was making in the bill would cost landlords and Housing New Zealand. There’s a very flimsy one on Paid Parental Leave. There’s one on strengthening union access and partially banning 90-day trial periods. There’s one on getting rid of National Standards. There’s even one on cancelling the tax cuts, where officials warn that this risks disincentivising work through New Zealand’s steep marginal tax rate.

It is not at all clear that we will get to see these same analyses of the new Government’s legislative agenda.

My former colleagues Thomas and Thomas both broke the story last week that the Government was suspending the RIS for some bits of its 100-day agenda. The exact details of what papers will be exempt and what won’t remain a bit murky - it seems “straight repeals” won’t need a RIS at all but other “new” policies would, although without Treasury’s quality assurance process.

A host of defences of this have been made by the new Government and its supporters. I don’t think they stack up. Here’s why.

Analysis of policy matters even if it is happening anyway

The main argument that the Government has made has been that the impact analysis process is a waste of time on policies the Government campaigned on, as there is no chance of them changing their mind as they have a clear mandate.

This assumes that a RIS is only useful for Governments, which isn’t the case at all.

RISs are gold dust for those of us who watch politics and the operation of power closely, whether as journalists or as Opposition MPs. They give us all a chance to see whether the Government department has properly made the case for making a change (the “problem definition” bit of a RIA) and properly set out the risks of undertaking this change, both in terms of wider effects to different groups (it will cost this group x) and in terms of implementation risks - ie it might just not work at all.

Officials, both at the agency preparing the paper and at Treasury who peer reviews most of the big ones for quality, get a chance to lay out these potential risks and even suggest a different approach to one favoured by a minister. You can actually see this in the just-published RIS on the Government’s move to remove the employment target for the Reserve Bank. This isn’t officialdom killing off reform ideas it doesn’t like - the Government can always pass what it likes - but it is officialdom getting a chance to put its thoughts to public paper.

This stuff is often fodder for attacking Governments with. The risks that rents would go up as a result of tax changes the last Government made were mentioned countless times by the Opposition. Some risks identified by public servants end up happening, leading to even more attacks. This is the lifeblood of democracy: An informed Parliament and commentariat able to argue with not just their views and the official statements of Governments as ammo, but with the very policy papers that Ministers looked at too.

It’s hard not to assume that this is a big reason behind this move by the new Government. It knows the power of a single line of a RIS used ruthlessly in the House and attack ads, even when that single line is actually not that bad in context. It knows that public servants looking at the distributional effects of some of its policies will say things that will result in bad headlines. And it’s had quite a few of them already.

The RIS is a good tool for showing the public this kind of analysis

RISs are of course not the only place this kind of analysis can live - it can be found in Cabinet Papers, departmental reports on legislation, select committee submissions, etc. One assumes that even the fastest moving Government will still produce a Cabinet paper on a repeal of primary legislation, and hopefully that paper will eventually be released to the public.

But the process around RISs has developed into a fairly strong bit of rigour that is worth defending. This process sees:

1. A department suggesting some kind of law change set out its reasons for doing so, including a problem definition, a consideration of risk, and often some detail on why alternative approaches were not taken.

2. A quality assessment on larger pieces of policy from a specialised Treasury team.

3. The publication of the RIS, as unredacted as possible, within 48 hours or so of a policy change being announced.

One of the key reasons the above process works so well is that Treasury are generally (but not always!) the ones who publish RISs, after they have done their quality review. Treasury have a nice little section of their website to do this on and have a culture that encourages openness about policy disagreements within Governments. In my experience, this meant that whenever a RIS was “late” you could call up Treasury and they would either put it up right away or tell you why.

This process is well-known and lets time-poor people2 quickly get to the nub of how a new policy was thought out behind closed doors. That’s worth defending. And if you don’t do it through this process, there’s a good chance someone will just leak some other paper anyway.

Repeals deserve a RIS

Another key argument made by the Government is that the repeal of policies should not require a RIS, as the Government is simply returning things to the status quo, and can rely on the original RIS as a kind of mirror piece of advice.

I think there is a reason the John Key-led Government rejected this argument when it first set up the RIS process. Repeals are never as simple as just returning everything to an exact status quo.

To be fair, there is a spectrum here. Repealing laws that have not yet gone into full force, like the Smokefree legislation, is different to repealing something like the 90 day trial ban3, which has been in force for years.

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But societies and governments change over time, especially in reaction to new laws, even when they haven’t gone into force. There is value in scrutinising, for example, the message that property developers will get when the Government repeals the new planning law known as the MDRS, which was going to make it legally mandatory for all major cities to allow three-storey townhouses everywhere. The planning changes to effect this law are not actually in place, but the repeal will still have a big impact on the construction industry’s confidence and the “status quo” has changed significantly since the law came into place and the original RIS was written.

Furthermore, if the old RIS really is fine to just flip on its head for the repeal, why not just ask the officials to do that? Surely a second look can’t hurt all that much?

The new Government has a mandate for change. Many will decry its rapid dismantling of the hard-won Fair Pay Agreements legislation, reintroduction of 90 day trials, and rubbishing of the Smokefree plan, but these are policies the parties in Government ran on. They have every right to enact them at the speed that they wish. But they should give us a look in on how they’re doing it.

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Recommended reading:

It’s been so long since I’ve done one of these! There are far too many interesting things I want to point you to, and I’m sure I’ve forgotten some below, but here goes.

• Jo Moir’s interview with Chris Hipkins.

• Toby Manhire is very funny on the Government’s moves to de-emphasise te reo.

• I wrote a quick report card on the Government’s first week.

• The is a useful NZ perspective Substack on COP. (Hat tip .)

• This thread on weird TV news moments (mostly UK) is gold.

• I’ve just finished Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, a short book as I am racing to try to finish 50 by the end of the year. Christ it is so good. Like you should just drop everything and try to read it before Christmas. It’s about Christmas - in a small Irish town in 1985. Go find it.

Good morning and welcome to the new New Zealand.

Chris Hipkins remains Prime Minister for now but his Government is now in full caretaker mode, ready to hand over the reins to a National-led Government of some form.

Here are nine things that stood out to me from last night.

Labour’s vote basically halved

On the preliminary results Labour has 26.85% of the party vote, a little more than half of its 2020 total of 50.01%. Here’s how that compares to some other losses under MMP, from worst to best:

• 2014: 25.13%

• 2023 (preliminary): 26.85%

• 2011: 27.48%

• 1996: 28.19%

• 2008: 33.99%

So at this point it is the second worst loss under MMP - just one election after its best.

National actually had a worse night than it seemed early on

National won the election and will be waking up energised right now. But the narrative that set it in early in the night - that National was comfortably in the low 40s and would be able to govern with just ACT - began to slip away as the on-the-day vote was counted, from a party vote high of around 42% to 38.99% where it sits now. Indeed just as Christopher Luxon started to speak the Electoral Commission went from projecting 62 seats for National and ACT to 61. It seems there was a small surge for the left in those later votes. It wasn’t enough to keep Labour in power - nowhere close - but when combined with the special vote it could easily be enough to force National and ACT into some sort of deal with Winston Peters.

This is not to undermine the massive achievement National managed, taking a party from a maelstrom of chaos and defeat in 2020 back to easily the largest party in 2023.

But it is also a lower share of the party vote than Don Brash won in 2005. They are in Government but the other party on the right is far stronger than it has been every other time National have governed. This still isn’t the party of Key and English.

The special vote could easily force National into Winston Peters’ hands

National and ACT could govern alone with the results from the night. Their majority would be just one seat - 61 seats in a 121-seat Parliament - but enough. The boost from the Port Waikato by-election would be somewhat cancelled out thanks to the existing overhang from Te Paati Māori’s stellar performance, which has already added an extra seat to Parliament. Assuming National win that by-election National/ACT would have 62 seats in a 122-seat Parliament - so once again a one-seat majority.

But that’s a somewhat heroic assumption given there are still an estimated 567,000 special votes to be counted - about 20.2% of the total vote. For comparison the special vote was around 17% in 2020 and 2017, although it was a similar absolute size - turnout is down.

On a simple party vote level, National don’t have to lose much of that special vote to lose another MP. If just .99% of the vote - about 20,000 party votes - slipped back to the left on the specials National would lose a seat and with it the ability to govern with just ACT. And usually the right lose more than that on the specials - they lost 1.7% across National, ACT, and NZ First in 2020 (enough for two MPs), and 1.9% in 2017 (enough for two MPs again).

The reasons for this are actually fairly easy to divine if you understand the special vote. There’s a perception that the special votes are mostly from overseas. This is wrong - it was about 14% overseas vote this time and it was about 12.5% in 2020.

No, the special vote is largely two groups who swing a touch more left than the general population: People who are outside of their electorates for some reason, but not outside of the country - think students and young people in general who travel more, - and people who enrol on the day they turn up to vote. It’s not that the specials are 100% left or anything, it’s just that they typically lean quite a bit more left than the non-special vote.

Then there’s the overhang

Another route to Christopher Luxon having to pick up the phone to Winston Peters is a bigger overhang created by Te Paati Māori winning two more seats.

An overhang, if you’re not familiar, is what happens when a party wins more electorate seats than its party vote would allocate it if New Zealand’s electoral system was purely proportional. Since it is more of a hybrid, these MPs are allowed to sit, and there are no “levelling” seats for other parties created to maintain proportionality. This means Parliament gets bigger.

TPM already created a one-seat overhang by winning three seats on the night - more than its party vote share would entitle it to. It is also behind by just 487 votes in Te Tai Tokerau and 495 votes in Tāmaki Makaurau. If it won either of those seats it would make Parliament even bigger - 122 seats without the Port Waikato by-election, or 123 with it. That makes that National/ACT majority that little bit harder to reach.

But this is not quite certain. Maybe the special votes don’t go as left as they usually do. It’s certainly possible, but I wouldn’t bet on it. More likely we own’t know the full picture of this Government until after November 3 when the full results including the specials are announced.

Labour lost across its heartland

Labour won a flush of seats in 2020 that it could never expect to win in a normal election. MPs in places like Whangarei and Whanganui and Rangitata and Ilam had a pretty good idea their days were numbered. So it’s no real surprise they lost there as the red tide went out.

But Labour also lost in the seats it would usually never worry about. Helen White has a razor-thin majority of 106 in Mt Albert - Jacinda Ardern and Helen Clark’s old seat, a seat that stuck with Labour through the dark election defeats of 1990 and 2014. Deborah Russell is behind by 106 in New Lynn. These seats could flip or get safer when the special vote comes in, but Labour’s loss in Mt Roskill, where Michael Wood probably assumed he had a seat for life, looks certain - National is ahead by 1429.

Obviously the Green Party electorate vote had a part to play in this: The Greens ran a two-tick campaign for Ricardo Menéndez March in Mt Albert. More strikingly the party swept the capital’s inner-city seats - more on that in a minute.

Labour’s turnout was dismal

These electorate results themselves are more symptoms of Labour’s loss than cause. The cause is the collapse in the party vote, which we discussed further up. Part of this will be switchers, but a sizeable chunk looks to be people staying home.

Overall turnout looks to have dropped from 82.2% in 2020 to 78.4% in 2023. It seems to have hit the left particularly bad, as drops in turnout typically do.

In Labour’s traditional South Auckland stronghold of Mangere, for example, there were 32,000 valid votes in the last election, and 19,000 votes as of last night. That means that even though Labour won the seat by a massive party vote margin, it contributed far less to the overall party vote across the country, which is what really matters. In nearby Manurewa, another Labour stronghold, the turnout dropped from 31,000 to 20,000.

Meanwhile National’s strongholds did not see a big a turnout drop. 42,000 people turned out to vote in the true blue Christchurch seat of Selwyn in 2020, and 40,000 turned up this time - a drop of just 2000. 46,000 people turned out to vote in the north Auckland seat of Whangaparāoa in 2020, and 38,000 people turned up as of yesterday. As you can see, people already vote in higher rates in blue seats than red ones - but it seems this difference was far more stark this time around.

You can also see this in the margins by which National hold their safest seats.

The largest Labour majority is 8385 in Mangere. The largest National majority is more than twice as large - 19,330 in Whangaparāoa.

The special votes will change this - but not by that much.

The Greens now control Wellington

The Green Party seemed to like the taste of winning electorates. Tamatha Paul has convincingly won Wellington Central. Julie Anne Genter is ahead in Rongotai by a likely insurmountable 792 votes, and I heard some talk last night of Labour candidate Fleur Fitzsimons conceding, although this is not confirmed. And in Auckland Central Chlöe Swarbrick cemented her shock win from 2020.

Basically, the Green Party successfully squeezed Labour out from the left. The young and educated voters in these electorates decided they would happily go two ticks Green and stick it to a party that wouldn’t even discuss a wealth tax or any other real leftist policy.

The party will be celebrating these wins and their increase in the party vote. But with Labour this weak a reasonably strong Greens is a given - 10.78% is solid and will increase after the specials, but is quite a lot lower than what they were polling.

What will the electorates mean? Well the Greens will now have some more Parliamentary funding, and a stronger foothold in these communities. But they will also have all the duties and responsibilities that come with holding a local seat - which sometimes involves advocating for your constituents even when you disagree with them, or just spending hours and hours of your life at school prizegivings. It will be interesting to see whether they can hold onto the seats when Labour get some strength back.

Te Paati Māori dominated

Labour won every Māori electorate in 2017. In 2020 TPM managed to wrestle one back, and with that foothold it is now a threat to Labour in all of them.

It’s hard to overstate quite how seismic the shift against Labour in these seats was. Nanaia Mahuta has been the MP for her seat under its various names since 1999 - years before the woman who banished her from it last night was even born. She won Hauraki-Waikato by almost 10,000 votes in 2020, and is set to lose it by 1,366 votes.

Māori Party co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer was a more predictable win in Te Tai Hauāuru, but her 6,347 is very impressive.

Labour have clawed back ahead in Te Tai Tokerau and Tāmaki Makaurau but by less than 500 votes - those could flip on the specials as discussed earlier.

Ironically, the only Māori seat Labour are safe in is the one where the sitting Labour MP defected. Cushla Tangaere-Manuel looks set to easily send off Meka Whaitiri, who defected to TPM earlier this year from Labour but never really explained why.

Hipkins’ future is wholly unclear

The normal thing to do after leading your party to a defeat in the 20s is to resign. Hipkins was fairly clear that option was on the table last night. But unlike Helen Clark in 2008 he did not resign right away. What remains to be seen is whether anyone wants the job other than him. Taking over as opposition leader after a bad loss is no easy feat. It’s a hospital pass, it’s the worst job in politics, it’s all those things - but it’s also the only real route to Prime Minister. Just ask Christopher Luxon.

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