On John Key still being prime minister

The deep truth behind a good meme.

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.

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.