Election 2023: New Zealand Makes A Choice, Reluctantly

Electoral Commission mascot (and abstracted orange figure), next to an orange dog. Text that reads “2023 General Election”.

New Zealand holds a General Election every 3 years, and every election I do a post outlining what is being debated and who the major players are. Our election is to be held on October 14th, and early voting has already begun.

Before I get started, I just want to emphasise that I am making these comments in my capacity as a private citizen. Most especially, my views do not represent that of my employer, or any other part of the New Zealand Government.

New Zealand’s Electoral System

New Zealand’s legislature is a unicameral parliamentary body, which means that our legislature has only one chamber (The House of Parliament) and the head of our government (the Prime Minister) is elected by Parliament from among its number. So, the people elect Parliament, but Parliament elects the Prime Minister.

There are two things you need to understand about our electoral system for anything else I say in this post to make any sense at all. These features don’t exist in the US, or even other Westminster countries, so they need a little explanation.

The first is our Mixed-Member Proportional (or MMP) voting system. MMP is a half-way point between the First-Past-the-Post system used by the UK and US and a true Proportional Representation system. Each election, each voter votes for a candidate to represent their electorate in Parliament (this works the same way candidate voting does in the US and UK), but they also vote for a political party directly. These party votes are tallied and each party gets a number of seats in Parliament in proportion to their share of the Party Vote. A party’s allocation of seats is first filled by any candidates who were voted into an electorate, and the remainder are taken from the Party List: a ranked list of would-be MPs which each party published before the election.

To get into Parliament a party must either win an electorate seat or get at least 5% of the Party Vote. Parties that fail to meet at least one of these criteria get no seats in Parliament and their party votes are effectively discarded from the total votes cast. For more information, see this explanation by the Electoral Commission.

Our system has led to a multi-party Parliament, though the number of parties has been dwindling over time. With the sole exception of 2020 (when Labour governed alone), every government these days is a coalition of one of the major parties (Labour or National) and one or more of the other parties in Parliament.

The second unusual aspect of our electoral system is that we have two parallel sets of electorates. New Zealand residents of Maori descent (New Zealand’s indigenous people) have the option of registering on either the General Electoral Roll or the Maori Electoral Roll. While the party votes from both electoral rolls are added together, each part of New Zealand is part of two electorates – A Maori Electorate and a General Electorate. Which roll you are on determines which set of electorate candidates you get to vote on.

The Contenders

These are the parties I think have a reasonable chance of getting a seat in Parliament. All of them either already have a Parliamentary seat, or have good chance of winning one, base don current polls. A lot of people think of Left and Right as absolute political directions that are common across countries, but that doesn’t make sense to me. New Zealand’s left and right don’t map onto the US’s, despite the efforts of some American pundits to force them to. In fact I have described several parties on this list as left, right or centre in previous elections, and coalitional boundaries shift.

Given the coalitional nature of our politics, here is the left-right framework that makes most sense for New Zealand politics:

• Left is Labour and any minor party that has ruled out working with National or that National has ruled out working with.
• Right is National and any minor party that has ruled out working with Labour or that Labour has ruled out working with.
• In the past I have included a “Centre” category, for parties that can work with either major party, but there aren’t any of those this year.

The Left

The Labour Party led by Prime Minister Chris Hipkins. The current government party, it held an unprecedented 62 seats during the last term, enough to hold Parliament outright. Hipkins took over as Prime Minister earlier in the year following the resignation of Jacinda Ardern. Since taking over, Hipkins has focused Labour’s policy priorities, cutting back on less popular policy ideas and trying to focus more on “bread and butter” issues like cost of living.

The Green Party, led by James Shaw and Marama Davidson, has a big focus on the environment but also social justice issues. While not formally part of the governing coalition, it had It held 9 seats in the last Parliament. The Greens are polling at around 10% of the party vote right now, putting them in a position to do a little better than last election.

Te Pati Maori (AKA The Maori Party) is led by Rawiri Waititi and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer. The party only holds 2 seats in Parliament, while they received less than 5% of the vote last election, Waititi won an electorate seat, which allowed him to bring Ngarewa-Packer in. While Te Pati Maori is polling well-below 5%, they are polling well enough that provided they win an electorate seat(which is likely) they will have 3-4 seats next term.

The Right

The National Party, led by Christopher Luxon, is the main opposition party. They held 34 seats at the start of the term. National was led by Judith Collins last election, but she was ousted after overplaying her hand against one of her opponents in the party, leading to Luxon, formerly Chief Executive of Air New Zealand to take over the leadership in late 2021. On currently polling, National is almost certainly going to hold the plurality of seats in the next Parliament.

ACT is led by David Seymour. ACT is a libertarianish party, but with more of a law-and-order bent than that implies. ACT gained hugely in the last election, going from 1 MP to 10. They look like they are going to consolidate those gains this election, as on current polling they will have 12 or more MPs.

New Zealand First is led by Winston Peters. They are a Trump-style conservative party, but with some policies that will register as more left-wing than that implies (You can find their policies here , and you’ll see they are a bit hard to categorise) that I am counting as right-wing this election (despite classing them as left-wing last election) since Labour ruled out forming a coalition with them this election (and vice versa), while Luxon has said he will make a deal with New Zealand First, but only if he has no choice. And they may indeed have no choice as on current polling, New Zealand First will be able to return to Parliament after the election.

If you’d like to have a look at major policies of each party, you can browse through policy.nz, produced by New Zealand news site The Spinoff.

The Big Issues

Labour started out the term with a massive supply of goodwill following its handling of the initial wave of COVID in 2020, but isolation was much less effective against Delta, with Auckland being placed in Level 3 for months in 2021, while we were among the last developed countries to get a supply of vaccines. Then, just as we were getting COVID under control in early 2022, Omicron came along and the whole isolation approach needed to abandoned. And now, with official responses to COVID in the rear-view mirror, New Zealand is grappling with high inflation, with all its attendant economic problems. The left wants more social spending, and the right lower taxes to give people more spendign money. Both approaches are heavily constrained by the high-inflation environment, voters won’t thank a party that gives them more money if it comes at the cost of higher interest rates, leading to more expensive mortgages and rents.

One big issue on the agenda is co-governance, which is a term describing a new approach to including Maori perspectives in government policy-making. The usual form it takes is to ensure iwi (or “tribe”) representation on minister-appointed boards that are charged with a particular sphere of decision-making.

A good worked example is the “Three Waters” reforms passed by Labour. The idea is:

• Water and sewerage infrastructure will be removed from local government and reallocated to four regional boards that would maintain infrastructure and set rules regarding water use.
• These boards would have a membership made up of both ministerially-appointed members, and members appointed by the iwi that are relevant to the area the board oversees.

Co-governance has a clear left-right separation, with the left being in favour and the right opposed.

Also, unfortunately, there has been a major uptick in conspiracism this election. Several minor parties have formed off the back of anti-vaxxer sentiment, transphobia-related conspiracies and similar stuff (most of this is leaking over from the US, so I don’t really need to explain any of it to you). I haven’t discussed any of these small parties as none of them have any chance of getting into Parliament. The only party with a chance of winning seats that has been willing to pander to these groups at all is New Zealand First, and there’s a decent chance he just does nothing about any of it after the election anyway.

Voter Sentiment

The general feeling I get from voters this election is dissatisfaction. The economy has us all under a lot of stress, and Labour haven’t covered themselves in glory generally this term. At the same time, no-one seems especially enthusiastic about National. The Greens and ACT are often used as a way of showing disapproval for your side without undermining their chance of victory – if you’re a solid National voter, but dislike what National is up to, you vote for ACT instead, since any feasible National government will have ACT as a coalition partner. The same thing happens with Labour and the Greens. As such, it is very strange for ACT to be polling at record highs when National has the clear advantage. This says to me that voters are looking for an alternative, but aren’t sold on National per se./ That means Luxon will have his work cut out for him.

Things to Watch

This is most likely going to be a National Victory at this point, since Labour has ruled out doing a deal with New Zealand First. That means the big question on the 14th will be whether it’s a pyrrhic victory or not. If things go well for Luxon, he will be able to lead with just ACT as a partner, in which case he will probably be able to advance his policy agenda well enough. But if he needs New Zealand First, things are going to be dicey. For one thing, New Zealand First destabilises every government it involves itself with, and this will only be exacerbated by the fact that ACT and New Zealand First despise each other. ACT has already said that they won’t sit around a Cabinet table with Winston Peters, which limits the sorts of deals Luxon can make. As (on current polling) the larger of the two parties, ACT will want more deference, but I doubt Peters would accept any deal that doesn’t give him a plum Cabinet position.

While I don’t think its a likely outcome, I think there is a chance of a hung Parliament out of all of this, and if not that then a chance of a mid-term government collapse. We’ll have to see what Luxon is given to work with, and what use he can make of it.