It’s been quite a fall. At the beginning of 2021 Jacinda Ardern was one of the most popular politicians on the planet. She won a historic election victory the previous year then formed the first majority government since Aotearoa New Zealand adopted the mixed-member proportional electoral system in 1996. The nation enjoyed a long, pandemic-free summer complete with weddings, barbecues, festivals and concerts, a level of personal and economic freedom unmatched anywhere else in the Covid-ravaged world.
But the last year has seen a dramatic collapse in Labour’s poll ratings. The fall was slow at first, with some voters drifting to the Green party, others to National. Then in November the covert war within the National party broke into open conflict. The then-leader, Judith Collins, demoted former leader Simon Bridges, allegedly as punishment for a tasteless joke he told a fellow MP four years earlier; National’s caucus responded by sacking Collins. Christopher Luxon, a former Air New Zealand chief executive elected to parliament only a year earlier, replaced her after a brief leadership contest. Labour’s decline steepened as National under Luxon soared.
Politics is chaotic. Events don’t happen independently and sequentially: they crash into each other, sending politicians, parties and voters spinning out of their stable orbits. “We saw a dramatic mood shift among the public in 2021,” one senior government staffer told me. “As people got vaccinated, their support for lockdowns and other public health measures declined. They saw the vaccine as the solution to the epidemic. But then we had Delta and Omicron, the escape variants, and all the restrictions were back anyway. Support for them shifted very quickly; far faster than we expected.” Ardern has indicated she’d make the same choices again given the circumstances, that it was the right thing to do. But the electorate certainly hasn’t rewarded her for it.
And then there’s the cost-of-living crisis. In some ways an overheated economy is a good problem to have. Unemployment is lower than it’s been for decades; wages are up, growth forecasts are positive, exports are booming. But benign macroeconomic indicators feel very abstract to families paying higher interest rates on their mortgages and putting their electricity and weekly supermarket shop on the credit cards. They’ll be wondering how long that can last and what their government plans to do about it.
There’s been a temporary reduction in fuel taxes and public transport fees to help offset living costs, but Luxon has promised a round of tax cuts if he leads the next government. The main advantage of incumbency is that Ardern and her finance minister, Grant Robertson, can deliver policies instead of just making speeches. The disadvantage is the tendency of voters to bank whatever the government gives them while remaining dreamily entranced by opposition promises.
And Ardern herself has become a more polarising figure. Two years ago she was almost above reproach. In early 2020 a scathing Facebook post critiquing her performance helped end Bridges’ leadership. Since then, the opposition has been cautious about direct attacks. But this year the organisers behind the chaotic and violent occupation of New Zealand’s parliament grounds made groundless allegations of the prime minister’s involvement in a malevolent global Covid conspiracy, the goals and nature of which were never made clear.
The bile directed towards Ardern coincided with a dramatic mood shift. Her favourability and preferred prime minister ratings have declined. David Farrar, a centre-right pollster who does work for the Taxpayers’ Union, a rightwing activist organisation, attributes some of this to anti-mandate sentiment, cost-of-living increases, and the loss of Covid exceptionalism. He also cites the government’s plan for “three waters” reform: the scheme to centralise and amalgamate the nation’s decrepit water infrastructure aims to establish oversight groups to govern the new entities, with representation shared between mana whenua (local tribal authorities) and councils. National and ACT claim the policy is a de facto transfer of water assets to Māori and have promised to repeal it if elected.
There’s no single reason for the government’s poll decline. And there’s no single beneficiary: former Labour voters are switching to the Greens, National and even ACT, while others declare themselves undecided. The government is hopeful that if prices stabilise and the crown accounts continue to improve some of that support will return. But it’s also bleakly aware that, given global conditions, neither of those outcomes are guaranteed. And to reap the gains from that instability, the newly formidable opposition can simply watch, and promise, and wait.