WHAT NATIONAL PARTY supporters will be discovering over the next few months is what 2023 will look like. Will the next general election be a full-scale assault upon a mistrusted Labour government, like 1975? Or will it more resemble the Australian Labor Party’s campaign of 2018: a bland, poll-driven affair which Labor (along with virtually the entire commentariat) expected to win easily, but which the incumbent Liberal-National Coalition transformed into a surprise victory? Will Christopher Luxon end up channelling Rob Muldoon, or Bill Shorten? And how will Jacinda Ardern respond?
Labor’s mistake in 2018 was to overestimate the strength of progressivism in twenty-first century Australia. (The NZ Labour Party made the same mistake in 1975.) Labor’s MPs and on-the-ground operatives were disproportionately drawn from the cosmopolitan cities of Sydney and Melbourne. They were convinced that, in those places, the Liberals were already beaten, and that the Right lacked the demographic heft in the provinces to offset its urban decline. Labor just didn’t have the social reach to perceive how well Scott Morrison was doing in those places where people still made things, grew things and dug things up.
Luxon and his advisers must avoid falling into the same trap. In their case, of course, the proposition is reversed. National’s strategists appear to be convinced that New Zealand remains a fundamentally conservative country, whose citizens will run a mile from the radical progressivism Labour is poised to unleash upon the electorate over the next two years. In this expectation, they may turn out to be as fatally overconfident as Labor’s Bill Shorten.
Those conservative commentators who have been both surprised and appalled at the news media’s laser-like focus on Luxon’s religious and moral principles should stop being shocked, and ask themselves why it is happening.
For New Zealanders under the age of 35 there is no lived experience of the period in this country’s history when every Sunday the churches were full. Very few of today’s journalists will have attended Sunday School. What little understanding they have of Christianity has been shaped by the antics of preachers like Brian Tamaki. The picture of religion carried in their heads – and the heads of young people generally – is likely composed of gay-bashing American bigots, cold-blooded Isis killers, and The Handmaid’s Tale.
Calling oneself a Christian in 2021 is a risky political business. By 2023, it could be fatal.
Conservatives should also understand the dangerous strength of the conceptual association of Christianity and misogyny in the minds of New Zealand women – young and old. The vast gender gap which has opened up between Labour and National strongly suggests that the latter has yet to fully assimilate just how profoundly feminism has influenced the values and expectations of half the population.
For a male politician to declare himself an opponent of abortion has become a highly provocative political act. It suggests an unwillingness to either acknowledge or accept the idea that a woman’s body is not something over which men are entitled to make legal and moral judgements. One wonders whether National fully grasps just how many women are likely to find Luxon’s attitudes an electoral deal-breaker.
Nor is it simply a matter of offending younger voters. Second-wave feminism is inextricably intertwined with the women of the Baby Boom Generation. Not all of them, of course, and arguably not even a majority of them. (Remember Phyllis Schlafly?) But, enough of them, when set alongside the younger generations of New Zealand women, to constitute a formidable electoral hurdle for the National Party, in general, and Luxon, in particular, to clear.
Nor is feminism the only potential minefield National and its new leader will be required to traverse. If they seriously believe that Labour is going to allow their right-wing opponents to remain vague on the issues te Tiriti o Waitangi, co-governance, Three Waters and the historical legacy of colonisation, then the Opposition is in for a very unpleasant surprise.
Jacinda Ardern is not Helen Clark. She is not about to dismiss Maori nationalists as “haters and wreckers”. Nor will she permit the passage of anything remotely resembling the Foreshore & Seabed legislation. The Prime Minister and her colleagues have pinned their long-term hopes on what they believe to be a generational shift in attitudes towards race relations in Aotearoa. Rather than moving with speed to allay Pakeha fears, as Clark and her Attorney-General, Margaret Wilson, did in 2004, Ardern may draw a very different line in the sand.
If the polls show National cruising to an easy win on the strength of widespread frustration with the Labour Government, presenting a fulsome conservative manifesto for which Luxon and his colleagues are anticipating a substantial electoral mandate, then Labour may opt to “go hard, and go early”. Reversing the ideological polarity of Muldoon’s 1975 blitzkrieg, Ardern and Labour may go on the offensive against the Opposition parties.
Conflating National’s and Act’s positions on the highly controversial race-related issues listed above, Labour may opt to cast the parties of the Right as purveyors of unabashedly racist policies which, if implemented, would generate massive resistance from Maori and Pakeha alike. National would be portrayed as a party mired in the prejudices of the twentieth century, and Act as a party willing to enforce its far-Right beliefs without giving thought to the consequences.
Labour, alongside the Greens, could present themselves as the parties whose values are those of younger New Zealanders: champions of the end-of-the-alphabet generations who no longer have the luxury of kicking the can down the road on racism, sexism and climate-change. In short, Labour-Green would be presented as the progressive future, and National-Act as the racist, sexist, Climate Change-denying past.
All would hinge, as did Scott Morrison’s fightback, on whether or not more New Zealanders subscribed to the government’s ideas about the future than to those of the opposition parties. Is New Zealand still the country that rallied to Don Brash’s in/famous “Nationhood” speech, or, nearly 20 years after the then National leader spoke at Orewa, has the balance of conviction within Aotearoan-New Zealand society shifted decisively to the Left on the critical issues of sexual and racial equality, fulfilling the promises of the Treaty, and making the sacrifices necessary to address climate change seriously?
When Rob Muldoon launched his blitzkrieg election campaign of 1975, promising “New Zealand the way YOU want it”, he was in no doubt that Labour had advanced a fatal distance beyond the tolerance of the voting public. He had been cheered to the echo in enough packed-out town halls to know that he was kicking-in an unlocked door. Does Jacinda Ardern have it in her to bet the Labour farm on New Zealanders not being willing to be dragged back, yet again, into the National Party’s ideological comfort zone? And, if she does decide to go on the offensive, is Christopher Luxon really the right man to stop her?