New Zealand International Review January/February 2026 Volume 51 Number
It is common to say that Arnold Nordmeyer is the greatest Labour prime-minister-who-never-was. His failure was a matter of timing. The misfortune for Grant Robertson, who challenges Nordmeyer for the title, was that he was gay. Three decades after homosexuality was decriminalised, a gay candidate for the premiership was still considered unelectable. Otherwise, Robertson could have been prime minister in 2017 or even 2014.
As his autobiography details, he struggled with being gay in his adolescent years – about the time of decriminalisation – and there are occasional references to later nasty incidents. But Robertson portrays his orientation as a comfortable fact, not a burden – not until the two times he stood for the Labour Party leadership. (Jacinda Ardern tells a parallel story in her biography, except one is left with the impression that being a young woman was a much more dogging experience.)
I do not recall any popular concern about his orientation when Robertson became Deputy Prime Minister in 2020 after Labour’s 2017-20 coalition partner, NZF, failed to win any seats. The position is not as significant in New Zealand as the title sounds and the commentariat portrays. There was no designated DPM in New Zealand before Keith Holyoake was so appointed in 1954. A position rather than a power it is not quite down to Lyndon Johnson’s description of vice president – ‘a bucket of warm piss’ –it involves minding the fort while the Prime Minister is away but so does the minister on Christmas duty.
Typically the Minister of Finance is number two in the cabinet, wherever they are ranked. The power comes from significant policy decisions having a financial dimension. In effect, there is often co-leadership of government; a PM of politics and a MoF of policy.
Robertson was MoF for six years from 2017 to 2023. (He held some other portfolios including, for two weeks after the 2023 election, Foreign Affairs when his predecessor failed to be re-elected. He had been a junior diplomat in New York, where his head of mission, Michael Powles, told him he was too political for a diplomatic career.)
Robertson was not well prepared for the finance job, judged by comparison with his predecessors – Michael Cullen, Bill English and Stephen Joyce. He had no academic training in the relevant disciplines, had no previous cabinet experience and had been appointed to the opposition finance portfolio less than three years before he became MoF. Moreover, the Treasury advising him was not as strong an institution as it had been. His personal economic advisers – each for three years – Craig Renney and Toby Moore are very good economists but they hardly offset the Treasury’s weaknesses.
Robertson’s biography is not very strong on his political philosophy. It is a pity that it did not crib from his maiden speech which portrays him as coming from a traditional Labour background with its ‘progressive’ commitment to social justice and equality.
The biography is more informative on his origins as a political activist in student politics and later as an adviser in the Clark-Cullen Labour Government. He presents himself as a bit of a political thug. ‘The rule of thumb for other offices was that if I arrived in their office something bad was brewing; if Heather [Simpson] arrived, something bad had happened; and if Helen [Clark] arrived, it was to say goodbye.’ He was H3, to H2 and H1.
There is no sense that Robertson was a policy wonk in the way that Michael Cullen, say, was. There is an odd example which he does not tell. (It is written up more fully in my In Open Seas.) Robertson reports, with pride, his involvement in the separation of Archives New Zealand from the Department of Internal Affairs in 2002. The Key-English Government reversed the change in 2011 for no obvious reasons. In 2017, Labour was elected with barely any policy – Opposition parties prefer plotting over policy. One well-formulated policy was to return Archives New Zealand to its 2002 independent status and strengthen it. The DIA resisted, outmanoeuvring their ministers, using tactics which were not entirely honourable. Robertson was one of those ministers, leaving the puzzle of how the government’s policy chief was so thoroughly castled by a department.
The lack of policy direction haunted the Ardern-Hipkins Labour Government. In opposition, Labour had more staff running its social media than policy advisers. In government it set up advisory committees which were largely about being more generous or dealing with anomalies. Robertson’s lists many such improvements; fair enough, but consolidating rather than transformative.
The biography covers a couple of initiatives which meet a progressive criterion. His social unemployment insurance scheme offered a path towards a major extension of the welfare state including the extension of the ACC scheme to sickness beneficiaries. Robertson says he reluctantly agreed to its jettisoning by prime minister Chris Hipkins in the policy bonfire of March 2023. Had its development been just slowed down, it could have been presented as Labour being progressive. Hipkins seems to have canned the policy because it was a de facto tax increase, continuing Ardern’s banning of all new taxes. Robertson spent six years trying to increase revenue to fund social spending while subject to this headlock.
His other major initiative was focussing on ‘wellbeing’ as a public-policy objective instead of personal real incomes. Robertson promises to write a book on the topic, so I shall be brief here. Robertson’s shift to focusing on wellbeing reflects that while once income may have been a reasonable proxy for wellbeing, with increased affluence and new technologies, income measures such as GDP are no longer adequate. It was very much a top-down exercise – as was much of the Ardern-Hipkins changes – with no attempt was made to establish institutions outside government to support and develop the notion. The Luxon-led Coalition easily repealed it.
We need to linger on this. Economic, social and technological change mean that the paradigms which we use to understand and regulate society are continually becoming obsolete and having to be modernised. That task was the traditional role of the liberal left, with the liberal right then consolidating the change. Today, as the Ardern-Hipkins Government illustrated, the dominant left has been consolidating, lacking a traditional leftish analysis of social change. There was no encouragement of their listening to those who thinking about the future.
That is why Robertson’s government looks so conservative and why it has been reasonably easy for the successor government to repeal so much of what it did. In comparison, Walter Nash, Roger Douglas and Michael Cullen all gave New Zealand a new direction. Robertson will not join that pantheon. His natural mode seems to be more a political problem solver rather than a policy leader.
He says that following his running a close second in Labour’s 2014 leadership contest, he decided not to seek the job again. (He had not the power ambitions of a Muldoon.) When Ardern resigned the job was offered to him. By now Belgium, Iceland and Ireland had had gay premiers. He declined, in part because he had a serious back problem – an old rugby injury. Robertson had been a keen rugby player – it is how he met his partner. His favourite portfolio was Minister of Sport where he prioritised the promotion of women’s sport. So much for stereotypes.