This was offered to a media outlet ‘accepted’ but not published. Excerpted from the just published In Open Seas.

The Labour Party halved its vote between the 2020 and 2023 elections (while National barely increased voter numbers). The coronial enquiries into the last election are yet to be held, but they will conclude Labour’s loss was partly because of  factors outside its control – like the unwinding of the COVID crisis, partly political factors but also because of inept policies.

In fact Labour was elected in 2017 without an overall policy framework – although a few of its ministers knew what they wanted to do in narrow areas. It established a range of unmemorable working parties to give them policies which were easily captured by slogans but it had little genuine policy content.

The consequence was that the Ardern-Hipkins Government was largely inefficient and ineffective. Perhaps the prime example is that it did not understand its flagship policy enshrined in the Child Poverty Reduction Act which, if implemented, would ultimately have reversed the Richardson-Shipley tax and benefit cuts of 1990-1. So it achieved little reduction in child poverty; the Luxon Coalition Government will achieve less.

My just published book, In Open Seas: How the New Zealand Labour Government Went Wrong: 2017-2023, is a detailed account of many of these policy failures. Its broad conclusion seems likely to apply to Luxon’s Coalition Government when its achievements are reviewed in three years. It is easy in Opposition to be critical of the Government’s policy. It is much harder to do better.

This is well illustrated by the current fracas over Health NZ. Labour’s criticisms are very damaging, although the Government has been scoring own goals too. What is not being reviewed though, is the recognition that the entire policy framework, with its emphasis on centralisation and generic management rather than on patient needs and professional involvement, may be wrong. In power Labour may well continue with its past policies based on this framework and be subject to similar criticisms.

What was instructive, which I realised while writing In Open Seas, is that repeatedly New Zealand starts off with a poorly conceived policy framework, which becomes almost impossible to break away from, even though it proves ineffective. That requires careful analysis and political courage. Instead, the policies are patched and patched again until we end up with Heath Robinson contraptions. They are easily criticised by the Opposition but after an election the roles switch, and the contraptions continue with only more and more patches.

This is nicely illustrated by our carbon emissions regime. While tackling a vital issue its implementation was poorly designed decades ago and it has proved impossible to develop effective remedies because each re-implementation, no matter how effective, generates a group of powerful political interests which veto significant change. (Remember Muldoonism?)

Not surprisingly, the electorate despairs. The party-list shares of the two main parties fell from 75 percent in 2020 to 65 percent in 2023. As 2020 suggests, coalition governments may not be inevitable, but what seems certain is that if the current government does not lift its game or Labour similarly fails when it returns to government, the public will become increasingly disillusioned with the main parties. It may turn to minor parties resulting in the fragmentation we see in France with its associated political shambles or perhaps it may even turn to authoritarian solutions as is happening elsewhere.