If the election was scheduled for next week, Hipkins could win. Luckily for Luxon, it’s next year

By Chris Trotter*

"There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune”. Those words, taken from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, are often quoted in the context of politicians facing the hard choice between doing it now, or not doing it at all. Shakespeare’s line is, however, as much about the ripeness of political conditions as it is about the realisation of personal ambitions. If the political tides are running against you, then putting your hopes to sea is more likely to be greeted with jeers than cheers. As is the case with most human endeavours, timing is everything.

There is precious little of the Caesar about Christopher Luxon. New Zealand’s prime minister has never been a Rubicon-crossing, die-casting, kind of guy. The smooth boardroom takeover, carefully prepared and managed by the leading corporate shareholders, is more his style. Power has come to him relatively easily: he has certainly not waded through oceans of blood to seize the imperial diadem.

Indeed, Luxon’s biggest political successes have come at the end of long periods of other players’ political failure. In the case of the National Party, following six years of tumultuous political fratricide; and in the case of the prime ministership, after three dispiriting years of governmental overreach and rising political toxicity. Luxon is much more New Zealand’s Prince of Tides than its Master Mariner.

After months of what the Prime Minister’s critics have condemned as political drift, however, there is growing evidence that the tide of events – especially those related to the New Zealand economy – may be carrying Luxon’s coalition government towards a safe electoral harbour.

If the pundits are correct, about halfway through 2026, just as ordinary New Zealanders are beginning to focus their minds on matters electoral, then they will also be noticing an appreciable drop in their monthly mortgage payments; a small but encouraging up-tick in house prices; and headlines trumpeting modest economic growth. For a great many of these voters, the modesty of the incumbent government’s achievements will be a close match for the modesty of their expectations. And, for the survival of the National Party-led coalition, that will probably be enough.

For the Labour Party, however, even a modest recovery in the nation’s wellbeing can only spell disaster. By all appearances, Chris Hipkins’ strategy for electoral victory in 2026 is simply to present Labour as the “Not-National Party”. For it to work, all the news, and all the indicators, have to be bad, bad, bad. When the Labour leader puts the question to the voters: “Has life got better or worse for you under National?”, it is vital that the instant and angry reply is: “Worse!”

What Labour needs is for the price of butter to remain above ten dollars for 500gms, and for a leg of New Zealand lamb to stare up forlornly at the median voter from the supermarket chiller wearing a price-tag of $62.00. It is equally important that those same median voters’ power bills and rate demands continue their inexorable rise, and that the putative value of most New Zealanders only significant asset, their family home, continues to fall. Essentially, when it comes to the electorate’s crucial “hip-pocket nerve”, Labour is praying for sciatica.

An enraged electorate will overlook the emptiness of the Opposition’s policy-file. It’s overriding electoral impulse is simply to be rid of the incumbents: to “throw the bums out” in American parlance; and to bring their mismanagement of national affairs to a decisive and punishing conclusion. If they think about the Opposition at all, it’s in terms of: “They could hardly be worse!”

In other words, Labour is pursuing the perfect strategy for winning an election scheduled to take place next week. In the bleak and demoralising winter of 2025, most bookies would put the chances of the present National-Act-NZ First Coalition Government holding onto power at fifty-fifty. The news has been politically unhelpful for months, and the economic indicators offer little hope of immediate relief. Frankly, any government contriving to position itself so poorly just one week out from election day would deserve to lose – badly.

Labour’s problem, of course, is that there’s still more than a year to go before New Zealanders head for the polling-booths. Between now and then, the efforts of the Coalition Government’s most useful ally, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, are offering better-than-even odds of delivering ripe electoral fruit.

The economic consultant, Cameron Bagrie, has framed the central bank’s recent conduct in motoring terms. Its first priority was to press down hard on the monetary brakes to bring inflation under control. Now, having slowed the economy, it’s time to tap the accelerator by lowering interest rates. If all goes according to plan, then by this time next year the economy will be cruising along nicely.

As has become a habit of social-democratic parties all over the world, Labour is set to fall between two stools. Unwilling to embrace the bold economic policies of the Greens, but equally reluctant to present themselves as orthodox economic managers, distinguishable from the parties of the Right only by their superior grasp of basic economics, Labour has opted, instead, to let the voters project their own hopes and aspirations onto the Labour brand. Hipkins and his colleagues intend to win through the combined effect of what National, Act and NZ First are actually doing; and what its supporters assume Labour is planning to do.

Hipkins’ strategy represents the “politics of subtraction” at its most plodding and uninspiring. Take enough votes off National to win, and then fob-off the Greens and Te Pāti Māori with a few inconsequential policy concessions. Govern for that half of the New Zealand population that can survive – even thrive – under the tutelage of “basic economics”, and leave the other half to get by as best they can. This might be a workable strategy while National is performing badly, but it becomes completely unworkable the moment the better-off half breathes a sigh of relief and congratulates its traditional electoral champions for getting the country back on track.

If that’s the way it goes; if it is indeed Christopher Luxon who is credited with getting New Zealand “back on track”; then it will not be on account of his having taken the tide of events at its flood and single-handedly navigated the ship of state into the open sea. Rather, he will owe his success to the powerful global tides in which the New Zealand economy has been carried forward, and to the strong monetary breeze which the Reserve Bank has directed into its sails.

Clearly, New Zealand’s forty-second prime minister is no flood-tide-taking Caesar. But, he does appear to have extremely good timing – and even better luck.

*Chris Trotter has been writing and commenting professionally about New Zealand politics for more than 30 years. He writes a weekly column for interest.co.nz. His work may also be found at http://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com.