By Natalia Albert*
So much coverage on whether Chris Hipkins can survive this drama. Does his personal matter, does it not. That is the wrong question. It assumes Labour's electoral fortunes are primarily a function of its leader's personal credibility, and that framing tells us more about the limits of our political coverage than it does about the state of the left bloc. Whether Hipkins did or did not do something his ex-wife posted about on Facebook is immaterial.
Here is the structural version of Hipkins drama. The Left Bloc is running on fumes. Every public poll since 2023 tells the same story: Labour cannot govern without both the Greens and Te Pāti Māori. A list of policies is not a coalition or good campaign strategy. It leaves zero room for any of those relationships to deteriorate, any of those parties to have a bad campaign, or any of those numbers to move in the wrong direction on election night. Meanwhile, The Opportunity Party sits below the 5% threshold, with no electorate lifeboat. Every one of those votes disappears entirely. That is a structural hole no amount of leader resilience fills.
The question worth asking is why Labour has allowed that hole to persist. Labour has spent 30 years operating on a single strategic principle inherited from the first MMP election: never commit to a coalition partner before the votes are counted. Never signal. Never endorse. Keep every option open and let the numbers decide. That doctrine made some sense in 1996, when Winston Peters held the balance of power and chose National against most predictions. It has calcified into a systematic refusal to build the coalition architecture that MMP requires.
The clearest evidence that this is a chronic failure, not a current-cycle one, is what Peter Dunne published last month. A careful, thoughtful piece arguing that the Governor-General should play a more active role in government formation, specifically to stop NZ First from playing the two main parties off against each other. His proposed fix: the Governor-General formally invites the largest party to attempt to form a government first, and if that fails, passes the invitation to the second largest. It is a procedurally clean solution to a problem that, Dunne notes, has recurred in 1996, 2017, and 2023.
If this were a problem that Labour's coalition strategy had ever seriously addressed, Dunne would not need to write that piece. The fact that he does — 30 years in — is proof that no one in a position to fix it has tried. And the reason no one has tried is that the ambiguity is not incidental to Labour and National's strategies. It is the feature that makes Peters possible in the first place. Both major parties prefer a post-election negotiation they can control to a pre-election commitment they cannot walk back. Peters is the cost of that preference. Dunne wants a smarter referee. But you do not need a smarter referee if the players have already agreed on the rules before the game starts.
His solution addresses the symptom. The disease is that New Zealand never developed the coalition culture that MMP requires and Labour, more than any other party, has actively chosen not to build it.
What this means for Hipkins
The Hipkins story lands the way it does because Labour has given the press gallery nothing else to cover. There is no coalition offer to analyse. There is no pre-election transparency about who would govern with whom. There is no structural argument about what a centre-left government would look like or who it would include. There is a leader, his personal situation, and a caucus trying to manage the fallout. When a party's entire public architecture is a single person's credibility, every threat to that person becomes an existential threat to the party's electoral prospects.
The standard Labour is failing
The 1986 Royal Commission that recommended MMP was explicit: its value lay in giving voters more meaningful choice and more accountability over who governs them. Post-election deals negotiated in private for weeks after voting closes sit uncomfortably with that intent. The letter of the report does not require pre-election transparency. The spirit of it demands it. That is the democratic standard Labour is failing.
None of this is an argument about whether Hipkins should stay. He is entitled to be judged on his record, not his marriage, and the media ethics questions raised by how a deleted private Facebook post became a national news story in 48 hours are worth examining. But they are a distraction from what matters this election year.
*Natalia Albert is a political scientist living in Wellington exploring how to govern divided societies in diverse, liberal democracies, with a focus on New Zealand politics. She writes weekly on her Substack, Less Certain. Albert stood as a TOP candidate in the 2023 election.
23 Comments
I'd say their biggest problem is being called the Labour Party whilst having very little focus on actual workers.
Kinda ironic, them and the Greens have been at the forefront of identity politics, yet as parties they struggle with their own.
One represents a type who got displaced by offshoring (cheap labour).
The other represents a society which offshored its pollution (offshoring production to slackly-ruled places)
Both wish to consume - to party on - at current-or-greater rates of consumption. Which they increasingly don't produce. Which the fund by selling houses to each other at bigger numbers, or by pumping other Ponzis - sharemarkets; gold prices, whatever.
The problem for the Left is that they have to assuage their consciences, vis a vis not just current others, but all future others. Which cannot be done.
The Right, of course, is more self-important - those little men in suits who thing bigger proxy-numbers will make them bigger.
The problem for both is that Growth is ceasing; this 'war' is not because there is unlimited plenty. Neither bloc is within a bull's roar of addressing the inevitable de-growth. Is TOP any closer?
Fair question.
The author & Peter Dunne propose to screw the scrum to address the Labour & other parties internal incompetence by appointing the GG as referee with additional unconstitutional & undemocratic power.
Get off the grass. This is a feature not a bug in MMP. They fail to acknowledge that democracy is also served not only by the largest voted party having preferences but also by minority parties leading with larger combined votes. Their naive & illogical perspectives would result in a defacto reversion to the status quo of FPP.
Exhibit A: Labour in 2017. I recall upsetting quite a few people by pointing out that instead of following the herd & going with the largest party vote National, Winston going with the 2nd most popular vote Labour Party was actually democracy in action. Minor party coalitions are also found in European countries.
Sounds like the whole point of MMP to me.
Dunne would have been a non-event without MMP.
The electorate, encouraged enthusiastically by much of the media, hasn’t after all this time got to grips with the basics of MMP. Neither have any of the political parties given the appalling number of appalling MPs that have entered parliament on the lists. The majority factor in coalition prospects is that most of the smaller parties are inflexibly entrenched with one of the majors. ACT with National and Greens/TPM with Labour. That feature in itself very obviously creates the both the territory and power than NZF has taken advantage of and in fact how they operate accordingly is exactly how MMP is structured.
The Hipkins story lands the way it does because Labour has given the press gallery nothing else to cover.
Nothing else to cover?! The timing of the facebook thing takes the heat off the fact chippy blew $30 billion on non-covid Labour fripperies. As documented in CV TAG minutes - Chippy double injected young people against medical advice, ignored medical advice about spacing experimental gene therapy shots > eight weeks apart to minimise side effects, not to give a second shot to people who got myocarditis off the first shot etc.
He was to gutless to front the Royal Commission, plenty of time for Women's Weekly family puff pieces but no time for Royal Commissions.
There was too something very disturbing about the virtual persecution in preventing the return of the stranded NZ journalist when he had in front of him clear ministry advice that what he was doing was against the law. Even stranger was that it took court action to obtain an apology. Even at the start of the government in 2017 PM Ardern had to step in and apologise to Australian minister Bishop for Hipkins insulting her. Is there some feature of negativity concerning woman at play here seeing as how he struggled mightily with a question about the definition thereof.
The Hipkins story lands the way it does because people love scandal more than they love policy. News media know that, and are desperate to stay in business.
However, Labour does not help itself by having little discernible policy. And what policy it does have is so carefully bland that it is no policy at all.
Resurrect Michael Joseph Savage, FFS.
He is entitled to be judged on his record, not his marriage
His record is not in any way successful regardless, therefore both are in disarray.
The political behaviour under MMP is a continuation of the reflexive adversarialism of FPP, and is a marker of New Zealand society: positions are rigid and absolutist, we see everything in terms of win/lose, and we don't do collaboration even when it's in our best interests to flexibly cooperate.
We know Labour comes with TPM and the Greens as baggage, and National comes as a package with ACT. The only one who has shown flexibility in thinking is NZF, but the policy they bring to the table?
For God's sake, it's still considered newsworthy if there's the rare case of multi-party support for even the most basic things: what does that say about us?
Society is both immature discussion-level-wise, and kept that way by politicians, the media and (mostly) academia.
And I don't see us getting more aware - we will blame the disintegration coming in the next years, on Trump, war, others, climate - anything rather than an overshot species overconsuming the planet.
Some even accuse those who point this out, as being obsessed with a hobby-horse - :)
Summary of the political ideology: don’t let the facts get in the way of responding to the 24 hour cycle.
NZ First would hardly exists if either the Nats or Labour adopted some of NZ First's, aka Winston First's, policies and that is why he has been successful. The fact that he ensures he also gets a ministerial post that he wants is also part of the deal. Any party leader in his position and that includes DS will ask for a ministerial post. Bye the bye I also agree with W-1st stance on the Ministry of Regulation, get rid off it. Evidently it has grown to quite a behemoth compared with it's budgeted size before being constituted, both in money terms and staff terms.
"None of this is an argument about whether Hipkins should stay. He is entitled to be judged on his record",
And if judged solely on that basis, he and thus his party, will be rejected. How can he promote a CGT without blushing when he binned the proposal before the last election for purely electoral purposes?
I want a fairer society but I couldn't vote Labour knowing that that they could only govern with the help of the Greens and probably the Maori party.
Agreed.
I wonder what would happen if Labour on National started actively encouraging TOP to bring some new ideas into parliament.? Some of their ideas are intriguing, others are a bit hard to accept.
Isnt the main problem with coalitions that it is difficult, if not impossible to implement a comprehensive interconnected economic/social strategy due to the horse trading required?
Taking TOP as an example, how could many of its policy proposals be implemented in isolation...or if they were they would not be effective?
You are judged on your character when you take public office, and the allegations from his ex painted a picture of a man of poor character.
If he didn't want to be publicly lambasted for being a douche, he shouldn't have been a douche in the first place.
I expect he has lost a lot of the female vote - specifically mothers who can imagine themselves in the post birth scenario his ex-described and which I am inclined to believe is true - Politicians in general (male and female) are power hungry /career driven people and I have no trouble believing they would see everything else including their own children as nothing but distractions in the way of their ambitions. Until they need them for a photo opportunity that is.
It would be a lot easier to ignore his character if we had some policy to talk about instead.
It is bereft of thought to consider a man of no substance being capable of delivering any words or actions of substance. He won't last after this election.
Maybe Hipkins and his command-class brethren are part of the problem: the lack of transparency and innovation permeates the part-political culture and acts to reproduce that orthodoxy by savagely attacking rank and file dissenters, so it will only change from the top down.
But how bad will things need to get before there are in-house revolutions?
Duplicate: there's a bug with posting comments.
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