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.
8 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.
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.
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.
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.
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