John Key proved that National did not need a global pandemic to win half the voting public

By Chris Trotter*

Jacinda Arden's impossible win of 2020 was impressive, but it wasn’t an aberration.  At the time, most journalists and academics disagreed. They reminded New Zealanders that absolute parliamentary majorities and proportional representation were generally held to be mutually exclusive. First-Past-the-Post may have possessed the virtue of lending clarity to electoral politics, but such clear-cut results could not be expected from proportional representation. Coalition governments were more-or-less mandated by MMP. And yet, somehow, Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Government had won 50.01 percent of the Party Vote. Her victory had to be an aberration.

But, if the 2020 General Election was an aberration, then what was the General Election of 2011? Three years after defeating Helen Clark’s Labour Government with 44.93 percent of the Party Vote, National’s John Key defeated her successor, Phil Goff, even more decisively. In spite of holding the Treasury Benches during the stresses and strains imposed by the Global Financial Crisis, Key succeeded in lifting National’s share of the Party Vote by 2.38 percentage points to a remarkable 47.31 percent.

While falling 2.7 percentage points short of Ardern’s symbolically important 50 percent+1, Key’s victory was no less “impossible”. New Zealand’s punditocracy has long agreed that, barring the most exceptional circumstances, no government should expect to lift its share of the popular vote after three years in office. Following a party’s initial breakthrough to electoral success, the direction of popular support is almost always downhill.

No less than Ardern, Key had defied political gravity.

Three years later, in 2014, Key came within 0.3 percentage points of pulling-off another impossible result. The David Cunliffe-led Labour Party received even less support than Goff’s. In spite of National holding office for six years, Key held its Party Vote steady at 47.04 percent. Even deprived of Key’s anti-gravity political skills, the Bill English-led National Party won roughly the same share of the Party Vote in 2017 that had made Key prime minister in 2008.

Having won such a decisive plurality of the Party Vote, English and National had every right to expect that the NZ First Party would deliver the numbers needed to keep them in government. New Zealand’s constitution may be held together with No. 8 wire, but the public expectation that the party receiving the largest share of the Party Vote gets to form the next government was in no way diminished by the lack of any legal obligation to make it so.

Winston Peters decision to ignore the rule that most New Zealanders believed him to have created (its actual author was Jim Anderton) and propel into government a Labour Party whose share of the Party Vote (36.89 percent) was 7 percentage points shy of National’s, set in motion the train of political events which has ended up making it almost impossible for any party to attract the 40-plus percent support needed to guarantee effective coalition government.

Had Peters followed precedent and installed Bill English as prime minister, National’s share of the Party Vote (44.45 percent) plus his own (7.20 percent) would have delivered a government controlling 65 seats in the 120-seat House of Representatives. More importantly, it would have delivered a conservative, two-party, coalition government; a vastly more stable and productive outcome than the inexperienced, fractious, and ideologically-riven three-party coalition which Peters’ decision to throw in his lot with the Left brought into being.

Had the Covid-19 global pandemic not intervened, and the finding of English’s replacement not descended into a crude battle of political pygmies, it is probable that Ardern’s Government wouldn’t even have made it to 2020. Except, of course, Covid did intervene, and National couldn’t help itself, which allowed Ardern’s rare combination of twenty-first century communication skills with unforced personal empathy to conjure up her “Team of Five Million”, roughly half of whom returned her Party to office, alone, on a tsunami of public gratitude.

But the political shelf-life of gratitude is short, and all the reasons why, even with “Jacindamania” in full-swing, Labour could attract no more than 37 percent of the Party Vote in 2017 were bound to reassert themselves.

On her best day, Helen Clark was able to attract 41 percent of the electorate to Labour’s red flag – and that’s well short of the 47 percent John Key, on his best day, was able to gather under National’s blue banner. In blunt terms, National’s hold on the New Zealand electorate was once a lot tighter than Labour’s.

But that “was once” is crucial. The emphatic nature of the Covid Election masked weaknesses in both major parties.

Labour, like so many other social-democratic parties around the world, had lost touch with and no longer trusted the people who made up the majority of the population. It’s working-class base in particular was viewed with a mixture of suspicion and distaste. Labour could no longer hide (even assuming it wanted to) the party’s transformation into an organisation of well-educated, well-paid, professionals and administrators.

Whatever else professionals and administrators may stand for (and the list is as long as it is alienating) they do not represent a majority of the voting public.

This should be excellent news for National. It should be guaranteeing poll results well into the 40s and beyond. That it is not; that in 2023 National’s ersatz John Key, Christopher Luxon, could not even manage a Party Vote in the low 40s; is proof of just how badly Peters’ rejection of National in 2017 has damaged the political right.

Historically, National was always careful to make itself the mirror of Labour. If Labour regularly polled in the high 40s and low 50s, then that was where National needed to position itself. In terms of policy formation and party organisation National was careful to follow Labour’s lead – to great success. But when Labour abandoned the policies that had won it half the population, and its vote began to shrink, then National’s relationship with the electorate risked undergoing a similar decline.

Key’s political genius was to gather up the people Labour had abandoned and celebrate them as the “real” New Zealanders. The National vote in 2017 showed how solid this demographic bloc had become. By disrupting it; by setting one half of the National Party against the other; Peters may have opened up a path for himself and his party, but only at the cost of bringing forth a weak and inexperienced compromise National leader whose “winning” Party Vote of 38.06 percent would have made John Key wince with pain.

The fragmentation of the Right unleashed by Peters in 2017 does not have to be the whole story. MMP does not necessarily encourage and/or reward the disintegration of the electorate. What John Key proved was that he and his party did not need a global pandemic to come very close to winning half the voting public. In back-to-back elections he came within three percentage points of attaining that magic fraction, and between 2008 and 2017 his party was never further away from it than six.

New Zealand’s democracy is in dire need of such political homogeneity. A society divided into antagonistic ideological camps can have no future worth bequeathing to its children.

Jim Anderton, one time guardian of the traditional Left, used to tell his followers: “Build your footpaths where the people walk.” It is one of the ironies of our recent political history that the only contemporary New Zealand politician to follow his advice was John Key.

Doubtless the National politicians of today would scorn to commission anything so humble as a footpath, preferring instead to announce yet another road of national significance, upon which we will all be tolled to travel at speed – into the wilderness.

*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.