By Chris Trotter*
Castin a vote in New Zealand used to be a fairly straightforward business. Since 1938 two parties have dominated the nation’s political consciousness: Labour and National.
Deciding between the two wasn’t difficult. If you sold your labour for a wage and weren’t the least bit ashamed to admit it, you voted for the “party of the workers”. If you devoted all your energies to making a profit, or aspired to that estate, you voted for the “party of the bosses”.
This binary choice was perfectly suited to, and reinforced by, the First-Past-the-Post electoral system (FPP). The single member electorate, simple plurality method of electing the House of Representatives, while not excluding “third parties”, made it extremely difficult for them to secure parliamentary representation even roughly commensurate with their share of the popular vote.
FPP made a “two party system” more-or-less inevitable – especially when the two parties involved mapped so accurately over what Karl Marx called “the two contending classes”.
Labour vs National in New Zealand. Labor vs Liberal in Australia. Labour vs Conservative in the UK. Democrats vs Republicans in the USA. Up until the 1980s, binary, class-based electoral politics was the norm across most of the Anglosphere. It was simple and it worked. When times were good the profit-seekers tended to win elections. When times turned sour, however, the party of the workers was expected to make them sweet again.
For the Two Party System to go on working, however, the contenders for power had to stay in their lanes. When the party of the bosses starts reaching out to the workers, then the structures of democratic politics begin to experience enormous stresses. When the party of the workers embraces wholeheartedly the ideology of the free market, the Two Party System breaks.
Fixing a broken Two Party System, especially one which has been in operation for fifty years (and in some jurisdictions for a century) is extremely difficult.
New Zealand opted to replace FPP with Mixed Member Proportional representation (MMP) in 1993, but the mental habits of the old system’s binary dynamic were much more difficult to replace. The electors were reluctant to cast Labour and National in any role other than that of the nation’s responsible parents. The voters mostly regarded the smaller political parties which MMP made possible as the parent parties’ unruly offspring.
Not a formula for steady or consistent government.
Not the least of the explanations for the unstable succession of coalition governments which the adoption of MMP made all-but-inevitable was the lack of clarity about who and what the new smorgasbord of parliamentary parties represented. By 2026, the bosses and the workers had many representatives.
National’s relationship with the bosses remains close. Money still flows into its coffers from New Zealand’s richest citizens in quantities that none of its rivals can match. It remains the preferred option of the majority of the nation’s farmers, along with the owners and managers of the enterprises that service the nation’s agricultural sector. Indeed, the people who own and administer the industry and commerce of New Zealand, with their families, favour National electorally in all but the most unusual of circumstances. When properly led, the party is capable of attracting close to half the electorate. In 2011, for example, John Key garnered National an impressive 47.3 percent of the Party Vote.
By and large, then, the National Party is still what it says on the tin: principal defender of New Zealand’s “property-owning democracy”.
Ready to step into that role should National ever falter is Act. What the Act tin promises, however, is delivered only in part. Though it presents itself as classically liberal in both politics and economics, Act’s electoral success owes much more to the atavistic impulses of that part of the owning class that most fears and despises the claims of indigenous Māori and working-class Pakeha.
In many respects Act is the contemporary incarnation of the brutally anti-worker sentiments that drove the Reform Party of the early 20th Century. Absorbed, along with the United Party, into the newly-formed National Party in 1936, Reform offered the nascent organisation the rural mongrel from which United’s liberal urban professionals averted their eyes.
Act may preach the gospel according to Friedrich von Hayek, but to get itself over the 5 percent threshold it has always had to offer the red-baiters and Māori-haters the raw political meat that keeps them howling for more.
If National represents the brain of New Zealand’s ruling class, then Act represents its muscle.
NZ First’s political constituency parallels much of Act’s. Small town business owners and the blokes who work for them. Retirees who remember a better New Zealand and young men determined to bring that lost country back.
Since its inception in 1993 the NZ First Party has represented simultaneously those members of the owning class who recoil from the predatory excesses of a free market unchained, alongside those working-class Kiwis who struggle to understand and accept just how comprehensively they have been abandoned by neoliberalism.
Bosses and workers together: a curious cross-class alliance of the aggrieved and the bereaved; New Zealanders clinging to the memory of a country they are no longer certain lies within the political reach of even such a history-defying Time Lord as Winston Peters.
It would be wrong to say that Labour no longer attracts the votes of working-class people, but it would be equally wrong to claim that Labour any longer represents them. The class Labour truly represents in 2026 is the class from which it selects most of its candidates – the Professional Managerial Class (PMC).
The reason the PMC has taken over the Labour Party, rather than form its own (and call it ‘Opportunity’) is because the PMC and the working-class are bound together by the exigencies of the modern state and society. The PMC manages the working-class: teaching its children; tending to its sick and injured; steering is offenders through the grim labyrinth of the courts; monitoring the progress of the jobless and disabled as they navigate the demoralising obstacle courses of the welfare system; guiding the aged and infirm to their graves.
Why else would people whose incomes average $100,000 p.a. pay such close attention to the lives of the poor and the marginalised if they did not provide such a powerful justification for their handsome salaries?
Those who struggle to understand why Labour no longer proposes the sort of transformative policies that defined its past have yet to appreciate that the dysfunctions of capitalism, and the havoc it creates, represent for the PMC a feature, not a bug. Why would the class that benefits most from the failures of the system seek to end them?
In the PMC-dominated Labour Party of 2026 it is always “justice yesterday” and “justice tomorrow”, but never “justice today”.
And the Greens? Which class do they represent?
The answer, no matter how vehemently Chloe Swarbrick may deny it, is that they represent Labour’s constituency before and/or after its years in the workforce. The Greens’ electoral base is the PMC-in-training; the PMC that married money; the PMC in retirement; the PMC gone bush.
It’s why the Greens never challenge Labour head-on. Theirs are the votes of the PMC before its members come to terms with reality. Labour only gets the votes of the PMC after its members decide to get serious.
Te Pāti Māori doesn’t really fit into this political schema. Its primary mission is to represent a people not a class. The politics of ethnicity are very different from the politics of class. Ethnic solidarity precedes class solidarity.
Indeed, as anyone who has studied the history of European colonisation in New Zealand will affirm, the class struggle only really begins after the ethnic struggle has been won.
Until then, determining one’s political priorities is simple: people first, party second.
*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.
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