Though both parties would reject the charge, Labour and National remain staunch upholders of economic and cultural liberalism

By Chris Trotter*

If I had a dollar for every person who’s complained to me that: “This is the most difficult election I can remember.” Well, I wouldn’t be rich, because I don’t get out that much. But I’m sure the reader knows what I mean.

New Zealanders are, indeed,

• perplexed
• confused
• uncertain
• frustrated
• all of the above

by the electoral choices on offer.

What used to be a simple tribal reflex action – tick Right or Left – has become a wearying exercise in sophisticated game theory.

Is Democracy supposed to be this hard?

No, it’s not. So, why has it become so difficult to choose between the parties on offer?

The answer – and it’s a problematic one – is because the parties are deliberately deceiving us.

This is especially true of the major parties.

Both Labour and National have histories reaching back to the first half of the Twentieth Century. Labour was founded in Wellington in 1916, slap-bang in the middle of the First World War. National was founded 20 years later by conservative politicians who saw right-wing electoral unity as the only way of defeating Labour’s “socialism”.

In other words, both of these parties (and the First-Past-the-Post electoral system only had room for two) were class-based organisations. Labour appealed to the working-class and New Zealand’s budding intelligentsia. National spoke for farmers, business owners, and the urban middle-class.

It was an arrangement that mapped almost perfectly onto the actual socio-economic topography of the country. Nobody had to think too hard about how they voted.

That remained the case right up until the 1980s. New Zealand politics was dominated by two great political tribes. What’s more, these tribes became ever more firmly entrenched as the decades passed. It wasn’t unusual for canvassers on the doorstep to be told: “Oh yes, we’re all Labour/National here. My grandfather voted for Labour/National back in the 1930s and the whole family’s voted Labour/National ever since.”

This was an enormously valuable inheritance. It allowed both of the major parties to concentrate on those uncertain margins of the electorate where elections are won or lost, confident that at their backs stood a solid army of loyal voters. Voters who were good for 40 percent-plus of the popular vote in all but the most unusual of elections.

But, as we all know, in the 1980s and 90s everything changed. It changed for farmers, businesspeople, the urban middle-class and, most devastatingly, for the working-class.

Economic liberalism supplanted Keynesian social-democracy, and its mirror-image, cultural liberalism, supplanted the Judeo-Christian moral system.

Capitalism, tamed considerably by the reforms of the First Labour Government (reforms which National undid only partially) was returned to the wild in 1984 and soon resumed its old predatory ways.

The Fourth Labour Government, which set Capitalism free, pretended that it was doing so for the sake of “ordinary working people”. The party was confident that the extraordinary ideological inertia of Labour’s voting “tribe” would protect it (for a while) from the electoral consequences of its betrayal.

Besides, for every industrial worker, postal worker, railwayman, and forester laid-off or made redundant by the economic liberalism of “Rogernomics” (many of whom were now openly declaring that they would never again vote Labour) there were thousands of tertiary-educated middle-class New Zealanders thrilled to discover that the cultural liberalism they had embraced as students now boasted parliamentary champions.

The Labour Party of Norman Kirk may have embraced the radical version of social-democracy that characterised left-wing governments in the 1970s, but when it came to social policy it remained an unashamedly conservative institution. On issues relating to abortion, divorce, gay rights, crime, drugs, and censorship, the Labour Party of the early 1970s still reflected the values of its founders.

In the years between Kirk’s death in 1974 and the election of the Fourth Labour Government in 1984, however, a battle raged in the Labour Party. Political and moral traditionalists, located in the party’s oldest branches and Labour’s affiliated trade unions, fought the tertiary-educated activists of the Baby Boom generation.

These activists saw the demolition of all religious and secular barriers to individual autonomy and identity recognition as the Left’s core mission. Indeed, those who refused to join in the destruction of such barriers should no longer be permitted to call themselves left-wing.

It either never occurred to them, or they simply did not care, that this libertarian stance was going to run headlong into the values of ordinary working-class people. If the ideas of the cultural liberals were to become entrenched in Labour (as they did) then it was only a matter of time before the party’s vast electoral base began to fracture and fall apart.

The social-democratic rhetorical flourishes of Chris Hipkins and Barbara Edmonds notwithstanding, the Labour Party of 2026 is a party driven by the imperatives of economic and cultural liberalism. The red backdrops, the hard-hats and high-viz vests, the happy receptions arranged for Labour politicians at the Otara Market, all of these symbolic gestures are designed to obscure the fact that the Labour Party of today is nothing like the party of our grandparents, parents, or even the party of the Baby Boomers’ youth.

But nobody will say so: not the National Party; not the news media; not the tame political scientists trotted out to re-spread the “conventional political wisdom”. It suits far too many people to have Labour positioned as authentically left-wing, a key component of the “Left Bloc”, and natural antagonist of the National Party and its right-wing allies.

That National and Labour might actually be the right and left cheeks of the same economically- and culturally-liberal arse, is a proposition that cannot, under any circumstances, be put to the voters. That goes double for the pimples called Act and the Greens!

Confusing? You bet! Especially for younger voters. At gut level, Chris Hipkins’ Labour Party simply does not register emotionally as radically left-wing. That becomes even clearer when Hipkins is set alongside the real McCoy. Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani. Chippy does not bear comparison with any of these American “democratic socialists”. Hell, he can’t even be compared to Andy Burnham!

Not that right-wing voters have it any easier. There was a time when both major parties shared a common moral language. Labour and National may not have seen eye-to-eye on compulsory union membership, import substitution industries, and public ownership, but on the big social issues (with the exception of capital punishment) they were in alignment.

In 2026, however, National, too, is an economically- and culturally-liberal political party, with little of real substance to separate it from Labour. A bit harsher on workplace relations, welfare support, and crime perhaps – but only a bit.

Economic radical of the Right, David Seymour, hit the nail on the head when he quipped that his political mission was to: “Keep Labour out of power, and out of the National Party.”

In 2023 hundreds-of-thousands of voters cast their votes for Christopher Luxon’s party in the expectation that it would naturally and forcefully realign New Zealand politics with the values of ordinary people and ensure that the nation’s laws and institutions reflected those values. They had no idea how deeply embedded cultural liberalism – which they called “wokeness” – had become in the upper echelons of the National Party.

What little progress has been made in the “war on woke” is almost entirely attributable to the pressures applied by Act and NZ First.

Speaking of NZ First, it is ironic that if everybody was calling political parties by their proper names; it would be NZ First that, in policy terms, would be compared most favourably with the Labour Party of yesteryear.

Winston Peters and Shane Jones are prepared to promote policies that would undoubtedly put a smile on the face of Norman Kirk’s ghost. They, like Kirk, are proud economic nationalists – not globalising economic liberals.

When it comes to the moral values of ordinary New Zealanders, NZ First’s policies would also resonate. Barriers against the impermissible are not decried by most Kiwis, they are welcomed.

Peters, like Kirk, agrees with them that monstrous things are better shut out – not invited in. If cultural conservatism is your poison, NZ First has plenty in stock.

If only our politicians could be persuaded to communicate truthfully with voters. Let them know who is really who. If that could be cleared up, then casting a vote on 7 November would instantly become a whole lot easier.

*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.