Matisyahu's Blog

Although we won’t have an official final result until 3 November, by then all the special votes would have been counted, it is clear that New Zealand voted for change. With this vote for change the internet has been over whelemed with hot takes, bad takes and a whole lot of cope with people reading into the election result messages that I don’t think represent the mood of why New Zealand voters made the collective decision they did. For the sake of being upfront, I voted for Chris Hipkins for my local MP but I gave my party vote to the Greens.

What we saw in the election was the result of three major problems that the Labour party failed to deal with (I use Labour rather than ‘the left’ because Greens and Te Pāti Māori had great success with a larger party vote and picking up electorate seats), those two failures are: a) failure to control the narrative – if you don’t step up and develop a narrative to explain your policy then your detractors will create their own narrative and that narrative will become the dominant one in the public discourse b) the failure to deliver on promises such as the polytech reform, dismantling DHBs, Kiwibuild and the promise to buiild 100,000 homes by 2028 (100,000 in 10 years, 10,000 per year) c) the failure to have a vision beyond the narrow confines of neoliberalism.

Those were the big issues but then there were the smaller issues that had an cumulative effect, ministers being caught out not declaring conflicts of interest regarding investments etc, there there were ministries caught ‘spending up big’ on going away parties while New Zealanders were tightening their belt. Then there was the denial that there was a cost of living crisis (link) (link) – if as the prime minister you avoid acknowledging the blatantly obvious then don’t be surprised that the voter feel as though you’re out of touch with the needs of mainstream New Zealanders.

As for Chippy (aka Chris Hipkins), he’s a nice enough guy but the problem is that he inherited 5 years worth of unfulfilled promises and tried to get things back on track by trimming back the exhaustive wish list in favour of focusing on the ‘meat and potatoes’. The problem is that the damage had already been done, the writing was on the wall and the electorate had already made the decision long before he arrived that they wanted a change in direction.

‘The Working Group’ did a great post-mortem from a left wing perspective.