Visitors With Votes.

The Way We Were - And Hoped To Remain: The iconic photograph of Prime Minister Norman Kirk holding the hand of a little Māori boy at Waitangi on 6 February 1973 held out the promise of a future founded upon the uncomplicated and uncontested acceptance of racial equality.  

WAITANGI DAY commentary see-saws manically between the warmly positive and the coldly negative. Many New Zealanders consider this a good thing. They point to the unexamined patriotism of July Fourth and Bastille Day celebrations, and applaud the fact that the character of Aotearoa-New Zealand, and its future evolution, remain matters for passionate disputation, rather than military chauvinism and outsized flags.

Conservatives of a certain age are less confident of the virtue of this annual debate. They look back wistfully to that period of New Zealand history when the constitutive peoples of New Zealand, Māori and Pakeha, gathered at Waitangi to celebrate the 1840 treaty signing which, according to Queen Victoria’s representative, Captain William Hobson, constituted them as “one people”.

In the memories of these people, no Waitangi Day better illustrated this notion of national unity than 6 February 1973. That was the day when the newly-elected Labour prime minister, Norman Kirk, announced that henceforth Waitangi Day would be known as New Zealand Day.

A powerful visual image of Kirk’s intentions for this new public holiday was provided by the photograph of a big prime minister holding the hand of a little Māori child as the two of them made their way across the Treaty Ground. Symbolically, the image suggested that the rising generation of Māori should expect to live lives of equivalent fullness to those of their Pakeha compatriots. The photograph’s clear assimilationist message was not welcomed by all, but for a large number of New Zealanders it expressed their hope for a future founded upon an uncomplicated and uncontested acceptance of racial equality.

“Why can’t we have Waitangi Days like that anymore?”, these old-timers ask. “Why can’t we celebrate the positive national achievements of New Zealanders, regardless of ethnicity? What is to be gained, in terms of strengthening social cohesion, by foregrounding – and all-too-often fomenting – this country’s ethnic divisions?”

The straightforward reply from the nation’s historians, Pakeha and Māori, is that the legacy of conquest, land seizure, economic marginalisation, and cultural erasure central to the European colonisation of New Zealand is seared into the collective memory of its indigenous people. At some point, the historical injustices that have not been forgotten by the colonised will have to be acknowledged and redressed by the colonisers. To suggest otherwise, they insist, is itself an act of colonialist oppression. Moreover, as the rising generation of Māori nationalists are only too willing to point out, by no means all these injustices are historical. Far too many of them are contemporary.

The articulation of such grievances, long assumed by the victors of the New Zealand Wars to be safely buried in the past, gathered momentum throughout the 1970s and 80s and were characterised by legal challenges and vigorous political protests.

The impressive Māori Land March of 1975 hastened the creation of the Waitangi Tribunal. Equipped with quasi-judicial powers, the Tribunal was instrumental in investigating past wrongs, determining the most appropriate means of their redress, and introducing New Zealanders to a more complete account of their history. Over the course of the next 50 years, its power and influence would undergo significant expansion.

The forcible eviction of the Ngati Whatua occupiers of Bastion Point in 1978 presented New Zealanders with a rare and shocking demonstration of the raw power of the Pakeha state. Hundreds of Police officers were involved, with logistical support provided by the armed forces. The operation provided a jarring reminder to New Zealanders that the alienation of Māori land and resources was predicated on the actual or threatened use of force by political and legal institutions that were overwhelmingly dominated by Pakeha – and remained so.

The watershed event that finally extinguished the sunny optimism of 1973, however, was the 1981 Springbok Tour. The dramatic and at times violent incidents that marked the 56-day tour by Apartheid South Africa’s rugby team brought the idealistic champions of classical racial equality into frequent and often uncomfortable contact with Māori protesters who had experienced first-hand the widespread and deeply ingrained Pakeha racism that, thanks to the Tour, would ensure the re-election of Rob Muldoon’s National Government.

The young, well-educated, middle-class Pakeha who mostly comprised the anti-tour movement found themselves at a moral disadvantage when challenged to account for the fact that they were willing to suffer Police batons for Black South Africans but not for Brown New Zealanders. Why was the racism of the White South Africans capable of inspiring a mass anti-racist movement, but not the equally egregious colonialist excesses of Pakeha regimes past and present?

The only acceptable answer was: “Because we’re as racist as the Rugby thugs.”

“Damn right!” came the Māori nationalists’ retort, “And now is the time for you to do something about it!”

Which they did. For the next forty years the students who had supplied the shock-troops of the anti-tour movement accepted the wero Māori Nationalists had laid before them and slowly but surely integrated it into whatever institutions they found themselves in a position to influence and/or control. Political parties, the courts, universities, schools, hospitals, the public service, law firms, the news media, trade unions, even corporations: all those institutions into which young, idealistic New Zealanders were disgorged annually. Places where, increasingly, the best way to get along was to go along with the ever-expanding ramifications of “the principles of te Tiriti o Waitangi”, and the Crown-Māori “partnership” which the New Zealand judiciary had determined the Treaty to mandate.

By the 2020s this self-replicating social layer of te Tiriti-inspired professionals, administrators and managers numbered in the hundreds-of-thousands and was exerting a decisive influence over the evolution of New Zealand’s political, social and cultural institutions. Binding its members together was a deep mistrust, bordering on active hostility, directed at that part of New Zealand society which evinced little or no understanding of, or enthusiasm for, te Tiriti and the transformational narrative it was driving forward. That this part of New Zealand almost certainly outnumbered te Tiriti’s promoters and protectors gave cause for even greater concern, raising serious doubts about the cultural safety of democratic institutions.

Nevertheless, it was this strategic aggregation of Pakeha allies that facilitated significant cultural, economic, and political indigenous progress – precipitating a veritable “Māori Renaissance”. Mutually reinforcing, the alliance between Pakeha jurists, administrators, and educators, and the rapidly expanding Māori middle-class fostered by te Tiriti’s official rehabilitation and the opportunities flowing from a succession of substantial iwi-based “Treaty settlements”, continued to grow and strengthen. By the second decade of the twenty-first century it had solidified into the permanent and seemingly unchallengeable arbiter of New Zealand’s social, economic, cultural and constitutional development.

Te Tiriti’s victory may have been complete in these institutional islands, but they were surrounded by a vast sea of doubt. A substantial majority of Pakeha, as well as a growing portion of the recent immigrant population, struggled to accept the Waitangi Tribunal’s increasingly radical findings. Before their eyes the power of the Crown seemed to be crumbling away – a shrinkage of sovereignty fuelled by historical revisionists who flatly contradicted the public’s understanding (however flawed) of their nation’s story.

It was only a matter of time before this public doubt crystalised into public anger. Increasingly, the narrative growing out of the Treaty’s judicial and bureaucratic restoration was being presented to Pakeha in ways that not only made clear the “settlers’” general unfitness to shape its evolution, but also rejected, absolutely, their democratic right to do so.

That the 80 percent of New Zealanders who did not identify as Māori were to be given no say in elevating the Treaty’s status to that of supreme and unchallengeable law was finally made clear in the He Puapua Report. This document, penned by Treaty scholars and activists, and presented secretly to the Sixth Labour Government in 2019, detailed the changes required to ensure that New Zealand’s constitutional arrangements conformed with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

The measures required to achieve this goal in time for the bicentennial celebration of the Treaty’s signing in 2040 were deemed to necessitate a full-scale constitutional revolution. This was not to be attempted in one go, however, but piecemeal. Each step along the way was to be accomplished through stand-alone, apparently unconnected, legislative adjustments. Significantly, the plan included no provision for these cumulative, transformational, changes to be presented to the whole citizenry for ratification by referendum. Like the proverbial slow-cooked frog, Pakeha New Zealanders were to be kept in ignorance of their constitutional fate until it was too late to change it.

That such a plan was thought to be implementable in an open democratic society speaks eloquently of elite New Zealanders’ assumptions concerning both the powers they wielded and the extent to which those powers could be challenged by ordinary citizens. As Sir Geoffrey Palmer makes clear in his book The New Zealand Constitution In Crisis, confidence in his own and other elite actors’ ability to sideline the democratic process was considerable:

The logic of the approach was as follows… Some parliamentary action by way of legislation was needed to make a base. But if that legislation itself redressed the grievances it would run into the problem that the majority of the community would oppose it. If, on the other hand, legislation was used to set up processes, and procedures and the principles on which decisions should be based were stated, it may be possible to get even a majoritarian legislature to act. The initial commitment required was to a process. No tangible outcome was provided by the legislation itself. What should be done was to be decided only after judicial or quasi-judicial processes had assessed individual cases. First it was necessary to give the courts something to interpret. Such was the nature of the approach I brought to both statutory incorporation of the Treaty in statutes, and extension of the Waitangi Tribunal to examine grievances back to 1840.

What brought He Puapua and the elite Treaty project generally to grief certainly wasn’t its exposure and condemnation by mainstream journalism. Indeed, the opposite was true: the major media organisations saw themselves as integral to the project’s success. Ultimately, what doomed the elites’ Treaty project to failure was the democratising impact of social media.

Palmer’s “processes” required media gatekeepers committed to keeping “the majority of the community” out of the game. In fact, so reliant upon the exclusionary powers of these gatekeepers were Palmer’s strategies for their ultimate success, that the moment the Internet empowered ordinary citizens to receive and impart information independently of the mainstream media and its guard-dogs, they began instantly to fall apart.

The picture that emerged from the collective exertions of these “citizen journalists” was as clear as it was disturbing. The bureaucratic and administrative elites had, since the early-1980s, come to view themselves as the irreplaceable brain and muscle of what political scientists call the “permanent state”, and constitutional lawyers refer to, simply, as “The Crown”. They had arrived at this conclusion alongside the leadership of the tangata whenua, who saw themselves, and were certainly acknowledged by the leaders of the Permanent State, as the “Permanent People”. The relationship between the two was mutually reinforcing.

The conclusion to be drawn from this reading of New Zealand’s constitutional, political and cultural evolution is daunting.

The status of those who are members of neither the Permanent State nor the Permanent People is problematic – to say the least! That they constitute a majority of the population is openly acknowledged by both the Crown and Māori. But, majorities under pressure from minorities all-too-easily behave tyrannically. Meaning that, while New Zealand remains a representative democracy, the non-Crown, non-Māori majority is likely to be treated as a permanent threat.

Because, what are they really? Victims of history: the flotsam and jetsam of a botched process of colonisation? Communities without roots, lacking permanent interests, bereft of cultural awareness, and off to Australia at the drop of a hat? A people just passing through?

No wonder Māori politicians call these New Zealanders manuhiri – visitors.

But that is not what they call themselves. It would, therefore, be most unwise of both the Permanent State and the Permanent People to forget that these visitors, these citizens, still come armed to the teeth with votes.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project website on Friday, 14 February 2025.

Adapting To Trump’s Changing Climate.

New World Orders: The challenge facing Christopher Luxon and Chris Hipkins is how to keep their small and vulnerable nation safe and stable in a world whose economic and political climate the forty-seventh American president is changing so profoundly.

IT IS, SURELY, the ultimate Millennial revenge fantasy. Calling senior Baby-Boomer and Gen-X bureaucrats and asking them to justify their salaries. “Come on, dude, just tell me what it is that you do!” All the time knowing that the hapless federal employee at the other end of the call is fighting for his job, his status, his self-respect.

Except, this scenario is no fantasy. Such conversations have been going on for days: proof that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is every bit as real and scary as its critics predicted. Musk’s twenty-something “tech geek” hires are cutting a swathe through the federal bureaucracy with the implacable determination of the Grim Reaper.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world struggles to make sense of the Trump Administration. What is its ultimate purpose? What is the nature of the political dynamic driving the raging torrent of Executive Orders pouring out of the Trump White House?

It is a testament to the essential mildness of their country’s politics and politicians that New Zealanders struggle to make any kind of sense of Donald Trump. Can he really be serious? Is there the slightest method to policies that strike so many Kiwis as utter madness?

There is – but it’s in the service of an agenda so completely foreign to the thinking of the vast majority of the world’s politicians, administrators and journalists, that even conceptualising it requires considerable effort.

Consider the following self-characterisation, offered-up to a puzzled world by one of Trump’s most hardcore supporters, Steve Bannon:

“I’m a Leninist. Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal, too.”

Seriously? How can a MAGA Republican possibly cite the Russian revolutionary, Vladimir Lenin, as his inspiration? Wasn’t Lenin responsible for establishing one of the most ferocious states in all of human history?

He certainly was, but Bannon’s Leninist sympathies amply confirm the old French aphorism: Les extrèmes se touchent. (The extremes find each other.)

Certainly, that is what the world is currently witnessing in the United States. The deliberate destruction of the 80-year-old state machine arising out of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” policies of the 1930s – by right-wing revolutionaries determined to create a new one?

It’s what Bannon attempted to do in 2017, when he was, briefly, Trump’s White House chief-of-staff. But, he failed.

The strength and resilience of the old state machine was simply beyond the First Trump Administration’s powers. The “Country-Club Republicans” had yet to be purged from the Republican Party. The Supreme Court was not yet fully harnessed to the Right’s agenda. Most importantly, Trump and his MAGA court had seriously underestimated the obstructive capabilities of the ancien regime. Transformative regime-change clearly required an “Everything, Everywhere, All at Once” battle-plan – and Trump 45 didn’t have one.

The crucial difference between Trump 45 and Trump 47 is that the forty-seventh president of the United States does have a battle-plan, Project 2025, and one of its principal authors, Russell Vought, has been safely installed as the new Director of the Office of Management and Budget. If the American ship-of-state has a bridge, then the OMB is it.

Trump’s greatest challenge, over the next four years, will be working out how to smash the status quo without, simultaneously, smashing the working-class Americans whose votes carried him to a comprehensive (if narrow) electoral victory. That Trump’s MAGA movement expects him to unleash holy vengeance upon the “Deep State” (aka the old state machinery) is indisputable. Less certain, however, is whether those same working-class voters appreciate how effectively the old state machinery has protected them and their families for the past 80 years.

If Elon Musk is to keep his promise to carve one trillion dollars off the Federal Budget, then the health, education and welfare services currently available to working-class Americans cannot avoid taking a massive hit.

Trump’s Democratic Party opponents simply cannot understand why American workers don’t get this. But, the very fact that the Democrats don’t “get it” is the very reason so many of those workers gave their votes to Trump. The extraordinary cluelessness of Democratic Party politicians when it comes to communicating effectively with ordinary Americans, let alone understanding their grievances, explains entirely the latter’s indifference to the plight of those federal bureaucrats on the receiving end of Musk’s tech geek interrogators.

Revolutions happen when, at roughly the same time, both the elites and the struggling masses arrive at the same conclusion: things cannot go on as they are. That the respective solutions advanced by these two groups are likely to diverge spectacularly only begins to matter after they have, between them, brought the failing system to its knees.

New Zealanders who shake their heads in disbelief at the speed and breadth of the Trump Administration’s changes are either too young to remember “Rogernomics”, or too embarrassed to acknowledge how fulsomely they embraced its breakneck “reforms”. If the machinations of Elon Musk seem sinister today, then so, too, should the machinations of Bob Jones and all the other ideologically-driven members of New Zealand’s elites back in 1984.

Those who argue that the “quiet revolution” of the 1980s simply represented New Zealand’s rather belated recognition that the world had changed, can hardly now object that the USA has collectively made the same determination. The economic and geopolitical doctrines that have dominated the policy-making of the last 40 years have been recognised, by billionaires and “deplorables” alike, as no longer fit for purpose.

Globalisation. Free Trade. The International Rules-Based Order. Donald Trump’s black felt pen has confirmed the death sentences of all three. Likewise the entrenched institutional power of the professional and managerial classes which emerged out of the social and cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 70s.

The challenge facing Christopher Luxon and Chris Hipkins is how to keep their small and vulnerable nation safe and stable in a world whose economic and political climate the forty-seventh American president is changing so profoundly. Faster and better than anybody else, Trump has grasped the possibilities of a world which is more in tune with the nationalist and imperialist marching songs of the Nineteenth Century, than the Kumbaya globalist singalongs of President George H. W. Bush’s and President Bill Clinton’s “New World Order”.

A President who openly canvasses the annexation of Greenland, Canada, Panama and the Gaza Strip, to the applause of an admirer of Lenin who once, rather incautiously, confessed: “Darkness is good. Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power”; should alert us to the fact that, like Dorothy and Toto in The Wizard of Oz, we’re not in Kansas anymore.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 10 February 2025.

The First Twenty-Four Days: Ageing Boomers, Laurie & Les, Talk Politics.

“This might surprise you, Laurie, but I reckon Trump’s putting on a bloody impressive performance.”

“GOODNESS ME, HANNAH, just look at all those Valentine’s Day cards!”

“Occupational hazard, Laurie, the more beer I serve, the more my customers declare their undying love!”

“Crikey! I had no idea business was so good.” Laurie squinted theatrically at the line of cards. “Is one of those from Les?”

“No, no. Les is much too sensible.”

“Whew!” Laurie glanced towards the table by the window at the back of the bar. Les raised an empty ale glass by way of welcoming his favourite drinking companion.

“I’ll bring them over”, Hannah smiled.

“Happy New Year!” Les stretched out his hand and Laurie grasped it firmly.

“And what a year it’s turning out to be! Has there ever been a blizzard of Presidential activity like Trump’s?”

“Actually, Laurie, there has, but not for more than ninety years. The first hundred days of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency were even more dramatic than Trump’s. Just as well, really, because the USA was in much worse shape in 1933 than it is now.”

“Presumably, that’s where the idea of ‘the first hundred days’ comes from?”

“That’s right. Roosevelt told Americans that the only thing they had to fear was ‘fear itself’, so he was determined to show them he wasn’t afraid of tackling the economic crisis paralysing the US economy.”

“Well, okay, that was Roosevelt’s first hundred days. What about Trump’s first twenty-four days?”

“This might surprise you, Laurie, but I reckon he’s putting on a bloody impressive performance.”

“Really? I’m gobsmacked. I assumed you’d be breathing fire and brimstone about a Far-Right coup, and branding Trump a tyrant.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, that’s what the so-called ‘Left’ are calling him. But, you won’t hear that from me. Because, in a free and fair election, Trump won fair and square. What’s more, on Election Night, back in November, he pledged to his followers: ‘Promises made. Promises kept.’ – and, so far, he’s keeping his word by turning the USA upside down and pulling it inside out. And, I’ll tell you what, Laurie, it’s not just the scale of Trump’s disruption that’s impressed me; it’s that massive change is happening at all.”

“I know, I know! And when was the last time that happened? – apart from 90 years ago!”

“Exactly! Roosevelt – an American aristocrat – understood that if the American republic was to remain the same, then everything would have to change. Trump’s vision is much more radical. He understands that if the American dream is to be resurrected …”

“If America is to be made great again …”

“That’s it. If America is to be made great again, then everything that is preventing it from being great has to be destroyed. That’s why he’s recruited Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, to ‘move fast and break things’ …”

“That was Mark Zuckerburg …”

“Was it? Sorry. But you get what I mean.”

“I sure do! And so do the elites. They all went to the same Ivy League colleges, subscribe to the same liberal ideas, and, until the Second Coming of Trump, were all supremely indifferent to the political colouration of the individual sitting in the White House. Because while presidents came and went, the permanent state – which they controlled – rolled on forever.”

“But, not anymore, eh Laurie? Not anymore. Just look at the US Agency for International Development, USAID. For decades, we lefties denounced it as the human face of American imperialism – the Kumbaya Division of the National Security State. If the CIA was Uncle Sam’s nasty cop, USAID was its nice one.”

“Like the missionaries softening up the natives before the colonists arrived with their muskets.”

“Hey, that’s pretty good, Laurie. We’ll make a leftie of you yet!”

“That’s the whole point, Les. Trump’s unleashing a revolution, tearing up the rules, repairing what’s been broken. It makes me laugh when I hear people say: ‘He can’t do that, it’s a breach of international law!’ Well, so was the invasion of Iraq – and Ukraine. The only question all the bleating defenders of the ‘rules-based international order’ should be asking themselves is: ‘Who’s going to stop Trump’s America? The Danes? The Canadians? The Panamanians? Hamas?’”

“So, Laurie, is your name down for one of the ‘beautiful’ new seaside apartments that the Trump International Reconstruction Corporation, with massive assistance from the Saudis, will soon be erecting in Gaza?”

This short story was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star on Friday 14 February 2025.

Balancing Act.

Even Stevens: Over the 33 years between 1990 and 2023 (and allowing for the aberrant 2020 result) the average level of support enjoyed by the Left and Right blocs, at roughly 44.5 percent each, turns out to be, as near as dammit, identical.

WORLDWIDE, THE PARTIES of the Left are presented as experiencing significant electoral decline. Certainly, in the 70 elections that took place across the planet in 2024 there wasn’t all that much for left-wingers to celebrate. But, does a review of New Zealand’s recent political history reveal a similarly receding electoral tide? How much evidence is there that, over the past 30 years, this country has become a part of what some commentators are calling “The Global Drift to the Right”?

The latest analysis detailing a worldwide decline in voter support for the Left was published in the right-wing British newspaper The Telegraph on 16 January 2025. Looking back over the past 30 years, journalists Meike Eijsberg and James Crisp felt confident enough to proclaim that “The Left is more unpopular than any time since the Cold War”.

Even so, the Left’s global average, based on the results of the most recent electoral contests in 73 countries, isn’t exactly dire. Indeed, at 45.4 percent, the level of public support would strike most leftists as comfortable. Sure, the Right, especially in North America and Europe, is currently riding high, but at 51 percent globally, the forces of conservatism are only a few percentage points away from defeat.

What’s more, in Africa and Latin America the forces of the Left remain in the ascendancy. Not to the same extent as a decade, or two, ago, but still – the success of Argentina’s Javier Milei notwithstanding – well ahead of the Right.

The Telegraph being The Telegraph, New Zealand’s ideological divisions have, for the most part been lumped-in with those of our Australian neighbours. The downfall of Jacinda Ardern is, however, noted with, one assumes, a fair measure of schadenfreude. Ardern was not liked by The Telegraph, which never passed-up an opportunity to devalue and downplay the extraordinary achievements of New Zealand’s young prime minister during the Covid-19 global pandemic’s first, terrifying, months.

Eijsberg’s and Crisp’s anticipation of a conservative victory in Australia similarly betrays their newspaper’s unabashed partisanship. Anthony Albanese may be no one’s idea of a charismatic political leader, but, to a great many Australians the alternative, Liberal Party Leader Peter Dutton, comes across as a hard-core – bordering on fanatical – right-winger. As things now stand across the Tasman, the safest bet would appear to be on a 2025 election that produces no clear winner – and lots of losers.

What, then, does the electoral record tell us about the fortunes of the New Zealand Right and Left over the past thirty years? Does the Left register a steadily descending trend-line? Are the parties of the Right entrenching themselves ever-more-firmly in the role of New Zealand’s “natural” leaders? Or are we presented with an altogether more nuanced history?

Between the election of 1990 and that of 1999, the most arresting feature of the Left-Right divide is the acute vulnerability of the Right’s overall position. National’s success in both 1990 and 1993 was entirely attributable to the unfairness of the First-Past-the-Post (FPP) electoral system.

Jim Bolger’s defeat of the Fourth Labour Government was presented – at the time, and still is today – as a landslide win. In terms of the popular vote, however, it was an extraordinarily close contest. Yes, National received 47.82 percent of the votes cast, but, between them, Labour, the Greens and Jim Anderton’s NewLabour Party attracted the support of 47.15 percent of the voting public.

The narrowness of National’s win never seemed to be fully appreciated by Bolger and his hardline Cabinet. The electorate’s embittered judgement on Bill Birch’s Employment Contracts Act, Ruth Richardson’s “Mother of All Budgets” and Jenny Shipley’s harsh “welfare” policies, was, however, rendered three years later, when National’s share of the popular vote plummeted from 47.82 percent to 35.05 percent. The Left’s share of the vote (Labour + Alliance) was 52.89 percent. That figure rises even higher, to 61.29 percent, when NZ First’s 8.40 percent is tacked on!

That National, with barely a third of the votes cast, was, nevertheless, able to form a government, vindicated in dramatic fashion the arguments of those who had promoted, successfully, a change to a proportional electoral system.

The power conferred upon Winston Peters and his moderate populists in NZ First, and, to a lesser degree, upon Peter Dunne’s succession of shape-shifting electoral vehicles, renders an accurate assessment of the Left-Right balance problematic.

In the 1996 election, the first held under the rules of Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) representation, for example, the anti-government parties collectively accounted for 51.64 percent of the Party Vote. The mutual mistrust of Peters and Anderton, however, resulted in a National-NZ First coalition government. The messy dissolution of the coalition, just 18 months later, made clear the unwisdom of “protest” parties pledged to unseating the government perversely restoring its leading players to power.

Over the course of the 18 years separating the general elections of 1999 and 2017, electoral success and ideological dominance (albeit in a muted sense) was shared evenly between the parties of the Left and the Right.

In the nine years that the Left Bloc was dominated by Helen Clark’s Labour Party, supported by Jim Anderton’s Alliance (later the Progressive Party) and The Greens, its collective share of the Party Vote averaged almost exactly 50 percent. The Right Bloc, by contrast, averaged just 39 percent between 1999 and 2005.

The Right Bloc’s nine years of dominance – from 2008 until 2017 – were the mirror-image of the Left’s. Its component parties – National, Act and the Māori Party – also racked-up an average of 50 percent of the Party Vote – while the Left Bloc’s average election tally similarly dropped to 39 percent.

With the benefit of hindsight, it seems altogether more appropriate to attribute this mirror-imaging to the quality of the contending block’s respective leaderships, than to grand ideological lurches. In Helen Clark and John Key, Labour and National were blessed with strong leaders who attuned themselves with remarkable accuracy to the mood of the electorate.

Throughout these 18 years, voter feeling was driven much more by exogenous events than ideological allegiances. The impact of 9/11 and the War on Terror; the Global Financial Crisis; the Christchurch Earthquake; these, and the way the government of the day responded to them, were what moved the electoral dial.

If 2024 feels more fraught and ideologically polarised than usual, that is, almost certainly, on account of the disruptive boost the Internet and social media have given to the generation and articulation of popular grievances; the impact of globalisation on core economic and social institutions, and the enormous global disjuncture occasioned by Covid and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Overlay all that with the continuing slow burn of global warming, and is it really any wonder that everybody is looking to blame “the other lot”?

And yet, allowing for the obvious exception of the 2020 “Covid” election, which saw the Left Bloc’s share of the Party Vote soar to an unprecedented 57.87 percent, with Labour winning 50.01 percent of that on its own, the ideological balance of the last 30 years presents us with a curiously reassuring picture.

Over the 33 years between 1990 and 2023 (and allowing for the aberrant 2020 result) the average level of support enjoyed by the Left and Right blocs, at roughly 44.5 percent each, turns out to be, as near as dammit, identical.

Some might interpret this “tie” as evidence of a society split right down the middle and at daggers drawn. But, for most New Zealanders, it doesn’t feel that way at all. For most of us, it simply suggests that, although we may have to wait a little while for democracy to deliver the right (or left!) result, our side’s turn will come.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 3 February 2025.