One political swallow does not make a summer election victory (to paraphrase a popular saying).
The message from yesterday’s Taxpayers’ Union – Curia poll showing the Labour-led centre left ahead of the coalition and Chris Hipkins ahead of Christopher Luxon as preferred Prime Minister should, however, be a wakeup call for the coalition and particularly the Prime Minister.
But it does not (yet) face defeat.
| Taxpayers Union Curia poll 2 – 4 March 2025 | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Labour | 33.6% | +1.7 | National | 34.1% | +2.8 |
| Greens | 10.0% | -3.2 | ACT | 7.7% | -2.3 |
| Te Paati Maori | 6.5% | +2.1 | NZ First | 5.1% | -1.3 |
| Total | 46.4% | 50.6% |
We have seen this sort of polling before.
From April 1991 until July 1993, Labour was ahead of the governing party, National, in the polls.
Despite that, and at least one unsuccessful tilt at his leadership, Prime Minister Jim Bolger hung on to narrowly win the 1993 election.
For the first six months of 2004, after Don Brash’s Orewa speech, National was ahead of Labour, which was the Government.
But Labour leader Helen Clark narrowly hung on at the 2005 election.
The lessons are obvious; a determined leader can stay in office if their caucus does not panic, but, in the case of Bolger and Clark, they are prepared to make substantial adjustments to their policies to accommodate the concerns driving the polls.
According to the Taxpayers’ Union poll, there are three concerns.
The Cost of Living is the most important issue to voters followed by the Economy and then Health.
That is not much different to a year ago, except that health has replaced law and order as a major concern.
The poll data shows that concerns about health are rising.
Luxon’s response has been the same way that Bolger responded to the backlash over National’s neo-liberal economic policies and the same as Helen Clark over what were thought to be her too pro-Maori policies.
Bolger and Clark backtracked on some of those policies.
Luxon appears to be doing the same in terms of health.
In July last year, when he sacked the Health NZ board and appointed Lester Levy as Health Commissioner, he said Levy would particularly look for savings from the extra 2500 back office appointed since Health NZ was formed.
But that proved not as easy as might have been imagined given the gargantuan tangle of issues buried within the 21 legacy District Health Boards.
In September, Levy told a Select Committee that many of the extra staff that Luxon talked about were there not because they had recently been hired but because of duplication of roles from the old DHBs across the system.
“We do have duplication, triplication, quadruplication,” he said.
“There are still the legacy effects of these organisations coming together.”
Levy told the Committee that the DHBs original bank accounts were still in place.
“We have in our organisation the incomplete amalgamation,” he said.
So now, the new Minister Simeon Brown is now finding ways to channel more (not less) money into health.
On March 3, he announced another $95 million a year for general practices and a special $20,000 grant to encourage them to employ graduate nurses who have missed out on a job in health because that body hired too many at the beginning of last year.
Concern about the cost of living should start to abate as inflation comes down, so the Government can probably rest easily on that.
National MPs interpret the concern about the economy to mean concern about jobs, and there is a nervousness that unemployment could get worse before it gets better.
Discussing the matter last night, one urban MP said that the increased dairy payout would help ease the situation but was concerned whether it would arrive in the cities in time to help turn things around before the next election.
The MPs know that, ideally, they must reverse the number of New Zealanders who think the country is headed in the right direction.
These figures began to move against the Government late last year. Now, 35.6% of New Zealanders think the country is heading in the right direction, while 48.9% say the wrong direction.
But the more imponderable issue facing the caucus is the slow decline in the approval ratings for the Prime Minister as preferred Prime Minister.
Since July last year, his rating has gone from 35 per cent to 20 in the latest poll.
Labour leader Chris Hipkins has moved from 19 per cent to 21 per cent over the same period.
ACT leader David Seymour has gone from six per cent to five per cent over the same period, while NZ First leader Winston Peters has gone from six to nine per cent.
He is thus the only coalition leader who has improved his rating over the past year.
It will be interesting to see how he handles the loss of the deputy Prime Ministership, which he must hand over to David Seymour in July.
He says he will begin NZ First’s election campaign then and that by then, he will have completed most of the travel he has planned as Foreign Minister.
The party needs him back on the road.
Its party vote is steadily falling, going from 8.1 per cent to 5.1 per cent this year.
POLITIK understands that Peters has been worried for some time that the Government’s support is fragile and that the coalition could easily break apart.
Hence, his plan is to be ready for anything from July on.
ACT has gone from 10.8 to 7.7 per cent since the beginning of the year, and National has actually gone up, from 29.6 per cent in January to 33.6 per cent now.
Labour, in the meantime, has gone from 30.9 per cent to 34.1 per cent.
So, we see an electorate gravitating back to the two main parties but with National still vulnerable because of a lack of enthusiasm for its leader and concerns about the economy and health.
National MPs talk about their leader, and they have concerns.
POLITIK understands from two separate sources that those concerns have been raised with the new Chief Whip, Stuart Smith, earlier this year at informal social sessions National’s backbench MPs have on Wednesday nights.
Smith’s advice, apparently, was that the “transaction cost” of changing the leader now would be too high, and he reminded them of what had happened to National in 2020 when the party went through three leaders.
Nevertheless, as an MP told POLITIK last night, people do talk.
But at present, that is all they are doing.
The Taxpayers’ Union’s latest poll figures would need to be repeated for much of the rest of the year, and Luxon’s rating would need to continue to fall before there was any real threat to his position.
But the poll will still be a wake-up call.
