Jacinda Ardern, page 10
When David Cunliffe again campaigned on a capital gains tax in 2014, it hung around like a bad fart. Nobody wants to hear policies explained at length by politicians, they just want to know what it means for them and their hard-earned money. So when John Key called capital gains tax a ‘death tax’, probably after watching an old West Wing episode, it derailed Cunliffe, who struggled to say why it wasn’t. Instead of promoting all Labour’s other policies, Cunliffe got stuck trying, and largely failing, to explain how a capital gains tax would or wouldn’t affect the average New Zealander. In 2014, Labour suffered their biggest election loss in ninety-two years.
Now, six years after it had first been floated, Ardern wanted to bring the CGT back. In her 2011 column supporting the tax, she’d written ‘Standing by and doing nothing while the country’s economy becomes a housing market with a few extras added on and we sink into more and more debt and rising unemployment – that is the real threat.’ There was a national housing crisis; the median house price in Auckland was nine times that of the median income. In these circumstances, a capital gains tax appeared reasonable – at least on face value.
But when Little had outlined his tax policy framework, he had ruled out a capital gains tax. With Ardern in charge, CGT was very much back on the table. New Zealand was one of few developed countries around the world to not tax profits made from the sale of property. Australia had a capital gains tax. Canada had a capital gains tax. The UK, Denmark, Sweden, France, virtually every country that New Zealand considered itself to be like had a capital gains tax. Implementing one wouldn’t be a drastic move, argued its supporters, because it was already long overdue.
Time had passed since Cunliffe had failed to convince voters and if anyone was going to sell CGT to the country, it would be Labour’s beloved new leader. Ardern announced that, as prime minister, she would form a tax working group and, if it came back with a recommendation for CGT, she would implement one before the 2020 election.
She’d made a ‘Captain’s call’, she said, in deciding not to rule out a CGT in her first term. She wasn’t going to campaign on it, but she wasn’t going to rule it out as a possibility before 2020. Voters didn’t like that. All they heard was that if Labour got into government, they’d implement extra taxes without warning or consultation. It scared people, and National pounced: ‘Taxinda’ or ‘Let’s Tax This’ were their go-to lines in attack ads. It was a repeat of the last two elections and once again, it worked. Ardern had made her first bold call as leader and it backfired. Taxes rule the world and the fear of them rules voters.
Even though Labour had deliberately chosen not to campaign on the capital gains tax (the Greens were the only party to do so), by not ruling it out they once again found themselves spending precious airtime trying to defend it. As far as a tax policy went, Labour didn’t have much. And their lack of clarity made them an easy target for National, who implied Labour were going to surprise New Zealanders with endless new taxes if elected.
Targeted attack ads aren’t nearly as popular in New Zealand as in other democracies. Some might argue it’s because there’s a greater sense of decorum, others would argue it’s because New Zealanders are so thin-skinned. Whatever the reason, there’s an underlying sense of ‘hey, don’t be too mean’ in New Zealand campaigning. And both Ardern and English, in their respective parliamentary careers, had established themselves as MPs who operated with a higher-than-average level of sportsmanship.
So when National released attack ads targeting Labour’s tax policy, people were shocked. It showed that National were genuinely worried, probably for the first time in nine years, about losing their place in government. But it also showed that attack ads work. By claiming that Labour were planning to introduce a whole basket of new taxes (they weren’t, but they also weren’t getting that message across), the shine of Jacindamania began to dim.
In the first week of September, Grant Robertson released Labour’s proposed budget. There was nothing groundbreaking in it. Until Steven Joyce, the finance minister, sent out a press release claiming there was an $11.7 billion hole in it. Labour staffers panicked. Was there a hole? How could they possibly have messed up calculations that badly? They called Robertson’s economic adviser to triple-check, and were assured that this claim was bullshit. There was no hole. Not even a little hole that got blown out of proportion? No, not even a little hole.
They were right. There was no hole.
Ardern was at a Pink Batts insulation factory when the news broke. She stepped away from the media scrum that had followed her the entire campaign, and had a timeout with her staff as a giant guillotine loudly cut insulation nearby. When she returned to the media pack, she said some things about insulation and they asked her only about the hole. There’s no hole, she said.
But Joyce didn’t back down, and neither did the rest of the National party. Somehow this imaginary hole kept popping up in debates and media stand-ups, and all Robertson could do was keep saying that there was no hole. It became a he-said, he-said situation, and National said it louder. By the end of the week’s polling, Labour’s popularity had dropped back into the 30s.
But Ardern was holding steady in other ways. In the televised debates between Ardern and English, she put in strong performances. The four debates, held between August 31 (the first debate was held one hour after the dramatic poll showed Labour in the lead for the first time in over a decade) and September 20, were closely fought. There were no major breakthroughs or hits for either side – in fact, they were about as civil as close election debates get – but there were a few memorable moments.
At the end of the second debate, the two leaders were asked about abortion. ‘At the moment it is actually illegal, under the Crimes Act, to have an abortion,’ began moderator Patrick Gower. ‘The main way that women get it is by saying that having a child is a serious danger to their mental health, and that forces a lot of women to lie. Should we change that law?’
He had barely finished asking the question before Ardern answered. ‘Yes.’
‘Will you do it if you become prime minister?’
Again, her answer overlapped with Gower’s question. ‘Yes. It shouldn’t be in the Crimes Act.’
The passion and conviction in Ardern’s response got a rousing ovation from the live studio audience. When pressed about whether she would make that change in government, Ardern was firm.
‘People need to make their own decision. I accept that there will be people out there who disagree with abortion. I want them to have that as their right. But I also want women who want access to have it as their right too. This is about everyone being able to make their own decision.’
It was a moment of sure-footedness in a debate series between two politicians adept at speaking around a firm statement. With elections since 2008 being fought between a rotating cast of middle-aged men, abortion had unsurprisingly not been a hot topic for debate. But Gower wasn’t wrong. Though abortion was technically available to women around the country – and it would be a shock to hear of someone being charged with a crime for terminating a pregnancy – abortion was still in the New Zealand Crimes Act.
The minutiae of tax policy and the guidelines for a tax working group were capital-P political issues, the types of things journalists and politics nerds on Twitter love to discuss at length in lieu of having a social life. Abortion was a conscience issue, and arguably a personal issue, and that’s where Ardern’s strength lay.
After the debate, Ardern sent a text message to Gower. ‘You did a good job,’ she wrote.
On the ground, Ardern was campaigning in a way that few politicians manage: by appearing to have genuine empathy and a sense of humour. Children, the great equalisers with no real interest in politicians, flocked to her wherever she went. In town halls all over the country, women spoke of how Ardern’s success was inspiring them and their daughters.
But while Ardern kept a smile on in every selfie (and there were many), the campaign was taking its toll. At an event in Nelson, Ardern had called for more investment in health services and used the example of her grandfather having recently been discharged from Waikato Hospital at midnight as emblematic of issues within the system. Days later, as their campaign made its way along the West Coast, Ardern watched another National attack ad raising doubt about Labour’s tax policy, and learned that the media were attempting to locate her grandfather to follow up on her claims. She started to doubt her own instincts. ‘It absolutely gutted me. I thought, “Did I make a mistake in mentioning that? How can I protect my family?”’ she recalled later. ‘And in the course of all that, my grandmother had a stroke too and was admitted into hospital as well and started a steady decline through the election campaign.’
Understandably, Ardern remembers this as ‘the real low point’ of the election.
Among that, while having a sausage roll in a small-town cafe, Ardern reconsidered her captain’s call on tax. Labour were bleeding and they knew exactly where the wound was. So Ardern called Robertson and they decided to walk back her captain’s call. On 15 September, Robertson called a press conference and announced that Labour would not impose any new taxes, even if recommended by a tax working group, until after the 2020 election. There was one week to go until the election. They hadn’t expected to peak so high, but they also hadn’t expected to peak so early. If they could just hold on for another eight days, they might be able to pull it off.
On the morning of 19 September, Margaret Bottomley, Ardern’s maternal grandmother who had lent her granddaughter a people-mover so she could campaign better for the 2008 election, passed away at Te Aroha Community Hospital. She was eighty-one.
The final leaders debate was the next day. Ardern briefly mentioned her grandmother’s death in the course of campaigning, but the campaign continued as scheduled, as did the debate. Commentators unanimously considered this to be the least impressive of the four debates and called it a draw. There was nothing said that would change voters’ minds at the eleventh hour. New Zealand election campaigns are relatively short, officially seven weeks, but by the week of the election, everyone was ready for it to be over. None more so, it seemed, than the candidates themselves.
Ardern’s grandmother’s funeral was held in Te Aroha, in the Waikato, on 22 September. It was a small service, and media largely kept their distance. One reporter remembers being sent to scope it. The reporter didn’t want to go, and preemptively apologised to Gayford, having bumped into him that morning in Auckland. He gave a look but didn’t say anything. Moments later, the reporter was pleasantly surprised to receive a call from Ardern, who was in the car on her way to the service, saying there were no hard feelings and she understood it was part of the job.
After the funeral, Ardern returned immediately to Auckland to attend the last few Labour events before electoral law dictated that she cease campaigning.
The election was just one day away.
9
ELECTION NIGHT
Nobody won.
This is a common downside of New Zealand’s mixed-member proportional (MMP) governing system: it’s entirely possible to not have a winner on election night. And in 2017, nobody won.
New Zealand used to operate under a ‘first past the post’ system, in which everyone got one vote in their electorate and whichever party won the most seats on election night became the government. The MMP system, introduced by referendum in 1993, means that every voter casts two votes: one for their preferred electorate candidate, who will represent their electorate in parliament, and one for their preferred party. These are helpfully referred to as the electorate vote and the party vote.
The New Zealand parliament is typically made up of 120 representative seats. In the 2014 and 2017 elections there were seventy-one electorate seats, with the remaining seats being filled by members from party lists, as determined by the party votes.
To win a seat, a candidate must win the most electorate votes in their electorate. For example, in 2014, Nikki Kaye earned her seat in parliament by beating Ardern in the Auckland Central electorate. To win the rest of the seats, it takes party votes.
If a party wins more than 5 per cent of the party votes, they are entitled to the same percentage of seats in the House. When Labour suffered their worst election loss in recent history in 2014, they received just 25 per cent of the party votes (thirty-two seats). Because their members had already won twenty-seven electorate seats, they were able to bring in just five additional members from their list, one of whom was Ardern. At the same time, the Greens won no electorate seats but gained close to 11 per cent of the party vote. All fourteen of their seats in the House came from their list.
Since New Zealand switched to an MMP system in 1996, no party has been able to govern alone. In 2014, National got the closest, gaining sixty seats in the House, just one shy of a majority. In order to govern, they formed a coalition with ACT (one seat), United Future (one seat), and the Māori Party (two seats).
In 2017, with polling in the final week of the campaign showing both major parties either in the late thirties or early forties, it was clear that neither had a shot at governing alone. Whichever party became the government would only be able to do so with the help of at least one other party, but most likely one man: Winston Raymond Peters.
Peters was a parliamentary veteran. He had been in and out of parliament since before Ardern was born. And in those four decades, he had got a lot done and pissed off a lot of people (read: every single politician). While studying in the ’70s, Peters joined the Young Nats, National’s youth wing. He stood for the National Party in the 1975 election and lost, but became a member of parliament for National in 1978. He stayed with National and was Minister of Māori Affairs from 1990 to 1991, when he was sacked from cabinet and eventually pushed out of the party following multiple instances of publicly going against his own party.
In 1993 he then established the populist New Zealand First and, thanks largely to his personal brand popularity with voters, easily won back his Tauranga electorate seat, along with four other seats.
In 1996, when MMP was introduced, allowing smaller parties to win a larger share of the seats, Peters’ New Zealand First won a whopping seventeen seats. With neither National nor Labour winning enough seats to govern alone, New Zealand First held the balance of power. For the first, but not the last, time, Peters was the kingmaker, able to choose which party he wanted to work with and therefore who would become prime minister.
After a month of negotiating with both parties, Peters shocked everyone by choosing to work with the National party again, despite their very recent break-up. As part of his negotiations Peters was made deputy prime minister, but it didn’t last. After health minister Jenny Shipley staged a coup to become National leader and PM, Peters clashed with his remaining coalition colleagues and by August 1998, Shipley sacked him from all his positions.
He stuck around for the next two terms in opposition, either winning his electorate seat or getting in on party votes, and in 2005, Peters once again held the balance of power. This time he went with Clark’s Labour. The relationship ran more smoothly than his National ones, largely because Peters was outside of cabinet and able to criticise the government in areas where he disagreed. But, again, good things never last: in 2008, Peters lost his Tauranga seat, and New Zealand First fell below the 5 per cent party vote threshold. At sixty-three, Peters was out of parliament for the third time. But he promised to be back. And he was.
Returning to parliament in 2011 Peters spent two terms in opposition. And come the 2017 election, all signs pointed to Peters being kingmaker yet again.
On the day of the election, Ardern was at home with her family. Early results of vote counting wouldn’t be in until early afternoon so, like most New Zealanders, Ardern was watching TV and waiting for news. Earlier that day, perhaps to distract herself, she had painted her fence. The paint job wasn’t perfect, but whose is?
For food, Ardern decided on the classic Kiwi dish of a sausage sizzle. Thin white bread, sausage (‘the more processed the better’), maybe some onions if you’re feeling fancy, and tomato sauce. Gayford was cooking up a fish dish, of course.
The campaign had been tough. Three years in opposition managed to cram itself into seven weeks and Labour had risen, fallen and risen again. The final poll of the campaign showed National at just under 46 per cent and Labour at 37 per cent. It was still a marked improvement for Labour, but, incredibly, National hadn’t fallen at all since the same time three years earlier.
As always, what the varied election polls proved was that you can’t trust polls.
It was possible to vote as early as three weeks before Election Day, and the turnout for early voting was the highest in history, at 1.24 million, around 40 per cent of the total vote. Also up was the youth turnout. If nothing else, Ardern had achieved her career goal of increasing youth engagement in democracy and voting.
While increased voter turnout was undeniably positive, the downside was that it made election night a lot less exciting. Because ballots had been cast early, vote-counting proceeded faster and by 7.30 pm, 10 per cent of all party votes had already been counted. By this stage in counting, it takes something unusual to upset the trend. And on Saturday, 23 September 2017, the trend was confirming the results of the final poll. National were comfortably ahead on 46.4 per cent, Labour on 36.5 per cent, New Zealand First on 7.1 per cent and the Greens on 5.9 per cent.
At 8 pm, the trend remained, and National were holding their not insignificant lead. Ardern was still at home cooking sausages, while Gayford served them to media camped outside their fence. Inside, Ardern paced around wearing a red gown and slippers. Peters was already at his party in Northland. In a beautiful example of the smallness of New Zealand, former prime minister Jenny Shipley (who acrimoniously severed ties with Peters in 1998) happened to be eating dinner at the restaurant next door.
