While Key has promised to govern for all New Zealanders, carefully moved his party to the centre, and promised to retain core Labour policies such as interest-free student loans and Working For Families, the coalition demands of ACT and the current financial crisis make those promises worthless. And the result, I suspect, is that they will be left by the wayside, dumped because Roger Rodney demanded it, or because we “just can’t afford it” (while shovelling vast wodges of cash at the rich). Even if Key – who seems to have no solid beliefs beyond his own ambition – was inclined to resist ACT’s demands, National’s hardliners, the 90′s retreads like Bill English, Lockwood Smith, Murray McCully and Maurice Williamson, won’t be. And with 64 MPs between them, there will be no effective check on their legislative program.

The good news is that I doubt the public will stand for that sort of betrayal. If National pulls that switcheroo and rules from the right having run from the centre, it will be a one-term government. But it could still do a significant amount of damage in that term – damage which would take another decade to repair.

As for Labour, while they’ve lost, they’ve also brought in a pile of new talent, and should be in a strong position for 2011. Until then, it’s probably going to be a nasty, bitter three years.

According to the latest polls, it seems that NZ will give National about 48% of the party vote, not enough to form a government in its own right, but by the time it invites its friends Act and United over to play, it will have enough seats in the House to take the Treasury benches. Things could yet change: the Maori party could win enough seats to give it the balance of power, and Labour and the Greens between them could form a sufficiently large block to be the basis of a government, together with some of the minor parties, but that’s looking increasingly unlikely.

So why is NZ voting this way?

I really don’t know. Here’s how I see it.

The Labour government in its various incarnations over the last nine years has made some very impressive moves, making changes and implementing policies that are so well liked that the National party will not be able to change them, or at least, will only be able to tinker around the edges. Labour has:
- re-introduced a retirement savings scheme (the Labour government of 1975 set up a retirement savings scheme, but the incoming National government of 1978 repealed it and introduced a universal pay-as-you-go state funded pension based on the average wage, available to everyone aged 60 and over);
- set up an investment fund using the substantial budget surpluses of the last few years to partially fund the superannuation liabilities created by the state-funded super scheme;
- developed a substantial welfare-for-families scheme, which has appreciably reduced poverty levels; and
- introduced several social equity measures of the sort that are being seen world wide, such as a somewhat threadbare but nevertheless viable form of marriage for same sex couples, and any other couples who care to use it, and banning smoking in pubs and restaurants.

Some of these measures are, to my thinking, mixed blessings. The family-welfare package doesn’t deliver much support at all to the lowest income families, those on benefits, and it is a highly targeted and consequently expensive-to-deliver program. It would be much more cost effective to simply give a universal benefit to all children (more precisely, to their caregivers). Of course, this would mean giving as much money to millionaires’ children as to beneficiaries’ children, but so be it, and if that’s really a huge issue, then the benefit could simply be taxed at the marginal tax rate of the higher income earner in the family. As for same-sex marriages, or “civil unions,” the form of marriage doesn’t go far enough: either the same form of marriage should be available to all couples, or the state should not be involved in marriage at all.

Labour have also reduced unemployment, reduced government debt, increased GDP growth, increased real wage growth, restored capability to the public sector, and in general, been a jolly good government. There have been some failings: in common with developed countries world wide, there are disasters and mishaps in the health system; the tertiary education sector has been allowed to decline and decline and decline, with New Zealand now seen as a happy hunting ground for overseas universities looking for staff; despite rhetoric about being green, carbon emissions have increased substantially and the country is full of polluted streams because dairy farmers are allowed to release effluent at will. However, overall the positive far outweighs the negative.

But it’s about personalities, not policies.

Helen Clark and Labour are not particularly seen as old and tired – there are plenty of new faces coming through the ranks – but they are seen as being out-of-touch and convinced of their own inherent right to rule, a common enough characteristic of third term governments. They have been plagued by allegations of nanny-statism, spending too much time telling people how to live. These claims however, only seem to make traction in the more rabid areas of the blogosphere. What is really hurting Labour is their political expediency. To my mind, there are three items that count against them here.

(1) In the 2005 election, they used parliamentary funds to pay for a pledge card. The move was extraordinarily cynical. The card was clearly election expenditure, but they claimed it was just informing people about their policies, which is a legitimate use of parliamentary money. But anyone with any nous would just reply, “Bullsh*t.” Moreover, because they regarded it as parliamentary expenditure, they didn’t count the cost towards their election campaign limit. They spent up to the limit on other campaign material. In effect, by using parliamentary funds for the pledge card, they not only helped themselves to taxpayers’ funds, but they also spent far more than the allowable amount on their campaign. Notoriously, one of their defenders claimed it was “courageous corruption” but that was not well received in a country that prides itself on being unusually corruption free.

(2) In 2007, Labour rushed through legislation controlling election advertising, but the legislation was so poorly drafted, due to political pressures, that even the Electoral Commission admits that it cannot administer the law with any certainty. The legislation itself seems to have been designed with the purpose of hobbling the National party, but it has created constraints for all political parties. I have no problem with trying to create limits on the extent to which money can be used as a source of political power, but this legislation seems to be deeply flawed.

(3) Labour has become very closely associated with the perfidious Winston Peters. Peters took his NZ First party into a loose coalition agreement with Labour, and in return won ministerial positions for Peters. In his capacity as Minister for Racing, Peters was able to acquire substantial concessions for the racing and bloodstock industries. Some people who are deeply involved in racing and bloodstock have made substantial donations to NZ First. You draw the conclusion. Peters has also for many years railed against big business in politics, but this year, he was found to have accepted donations from big business, and hidden those donations by not declaring them. His latest gaffe has been to deny that he has been using a donated helicopter for campaigning (donated by those racing interests) despite photographic evidence to the contrary. He tried to wriggle out by claiming that he had travelled in a helicopter, but of course he had not campaigned from it, because he wouldn’t try to shout from a helicopter. [link] Puerile stuff, and yet somehow, emblematic of the stench which surrounds him. He also, regularly, every election year, pulls out a race card, against Asian immigrants. He’s bad news all round, and yet Labour continues to work with him, and has not ruled out working with him in the future. Labour has become contaminated by his stench.

What this all means is that there are plenty of people who despite liking Labour’s policies, feel that they can no longer vote for them. They don’t trust Labour any more.

But the alternative is no better. The National party has the usual policies that you would expect from a right wing party – less government, less tax, better management and so on. Some of its policies are bizarre: it has promised to invest 40% of the pension investment fund in New Zealand, which would soak up the entire capitalisation of the NZ stock market, leaving the party of less government owning a high proportion of the NZ business sector, and it wants to privatise the Accident Compensation Corporation, NZ’s no-fault accident compensation scheme, which according to PriceWaterhouseCoopers, “adds considerable value to New Zealand society and economy and performs very well in comparison to alternative schemes in operation internationally.” [HT: Hard News]

All that National is really offering is a different leader, new comer John Key. Key has an interesting background – reared in a state house, educated at public schools and universities, then making millions in senior positions with Merrill Lynch, before coming back to NZ to become a politician. He has no personality. He is like a great blancmange, taking on whatever flavour is slathered over him. He proclaims his Jewish descent to Jewish audiences, his Christian upbringing to Christian audiences, and his agnosticism on national TV. Early on, he claimed not to recall what his position had been on the 1981 Springbok tour, an event which rocked New Zealand. Campuses were alive with protest for and against the tour, and Key was in his first year at university in a rugby playing town. It’s hard to believe that he couldn’t recall his position on the tour. It looks very much as though he simply doesn’t want to take a position, doesn’t want to lose votes, doesn’t want to show who he really is.

More than that, he seems not to understand just what life might be like for the people on the other side of the tracks, despite that much vaunted upbringing in a state house with a widowed mother. When speaking to school kids in Waitara, a small Taranaki town with a large proportion of underprivileged young Maori households, he chose as his topic National’s promise to get fast broadband into 75% of homes. The kids weren’t impressed.

“How can you compare the environment to broadband?” Jenses Kemp (17) said. “Not everyone has computers … how can he justify that billion dollars? Some kids here don’t even have money for clothes.”

Shane Partington (17) agreed. “That billion dollars could go towards so much. What about our education and health system?” [link]

Key forgets that his own underfunded childhood nevertheless had incredible privilege – a middle class mother who not only valued education, but knew how to go about getting it for her children, and a white skin.

I was more confident when Bill English was leader of the National party. For all his moral conservatism, he was at least a compassionate conservative, prepared to try to understand what life might be like for other people, sure that he didn’t want to see children going without on his watch, intensely pragmatic about ensuring that all New Zealanders had at least some opportunity to succeed. After being demoted as leader, he put in a fine turn as Opposition Spokesman on Education, to the extent that even left leaning economist Brian Easton endorsed him. [link]

Key doesn’t convince me, at all. But then he would have to be extraordinary to do so, given that I almost always vote left. More to the point, I know at least two usually Tory-voting women who are very unsure about voting for him, to the extent that they are searching for a vote other than National. One thinks that she might, like me, vote for the Maori party instead.

Labour has, however, made a huge mistake in the campaign they have run against Key. They have sought, without success, for some evidence that he had dirty hands in business, that he was involved in the crooked deals of the 80s and 90s, that he is the incarnation of teh ebil bizniz. He is not, and Labour look silly for pursuing him so intently instead of focusing on policy. I suspect that Key doesn’t have the courage to be teh ebil – blancmanges are not noted for their iron will. But it’s almost as though Labour have decided that business is necessarily evil and therefore John Key is necessarily evil. Many business people, big and small, must feel offended by Labour’s pursuit of Key.

Can’t vote Labour, can’t vote National, wouldn’t vote for Winston Peters and NZ First ever, at all. So who to vote for?

The Greens are an option for many left leaning voters. The right has been at pains to characterise them as watermelons – green on the outside but red on the inside. Given this identity campaign, the right will have little to complain about if the overall left-vote, Labour and Green, turns out to be bigger than the overall right vote, and the Labour party gets to lead the government again. But they look like Luddites to me. I would be more confident about voting for them if they acknowledged that we can’t actually all live in some rural idyll, not without a massive decrease in the population first.

On the other side of the ideological divide, there’s the Act party, unreconstructed market ideologues from the 80s and 90s, who are proposing the usual sell-offs and meltdowns and damn the poor. They are about as unpalatable as Winston Peters and NZ First, ‘though to give them credit, they are at least honest in their aims.

So what I have done? Along with one of my Tory-voting friends, I’ve voted Maori. Go figure.

*****

There should be some preliminary results through by about 8pm AEST, and we might have a clear sense of how the government will shape up by Sunday morning. I will try to pop by on Sunday to give you an up-date on what’s happening, and why.

So which way will they jump? The media has been full of speculation over the last few days, aided by the differing positions of the party’s co-leaders (Tariana Turia is clearly keen for a deal with National as utu for Labour’s betrayal over the Foreshore and Seabed; Pita Sharples prefers a deal with Labour). On the policy front, the party clearly has more in common with Labour than National (it is generally seen as being to the left of Labour on economic issues), and its bottom line of entrenching the Maori seats would be very difficult for National to swallow (particularly since they’ve been courting the redneck vote and promising to abolish them for the last five years). Labour OTOH might grumble, but they have no fundamental objections, and it basically matches their policy of leaving the seats’ fate in the hands of Maori. More importantly, the grassroots membership, who will be consulted on any deal, are likely to swing towards Labour – meaning the party leadership will have to have a very attractive offer to persuade them to accept supporting National.

Of course, there is a third option: the party could abstain on confidence and supply, let government fall where it may, then sit on the cross-benches and act as a veto on legislation. This would neatly defuse any Pakeha whining about the Maori Party exploiting their overhang to produce an undemocratic outcome, while maximising power; instead of having to make one deal, once, whoever is in government would have to come crawling to them on every vote. This would pose no real problems for Labour – they’ve been governing under such arrangements for the past six years. But it would pose real problems for National; they still haven’t grasped MMP properly yet, do not play well with others, and are likely to get sulky and pouty at the thought of parties refusing to vote for policies they fundamentally oppose. But there are two problems with such a plan. Firstly, its practicality depends on the numbers; there has to be no other real alternative the government can go to for votes. The Greens aren’t a problem to this; either they’re part of Labour’s legislative minority, or just as unlikely to agree with National. But if NZ First gets in, the plan is probably a non-starter. Secondly, its difficult to imagine that National would put up with this sort of arrangement for long; they’d simply call an election at the first legislative defeat, citing the need for a “mandate” – a highly desirable (for them) tactic as most of the other parties would be broke and unable to seriously compete. OTOH, a clear statement that he Maori party will not tolerate a mid-term election and will throw confidence and supply behind Labour rather than have one may be enough to prevent such a tactic.

Whichever option the Maori Party choose, the other parties – and the New Zealand electorate – are going to have to get used to Maori wielding real power and having a real influence on policy. Hopefully we’ll be able to cope.

Australians may think they are already familiar with coalitions. After all, you have one as a permanent feature of your political landscape, and it ran the country for eleven years under John Howard. But that’s a very traditional form of coalition. Here in New Zealand, we do things rather differently. The best way of illustrating this is to show how coalition arrangements have changed over the years.

Before MMP, there were no coalitions, or at least, none since the two-party system solidified in 1938. The unfair electoral system leveraged pluralities (and sometimes not even that) into majorities, allowing governments to do what they liked, with no checks and balances. Minor parties were an annoyance, not a potential partner in power, and so were generally ignored. As a result, New Zealand politicians were unused to coalitions when MMP came along. And the first MMP coalition, between National and New Zealand First after the 1996 election, reflected this. Management-wise, it followed the Australian model, with the two parties agreeing to act jointly on all things (I think they may even have shared a caucus, but I may be mistaken about that). New Zealand First gained the position of Deputy Prime Minister, as well as five Cabinet positions (and four Ministers outside Cabinet) – but those Ministers (and by extension, the party they dominated) were required to follow the Cabinet line in all things, thanks to the doctrine of Cabinet Collective Responsibility (this will become important later).

Thanks to past bad blood (Winston Peters, the NZ First leader, was a former National Party Cabinet Minister), the two parties did not trust each other, and so the coalition was governed by an exhaustive written agreement backed by a detailed agreement on policy. However, there were policy tensions between the parties, which were exacerbated when an internal coup within National saw it shift back towards neoliberalism. The coalition eventually fell apart, with National continuing to govern with the aid of defectors from NZ First and other parties – all of whom lost their seats in the 1999 election.

In retrospect, these sorts of arrangements were too brittle, and failed to deal with what is now called the “unity-distinctiveness dilemma” – the need for coalition partners to remain united for the purposes of advancing shared policies, but at the same time remain distinct so as to appeal to their separate bases of support. Every coalition arrangement since has been progressively looser in an effort to resolve this problem. So, in 1999, the new Labour-Alliance coalition (a minority coalition which needed support from the Greens to do anything) went for a much shorter arrangement, essentially agreeing on overarching goals and good faith discussion of how to achieve them. More importantly, it was recognised that the coalition parties would need to disagree on some things, and arrangements were made to allow this to happen without it causing the government to fall over. Most importantly, Cabinet Collective Responsibility was weakened (and the Cabinet Manual formally revised) to allow Ministers to disagree with the government in certain circumstances. In the end, this was not enough to save the Alliance – their poll numbers plummeted as they were seen to be “absorbed” by Labour, and the party eventually imploded due to tensions over the US invasion of Afghanistan.

The 2002 election saw even looser arrangements. Labour concluded a coalition agreement with the Progressives (a rump of the Alliance, centred on party leader Jim Anderton), but this was not enough to gain a majority on confidence and supply. So they cut a deal with the United Future Party promising specified policies and general consultation in exchange for support on confidence and supply. In addition, despite bad blood from the campaign, they also entered a cooperation agreement [PDF] with the Greens, promising general consultation and influence on policy development in certain areas. The post-2005 coalition agreements mirrored these sorts of arrangements, albeit with a different combination of parties, and with the innovation of support parties having Ministers outside Cabinet, bound by Cabinet Collective Responsibility only in their portfolio areas. So, we can have the Minister of Foreign Affairs criticise the government on free trade with China (not technically a foreign affairs topic) or immigration, without it impacting on their support for the government. The straitjacket has become very loose indeed.

While the experiment of Ministers outside Cabinet may not survive, loose coalition arrangements based on a few specified policies coupled with general consultation have been established as the norm. And the reason for this is simple: power. In a shared caucus, or where policy is decided on by a joint committee, small parties have no power. In the former, they can be outvoted. In the latter, at best, they can achieve deadlock. But by minimising their commitments, small parties maximise their freedom of action, and thereby their influence and ability to represent their constituents. Beyond a limited number of pre-agreed areas, the government has to come to them on every vote, allowing them to bargain for concessions, amendments, or (if they are inclined that way) quid pro quos. That said, the parties represent fairly well-defined policy positions, and can generally be relied upon to support legislation which advances their interests regardless. But the requirement for consultation gives them significant influence over policy before it even hits the House – and that is influence they will want to retain. I cannot imagine a return to a 1996-style coalition – small parties just won’t sign up to it. And if a large party insists on such an arrangement, they won’t get to be government.

Deborah has already covered what Labour has done in government over the last nine years. If re-elected, Labour will likely continue to govern in the same vaguely left-wing, incrementalist style, slowly extending employment rights and the welfare state as money becomes available. So in this post, I thought I’d look at the alternative: what would National do if they form a government?

A problem here is that we don’t really have complete information to judge. National has been following a “small target” strategy, which means minimising differences with the government and refusing to release policy until the last minute so as to prevent public scrutiny – and government criticism. This is highly frustrating to those of us who like solid policy to chew on and pick through or who think parties should offer us meaningful policy choices rather than just one of red or blue. But there’s still some policy out there, and some broad trends can be discerned.

(I should note here that I am a lefty, and so my perceptions of National’s policy will inevitably be coloured by this. That’s something you’ll just have to deal with)

First, National would offer tax cuts. Great stonking ones, if you believe their finance spokesperson. Whether they’ll actually be able to deliver in an economic environment which has their own leader warning against “lolly scrambles” is an interesting question, but they’ve previously expressed some willingness to run deficits if necessary – “balancing the books” apparently now being some sort of socialist plot. The exact shape of their tax cut programme will be announced some time after Treasury opens the books on October 6, but traditionally National has favoured the rich (sorry; “average” New Zealanders, which it defines as the 15% of the population who earn over $60,000 / year) over actual ordinary New Zealanders; I’ll do a full distributional breakdown when the policy comes out.

Secondly, National would shift employment law back towards favouring the interests of employers. They have ruled out a return to the hated Employment Contracts Act, instead saying that they would “reform” the existing Employment Relations Act, but their announced policies indicate a clear desire to roll back Labour’s reforms around union access to workplaces, collective bargaining, public holidays and annual leave, while introducing a 90-day “probationary” period in which workers could be fired at will. They are also likely to reduce employee and possibly government contributions to the KiwiSaver workplace savings scheme, and are highly unlikely to continue Labour’s policy of regular increases to the minimum wage.

Thirdly, reforming the Resource Management Act – our core planning and environmental legislation – is a high priority for National, featuring in most of their policy announcements. The RMA allows local communities to control development, both through policy setting and participation in the resource consent process. National thinks this introduces uncertainty and increases costs; they would prefer a system where developers can do whatever they want without all of this messy “democracy” and “participation” business. Their solution is to erect barriers to public participation, preventing “frivolous” objections, holding hearings in the Environment Court (which means formality, lawyers, and cross-examination – all of which costs money and frightens people off), and introducing a priority consenting scheme allowing them to bypass the entire process for important projects and favoured applicants. This would both reduce participation, and significantly weaken environmental protections.

Fourthly, National have promised both to abolish the Maori seats, and to hold a referendum on MMP. The latter is a deliberate effort to roll back democracy and replace the current fair electoral system with an unfair one in which there are fewer checks on government power. The long-term story here is that democracy and coalition politics put an end to the neo-liberal policies National favours – once Parliament reflected the actual will of the people, such policies were a non-starter. So National seeks to advance its policies by stacking the electoral system and undermining democracy – a dangerous path which displays a deeply undemocratic mindset.

On health and education there is not much real information yet. National have made vague promises to improve outcomes (literacy rates or elective surgery waiting times, respectively), but given no real details. They may provide more details during the campaign, or they may leave this area deliberately empty, so as to spring radical policies on us by surprise.

They have other policies – privatising ACC (our no-fault universal accident insurance scheme which keeps lawyers out of business), capping the number of public servants, using public-private partnerships for roads (which worked so well in Australia), and tweaking the Emissions Trading Scheme to favour polluters – but the above are the main ones. And while they have attempted to minimise differences, there’s a clear distinction between them and Labour.

All of the above of course assumes that National gets to do what they want. But thanks to MMP, that is more difficult than it seems. While they are currently polling high, National is unlikely to win an absolute majority on election day, meaning they will need to talk to other parties if they want to pass legislation. And unless they manage to win more than ~46% of the vote, they will have to talk to parties beyond their preferred partners of ACT and United Future. The problem for National is that those parties – the Greens and Maori Party – are strongly opposed to these policies, and are highly unlikely to vote for them under any circumstances. So National may find itself in the unenviable position of being able to form a government, but unable to enact its preferred policy platform. National voters will be deeply unhappy with that. The rest of us will probably be somewhat relieved.

So what have they been doing, all this time?

Labour came back to power in 1999. One of the first things they did was to introduce a new tax top tax rate of 39%, on incomes over $60,000. They campaigned on this, and it was a known consequence of their election. So for most of their term, the effective NZ tax rates have been 15% on incomes up to $9,500, 21% on incomes between $9,500 and $38,000, 33% on incomes between $38,000 and $60,000, and 39% thereafter.

There has been quite a bit of bracket creep, and a corresponding push for tax cuts. In 2005, the Minister of Finance (equivalent to the Australian Federal Treasurer, not to the Australian Federal Minister of Finance), announced that thresholds would be inflation indexed, which had the effect of cutting taxes. The problem was that it simply didn’t deliver very much. People in the lower income tax brackets would have been better off by about 60c a week, so the changes were quickly dubbed as “the chewing gum” cuts, and the Minister backed down on them. Instead, he decided to give people tax breaks for saving. Towards the end of their first term, Labour had announced a workplace retirement savings scheme, KiwiSaver. Originally, the scheme was to be just one that was facilitated through payroll systems, but in 2006, Labour cancelled the chewing gum tax cuts, and added tax incentives to KiwiSaver instead. At the same time, they added compulsory employer contributions, although only for employees who actually sign on to KiwiSaver. So about 20 years after Australia got its compulsory superannuation savings schemes going, NZ followed suit.

KiwiSaver is one response to the problem of retirement savings for the aging NZ population. Another is the Cullen Fund, so called because the Minister of Finance is Michael Cullen. The Cullen fund is a enormous investment fund. Dr Cullen has run budget surpluses for virtually all of Labour’s term, and a portion of the surpluses has been directed into worldwide investments, with the specific purpose of helping to fund superannuation in the future.

Labour has made some specific moves to help lower income earners. In its first term, it introduced Working For Families, a system of transfer payments to families that were “in work” (20 hours per week for sole parents, 30 hours per week between them for couples). The Working For Families payments increase with the number of children you have, so a couple with three children earning over $100,000 (total) would still get $2 per week. The Inland Revenue Department has a handy little calculator where you can while away minutes working out what you might get. Labour has characterised the Working For Families Tax Credits as very tightly directed tax cuts.

Most recently, Labour has introduced a child care scheme, so that all children aged three and four are entitled to 20 hours of free child care per week (conditions apply). The object is to ensure that all children can have some preschool education, and to help families with the cost of child care. And in their first term, they introduced government funded paid parental leave (again, conditions apply, but not onerously so).

Two other groups of people have been given very specific help. New Zealand has a proud tradition of state housing, providing good quality housing at low cost. Under the previous government, many state houses, particularly those in desirable areas, had been sold off, and rents for state houses had been set at market rates. Tenants were able to apply for assistance to pay the market rate. The idea was to ensure that people who needed housing assistance could get it, whether the house they were renting was publicly owned or privately owned. In effect, however, it served as a subsidy to private landlords. The incoming Labour government stopped selling state houses, started building more, and re-introduced income-related rents, so that tenants of state houses pay no more than 1/4 of their income in rent. State tenants have been helped enormously by this. And in the lead-up to the 2005 election, Labour promised to remove the interest on student loans. In New Zealand, students take out loans to fund their tertiary education, and previously, the interest impost was set at market rates. Interest-free student loans have made a huge difference to young people fresh out of universities and polytechnics (equivalent to TAFEs).

Other financial actions include: renationalising the Accident Compensation Scheme (NZ has a no fault, universal, accident compensation scheme, which means that no other insurance is needed, there are no lawyers, and there are no massive payouts – it’s a fabulous scheme); buying back the railways, lock, rolling stock and tracks; and bailing out Air New Zealand (but that’s a lot cheaper than what’s going on in the US at present).

On the social front, the Labour government has decriminalised prostitution, made public places, and especially bars and restaurants smoke-free, and introduced civil unions, which are marriages in all but name, but they are open to all New Zealanders, including gay and lesbian New Zealanders. The sky has not yet fallen in. Even more contentiously, the Labour government backed legislation introduced by the Green party, initially repealing, but eventually amending, section 59. Section 59 allowed parents to claim in defence of an assault charge, that the use of physical force was justified by the need to correct a child. Unsurprisingly, some very nasty cases of physical “punishment” of children had been successfully defended using section 59 as a defence. Now that defence is gone, with the proviso that the police will not prosecute minor incidents. The sky still hasn’t fallen in.

On the international scene, NZ stayed out of the invasion of Iraq, took in refugees from Nauru, and signed a free-trade agreement with China. And finally, in the last few weeks, it has passed a bill enabling an Emissions Trading Scheme.

So far, so good. This is all consistent with progressive government, and indeed, what we might expect a progressive, left-wing government to do. But Labour ran into major problems over the foreshore and seabed. It’s a long story, and the complexities are, well, complex. But the essence of it was that a Maori iwi (tribe) had won the right to appeal a judgement involving the foreshore to the Maori Land Court. To people with brightly coloured necks, it looked as if the Kiwi right to a day at the beach was threatened. So the government legislated to assert its sovereignty over the foreshore and seabed. To many Maori, it looked like yet another confiscation. (To the credit of its philosophical consistency, NZ’s leading right wing business lobby group argued that this was a removal of property rights, and as such, was unconscionable.) One Maori MP split away from the Labour party on the strength of it, and formed the Maori party, which now holds four seats, and is likely to hold more after this election.

The Labour government has achieved an enormous amount during its time in office, particularly with respect to providing support to lower income people, and with respect to social issues. It has been a classic, reformist, Labour government. Some of its reforms will, I think, endure, such as KiwiSaver, and the various social reforms. I can’t see any major political party wanting to go near civil unions again, much to the dismay of the fundies.

But the government is looking old and tired, and it seems to be lacking vision. It has become embroiled in a corruption scandal (well, as corrupt as NZ gets, which is not much, really), and so far, it’s not offering anything other than more of the same. So despite being, on balance, a jolly good government which has done all sorts of sensible things, I think we are going to toss it out.

The problem is where to start. So, I’ll start with the meta-narrative: currently, New Zealand has a nominally centre-left Labour-led minority government. The NZ Labour Party – basically like the ALP, only without a right faction – has run the country for the past nine years through various coalition arrangements, most recently with the populist New Zealand First Party (old grey economic nationalists crossed with One Nation immigrant-bashers) and the supposedly centrist (but really neo-liberal and Christian) United Future Party (a one-man band centred on former Labour cabinet minister Peter Dunne, with a rotating cast of freaks depending on who he’s trying to appeal to this election). After nine years in office, they’re looking pretty tired, and this look is not helped by an ugly corruption scandal which has blown up around NZ First leader Winston Peters. Meanwhile, the opposition National Party (standard capitalist conservatives) has managed to get itself a fresh-faced young leader uncontaminated by the economic atrocities of the 90′s, who is willing to be pragmatic on policy and huddle up to Labour in order to gain power (something which incidentally takes the focus off his 90′s-era front bench, who have some serious baggage and have not forsworn their neo-liberal ideology). There are a couple of other parties – ACT (market Darwinists, complete with insane prophet), the Greens (who are exactly what they say they are) and the Maori Party (ditto) – but the basic narrative is a Rudd vs. Howard, youth vs. experience, change of the generational guard story.

Currently, Labour is well behind in the polls, with the most recent showing National holding a commanding 18-point lead. But that lead is expected to shrink during the campaign, which could cause serious problems for National. Why? Because New Zealand has a fair election system, which (give or take overhangs and the 5% threshold) assigns power according to the proportion of the votes won. This means that parties must usually gain the support of other parties in order to form a government. And this is a particular problem for National because it has cannibalised all of its friends and has problems working with other parties. At the extreme, this may see National “win” the election (by winning a plurality of the vote), but lose out in the post-election coalition games – something likely to cement right-wing hostility to MMP. More likely, they will fail to win enough seats to be able to form an easy coalition with ACT and/or United Future, and so be forced to try cutting a deal with the Maori Party or even the Greens. While both parties are on the opposite side of the political spectrum, it’s not entirely unthinkable (particularly if alternative arrangements look complicated or the Maori Party wants utu over the foreshore and seabed), but it would likely see National lacking a legislative majority and unable to enact its policies – something they are unlikely to tolerate for long.

(Of course, Labour might be able to pull a rabbit out of a hat and fight its way to a fourth term. But they will only do that by being bold – something they have shown a pathological aversion to doing).

I haven’t talked about policy yet because there hasn’t been much – the government has kept on governing, and the opposition has been “keeping its powder dry” / “trying not to scare the horses”. But no doubt we’ll see a big pile of it in the next few weeks. Unfortunately, apart from tax cuts and the usual law and order fearmongering, and some pro-forma whining about “bureaucracy”, almost all of it will be ignored. We have a presidential-style of politics here now, with the media focusing relentlessly on the personalities, the narrative, and the “game” of who’s up and down in the polls. And in the process, the stakes – the stuff we’re actually fighting over – gets completely lost in the noise.

If anyone has anything they particularly want explained, ask in the comments, and maybe Deborah or I will put together a post on it.

We might be in touch with some Canucks too.

Update: I’m equally delighted to announce that Deborah from In a strange land will also be joining us as an NZ election guest blogger!

Anyone wanting a primer on what’s been happening in the lead up to the campaign and lots of links should check out No Right Turn.

Other links and commentary solicited!