The Post: Why this might be the ‘angry centrist’ election

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The current paradox of New Zealand politics is that the public is the angriest it’s been for decades – but has in no sense shifted decisively left or right.

The country isn’t doing well: everyone knows that. The health system is a mess, our infrastructure is crumbling, and thousands are leaving for Australia. Still in the grip of the long pandemic-era hangover, the public’s ambient mood is bad.

None of this, though, has pushed middle New Zealand into the arms of either the right or the left. Big change may well be waiting in the wings: in this country we get it every 40 to 50 years, starting with the 1890s Liberal creation of a bare-bones social welfare state, continuing with the first Labour government’s 1930s-era fulfilment of that dream, and culminating in the fourth Labour government’s betrayal of it in the 1980s.

But even on that timetable, the next sweeping shift might not arrive until the next decade. Right now, one can feel the pressure build without any clear sense of where it will burst out.

Partisans on the right point to an increased ACT vote share, up at 8% versus less than 1% last decade. But that’s counterbalanced by a strengthened Green Party, comfortably polling twice the 5% threshold it once looked set to fall below.

Feeling these opposing pulls, middle New Zealand remains exactly where it was: dissatisfied with life but unsure about the proffered solutions. Which is where the latest theory from the New York Times comes in.

Mapping hundreds of recent American electoral contests, the Times has found that the politicians who can win crucial swing states and voters are what it calls “angry centrists”. As the name suggests, these are not the bland, status-quo-defending moderates of days gone by.

They are, instead, people like Ohio Democrat Marcy Kaptur, who happily attacks “the far right taking away women’s rights and protecting greedy corporations at every turn” but also lambasts “the far left ignoring millions illegally crossing the border and trying to defund the police”. Kaptur got re-elected in a state Donald Trump won by seven percentage points.

Such politicians, in short, are left-wing on economic issues and right-wing on cultural ones. They want to break up corporate oligopolies but take a tough line on crime. Far from being boring, angry centrists are “combative and populist”, the Times argues, promising sweeping change while criticising mainstream elites as out of touch.

If middle New Zealand is indeed resolutely centrist but also very angry, such an approach could be electorally potent. Analysis by the Post’s Henry Cooke shows 71% of 2023’s swing voters thought the economy had got “a lot worse”, but only 2% wanted further progress on Treaty issues.

Angry centrism is, of course, what New Zealand First does already. And one can also see the appeal for Labour.

The party knows that the cost of living is the dominant issue in New Zealand politics. Its MPs talk glowingly of their Australian counterparts’ decisive victory in May, one underpinned by Anthony Albanese’s relentless focus on household budgets and material issues.

New Zealand Labour’s greatest problem is that, having chosen a minimalist capital gains tax that garners equally minimal revenue, it will be unable to spend much on alleviating cost-of-living pressures. This puts even more onus on areas like competition policy.

Populist moves to break up oligopolies in energy generation, supermarkets and elsewhere could both lower prices and harness public anger. The bargaining strength of workers could also be boosted without any strain on the government’s books.

Such a focus on economic issues, at the expense of cultural ones, might be hard to justify ethically. Women still face horrendous levels of domestic violence; Israeli forces have killed 20,000 innocent children in Gaza; Māori live seven years fewer than Pākehā and are discriminated against in hospitals and courtrooms.

Middle New Zealand doesn’t have hard-right views on these issues. But it almost certainly doesn’t want to hear politicians focusing on them. The more that Labour does so, the less likely it is to win next year.

Winston Peters will still try to fight the culture war fight. But his attacks on “woke” politics and gender-neutral toilets will be, as much as anything else, wedges used to separate Labour from middle New Zealand.

Watching the main centre-left party trying not to engage on these cultural issues, while also not going so far right as to alienate its base, is unlikely to be an edifying experience.

But as the British pollster Michael Ashcroft once wrote: “If an election is an exam, voters will set the question; parties that choose to answer a different question will be marked accordingly.”

The state of the economy is foremost in the public’s mind and, like it or not, looks set to dominate the year ahead.