Before me was a few hours drive to Matamata and I was taking a moment to myself, enjoying a coffee and scrolling my phone without the energy to go beyond the headline.
Stuff, that wonderful site that allows me to write these columns, had a story about the latest opinion polls. The election was still a year away but if religion is the opium of the common folk, polls are catnip to those ensnared by an interest in politics.
I clicked the link and there it was. The long-awaited glimmer in ACTs endless winter. For the first time in a decade, polls were giving ACT a second MP.
This mattered because polls do not merely reflect voting intentions. They shape them.
It isn’t a secret that I prefer ACT. We don’t agree on everything. They are yet to support the selling of heroin in dairies, and the reluctance to scrap occupational licensing for dentists is a frustration. I remain hopeful.
Anyway. It was my belief that there was latent support for the party, but when its polling was so anaemic that it would not raise the interest of the most ravenous vampire there was no point wasting voting intention on a one-man vanity project. Like Peter Dunne’s long goodbye.
My anticipation was that if ACT could show signs of political life, former supporters might return. The attention would also draw new voters to pay the party attention. Opinion polls do not merely reflect opinion. They help shape it.
The current polls show a tight race. The governing party would be wise not to place too much comfort in these numbers.
Let’s start with the direction of travel. Labour won half of the electorate in 2020. Current polls have them at a little over 30% and falling.
National managed less than 21% in 2002 and didn’t do much better in 2020. As recently as 2011 Labour fell to 27.5% of the party vote.
Labour can fall below 30% and there is every reason to think it will; and the opinion polls will be a factor in their decline.
After the initial rush of enthusiasm for Prime Minister Hipkins, which saw his party’s poll numbers rise to the high 30s, reality has set in. Not only the ministerial debacles, which never help, but the underlying problems in the heath and education sectors remain stubbornly resistant to being solved by a fresh smile and a few sausage rolls.
I have been surprised at how sanguine most parents are as the quality of the education their children endure declines. I expected parents marching in anger, but most appear content to have their offspring do little more than eat lunch and sing culturally appropriate songs during the six hours of state-funded daycare.
However, at the margins this dismal performance will cost Labour votes. Reporting about the new science curriculum not teaching science will peel off further support. There are no good-news-stories in education for Hipkins, his old portfolio, and there will only be more bad news between now and October.
There is worse in healthcare. There are no positive reviews of the many health reforms, and persistent stories about patients not getting seen or having to wait years for treatment.
But a larger liability than the failure of Labour’s reforms has been the imposition of race into healthcare. New Zealanders are a tolerant and generous people; but being told that you are less entitled to medical care than your neighbour because of who your ancestors cuddled up to at night is going to prove electorally unpalatable for many.
I doubt Hipkins wanted to have to defend this unorthodox approach to triage. It seems to have been a policy that grew organically within the health sector, and he has asked his health minister to find a way out, but there isn’t a way out.
If he unwinds this policy he will face an insurrection from within his own caucus, and if he doesn’t he will be hammered all the way through to polling day.
All of this analysis, it should be remembered, rests on the questionable analysis offered up by the pollsters. The ability of this profession to have us forget their past mistakes is up there with Harry Potter’s Obliviate spell, but what polls do achieve is to make people think tactically.
Just as an ACT supporter might not have wanted to waste their vote when their poll numbers were under 1%, Labour supporters will look at the numbers and consider their party in coalition with the Greens and the toxic mess that is the re-branded Māori Party, Te Pāti Māori.
The Greens’ desire for a wealth tax and Te Pāti Māori’s radical interpretation of how power in Aotearoa should be apportioned will cause more than a handful of Labour supporters to wonder about what a government underpinned by these two groups would look like.
The emergence of Te Pāti Māori in the polling data, it is my thesis, has made the electoral maths for Labour difficult. In the recent Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll, both co-leaders had exceptional negative net-favourability ratings, including amongst Labour voters.
Soft Labour voters might be wary of swapping to National thanks to the rising impact of ACT, but even here the electoral maths may swing against Labour.
If it begins to look like a change of government, a small number of swing voters may decide it is better to give Luxon a few extra seats to dilute ACT’s negotiating power...The full article is published HERE
Damien Grant is an Auckland business owner, a member of the Taxpayers’ Union and a regular opinion contributor for Stuff, writing from a libertarian perspective
It isn’t a secret that I prefer ACT. We don’t agree on everything. They are yet to support the selling of heroin in dairies, and the reluctance to scrap occupational licensing for dentists is a frustration. I remain hopeful.
Anyway. It was my belief that there was latent support for the party, but when its polling was so anaemic that it would not raise the interest of the most ravenous vampire there was no point wasting voting intention on a one-man vanity project. Like Peter Dunne’s long goodbye.
My anticipation was that if ACT could show signs of political life, former supporters might return. The attention would also draw new voters to pay the party attention. Opinion polls do not merely reflect opinion. They help shape it.
The current polls show a tight race. The governing party would be wise not to place too much comfort in these numbers.
Let’s start with the direction of travel. Labour won half of the electorate in 2020. Current polls have them at a little over 30% and falling.
National managed less than 21% in 2002 and didn’t do much better in 2020. As recently as 2011 Labour fell to 27.5% of the party vote.
Labour can fall below 30% and there is every reason to think it will; and the opinion polls will be a factor in their decline.
After the initial rush of enthusiasm for Prime Minister Hipkins, which saw his party’s poll numbers rise to the high 30s, reality has set in. Not only the ministerial debacles, which never help, but the underlying problems in the heath and education sectors remain stubbornly resistant to being solved by a fresh smile and a few sausage rolls.
I have been surprised at how sanguine most parents are as the quality of the education their children endure declines. I expected parents marching in anger, but most appear content to have their offspring do little more than eat lunch and sing culturally appropriate songs during the six hours of state-funded daycare.
However, at the margins this dismal performance will cost Labour votes. Reporting about the new science curriculum not teaching science will peel off further support. There are no good-news-stories in education for Hipkins, his old portfolio, and there will only be more bad news between now and October.
There is worse in healthcare. There are no positive reviews of the many health reforms, and persistent stories about patients not getting seen or having to wait years for treatment.
But a larger liability than the failure of Labour’s reforms has been the imposition of race into healthcare. New Zealanders are a tolerant and generous people; but being told that you are less entitled to medical care than your neighbour because of who your ancestors cuddled up to at night is going to prove electorally unpalatable for many.
I doubt Hipkins wanted to have to defend this unorthodox approach to triage. It seems to have been a policy that grew organically within the health sector, and he has asked his health minister to find a way out, but there isn’t a way out.
If he unwinds this policy he will face an insurrection from within his own caucus, and if he doesn’t he will be hammered all the way through to polling day.
All of this analysis, it should be remembered, rests on the questionable analysis offered up by the pollsters. The ability of this profession to have us forget their past mistakes is up there with Harry Potter’s Obliviate spell, but what polls do achieve is to make people think tactically.
Just as an ACT supporter might not have wanted to waste their vote when their poll numbers were under 1%, Labour supporters will look at the numbers and consider their party in coalition with the Greens and the toxic mess that is the re-branded Māori Party, Te Pāti Māori.
The Greens’ desire for a wealth tax and Te Pāti Māori’s radical interpretation of how power in Aotearoa should be apportioned will cause more than a handful of Labour supporters to wonder about what a government underpinned by these two groups would look like.
The emergence of Te Pāti Māori in the polling data, it is my thesis, has made the electoral maths for Labour difficult. In the recent Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll, both co-leaders had exceptional negative net-favourability ratings, including amongst Labour voters.
Soft Labour voters might be wary of swapping to National thanks to the rising impact of ACT, but even here the electoral maths may swing against Labour.
If it begins to look like a change of government, a small number of swing voters may decide it is better to give Luxon a few extra seats to dilute ACT’s negotiating power...The full article is published HERE
Damien Grant is an Auckland business owner, a member of the Taxpayers’ Union and a regular opinion contributor for Stuff, writing from a libertarian perspective
4 comments:
There is no great parental protest about education because the avergae person today is woefully less informed than 40 to 100 years ago when all read reasanablly balanced newspapers which included informed comment. Very few now read more than headlinesif that, and the education failure is not trumpeted as sporting matters, the antics of celebrities etc are.
“I doubt Hipkins wanted to have to defend this unorthodox approach to triage. It seems to have been a policy that grew organically within the health sector…”
What evidence is there that this policy grew up organically within the health sector? I would bet absolutely none.
Labour has told us that race based waiting list assessments have only been introduced in Auckland. Someone recently who signed an ACT party petition to remove race based criteria from waiting lists for health told me they did so because they worked in a small South Island hospital where they were ordered, on the quiet, over 12 months ago, to move all maori to the top of their surgery waiting lists. They have been doing so ever since and they are disgusted.
The woke left iwi elite take over of New Zealand now runs fast and deep, but deeper still runs the brewing anger from many New Zealanders, maori included.
This election will be the voice for much suppressed anger.
if the woke think colonisation by british was bad, wait till we see colonisation by the chinese. while kids are singing kumbaya and kissing taniwha, chinese are sharpening their arsenal with online coaching from singapore. the future wars will be won by machine learning - its foundation is not computer science, but statistics (the ugly math). as long as UE allows 10 credits of ncea math, there is no hope for our college grads :(
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