Thread by @publicaddress

🧵 There has been a lot of commentary and reporting on Labour's loss of – or battle to retain – a number of high-profile electorate seats in the 2023 election, but it all seems to miss one obvious fact: those Labour MPs almost all outperformed Labour's party vote.

Deborah Russell, a committed, talented MP, is currently 483 votes down vs National's Paulo Garcia, a mediocre second-time MP with risible views on social issues. But National's party vote margin in New Lynn is five times that. Labour won the party vote in very few electorates.

So, why? I can tell you why I, a lifelong tribal Labour voter, voted Green for the first time this year. Firstly, they lost me on tax: Chris Hipkins' veto on the Parker-Robertson tax reform in favour of a GST cut that would not deliver the promised benefit.

Secondly, climate change. It's serious and it's existential and the Greens' policies most strongly recognised that. It's unfathomable that climate was almost absent as a campaign issue given what's happening in the real world. voteforclimate.org.nz

This has not been a good election for climate, by the way. National's Energy spokesman, Stuart Smith, has been touting a crackpot libertarian climate denier. Act, somehow, is even worse.

In a more general sense, I think Labour, as a government, was out on its feet. History will vindicate its handling of the pandemic and we've come through that crisis in better shape than most developed countries. But it took a toll on the government and the governed.

That showed in the government's difficulty in achieving the necessary reforms it embarked on, and which it either abandoned under Hipkins or struggled to bring the public along with.

There's another dimension to that, of course: the money. Declared donations to parties in the 2023 election were dramatically unbalanced, but third-party promoters spent more than ever before and were far less transparent. rnz.co.nz/news/election-…

And long before the election campaign began, yet more money was going into astroturfing, shaping perceptions. Those campaigns often reached for race as a wedge. The alleged threat of "co-governance" was a created one.

After voting on Friday, I felt quite relaxed, buoyant even – because it meant that regardless of any result, the election campaign itself was over. I genuinely think this campaign – and the pursuit of a group of angry, labile voters – has been bad for us as a country.

But here we are. There will be a new government, led by a triumphant National Party, which has promised the voters a lot. In some cases, it has made promises directly contradicted by its policies.

I don't think any New Zealand government has taken office with this many questions over its core tax-and-spend undertakings. The only economists National could find to endorse its tax plan were the ones it paid.

A tiny proportion of households will get the tax relief National campaigned on, and a much greater number will see additional costs that are a result of trying to make the tax numbers add up. The poor, young and disabled will do worst.

While property investors, the real winners of the election, are celebrating, their good fortune has implications for the rest of us. If, as suggested here, they pile back in the market ... stuff.co.nz/business/prope…

That means the end of a welcome recent trend towards owner-occupiers being the majority of buyers. Housing affordability, already almost the worst in the world, will get worse.

Ditto for the implications of the foreign buyers' tax. For it to work, half of all sales of $2-plus homes will need to be to foreign buyers. Every single year. Nicola Willis suggested, apparently off the top of her head, that the online gambling tax could be made to work ...

By requiring NZ internet providers to block websites that didn't sign up for the tax. No government has proposed such a thing before.

The effect of the tax plan, according to Goldman Sachs and others, will be inflationary. Which would mean higher interest rates for longer.

Meanwhile, no apparent provision has been made for the hole in local government budgets that will be created by the promised scuppering of the water infrastructure reforms. In Auckland, it's worse yet: as Wayne Brown notes, the scrapping of the regional fuel tax means ...

A further $2bn hole for us. Absent any government commitments, that's on the ratepayers. It could get really brutal. Scrapping of the clear car discount and reliance on the ETS to drive fleet decarbonisation – National's position – implies a *lot* more pain at the pump.

And then there's the reckless scrapping of the independent Māori health authority, with only the vaguest ideas about what might be done instead. It's policy vandalism.

I worry about that and I worry about my disabled children. Doubling the price of the buses my son takes to be part of his community – to go to job interviews – to give tax relief to landlords is petty, miserable politics. It will cost us all in the end.

So, Labour didn't give people enough to vote for, it was clapped out and people wanted change. But it's National that has to govern now. And that will not be easy, for either the government or the governed.

Among the risks is Act's determination to force a Treat referendum, which we know would unleash the same kind of division witnessed across the Tasman this past weekend. There's plenty of dark money waiting. I hope Luxon stares that down. stuff.co.nz/national/polit…

As a final thought, I wonder if all the talk about a three-term government misses what's actually happening. This election result and the last one have both been the product of electoral convulsions. It might not be the new normal, but it also doesn't seem like business as usual.

PS: Perhaps I've missed it, but all the news reports on TPM's success in the Māori electorates seem to omit the fact that Labour comfortably won the party vote in all seven of them. Those voters knew what they were doing. They wanted new faces.

PPS: Mt Albert is pretty interesting. With its leader standing, Labour won more than 20,000 party votes in 2020. This year: 7651. The Green Party vote was down too. But National only picked up an extra couple of thousand. The voters just didn't turn up.

The preliminary total for Mt Albert in 2023 is 28,266 votes (pending specials, obviously). In 2020, there were 41,697 votes cast in the electorate. Wow.