New Zealand Goes Right, Away

And on the same weekend where Australian voters resoundingly rejected codified rights for Indigenous people, neighboring New Zealand has seen voters sending the ruling Labour Party to the bench and have elected a right-wing conservative nationalist coalition that is promising to cut taxes, inflation, and oh yes, immigration.

 

New Zealand’s next prime minister will be Christopher Luxon, a former chief executive of Air New Zealand, whose center-right National Party will lead a coalition with Act, a smaller libertarian party.

Addressing a euphoric crowd at his party’s victory event on Auckland’s waterfront, Mr. Luxon thanked supporters and promised a better and more stable future for the country.

“Our government will deliver for every New Zealander,” he said, to whoops and cheers. “We will rebuild the economy and deliver tax relief.”

The rightward drift ended six years of the Labour government that was dominated by Ms. Ardern, who stepped down early this year.

“She’s probably the most consequential prime minister we’ve had since David Lange,” the Labour leader who came to power in 1984, “and, from an international point of view, most charismatic,” said Bernard Hickey, an economic and political commentator in Auckland, New Zealand. “But this election is the landmark of her failure.”

For many voters, Ms. Ardern and her successor, Chris Hipkins, failed to deliver on the Labour Party’s promise of transformational change. In the weeks leading up to the election, New Zealanders, buffeted by the currents of global inflation and its larger Asia Pacific neighbors’ economic woes, overwhelmingly cited cost of living as the primary concern driving their vote.

The coalition is a return to form for New Zealand, which since moving to a system of proportional representation in 1993 has had only one single-party government — the Labour government elected in 2020 under Ms. Ardern. But it is the first time National, which last governed alone in the early 1980s, has been in coalition with a more conservative partner.

With most of the vote counted, support for the Labour Party, which won 50 percent of the vote in 2020, buoyed by the country’s strong response to the coronavirus pandemic, has collapsed to 27 percent.

The National Party won 39 percent of the vote, up from 26 percent in 2020. Among the smaller parties, the Green Party took 11 percent of the vote, and Act won 9 percent. But those results could shift slightly after “special” votes were counted, including those of overseas New Zealanders. That could potentially force Act and National into coalition with New Zealand First, a longtime kingmaker that played a role in Ms. Ardern’s ascent, to push the right-wing coalition over the halfway mark.

Addressing party members in Wellington, Mr. Hipkins said he had conceded the election to Mr. Luxon and celebrated Labour’s accomplishments on alleviating child poverty and navigating New Zealand through the coronavirus pandemic, the Christchurch massacres and the White Island volcano eruption.

“We will keep fighting for working people, because that is our history and our future,” he said.

 

And yes, the rights for New Zealand's Maori population are now expected to be put to a vote.

The new National-led government, despite being more conservative, was unlikely to make significant changes on many social issues, said Ben Thomas, a former press secretary for the National Party.

“Nobody wants to re-litigate abortion or homosexual marriage,” he said. “Unlike the States, where there’s a constant battle to try and roll back progressive legislation, the conservative tradition in New Zealand is ‘We’ve always gone just about far enough.’”

But Act may seek to push policy priorities of its own, including a referendum to reconsider the role New Zealand’s Indigenous Maori people play in policymaking.

“What they actually want is a referendum which defines away any kind of standing or rights guaranteed to Maori by the Treaty,” Mr. Thomas said, referring to an 1840 agreement that governs New Zealand legislation to this day.

He added: “What you might broadly call racial tensions — over race and policy, Maori policy, Treaty policy — are greater than at any point since 2005.”

 

Putting rights of a minority group to a vote never seems to end well in any country. I don't expect New Zealand to be any different.