In six weeks from now, on 14 October, voters in New Zealand will go to the polls at a general election. (As an aside, voters here in Australia will also go to the polls on that day to vote on Mr Albanese’s Voice constitutional referendum, the one in which Albo is about as on top of the details as Joe Biden is when recounting how one of his sons died or as an ABC managing director is as regards the concepts of balance and impartiality.) Across the Tasman this will be an important election for Kiwis after two terms of Labour governments because the second was one of the most radical left-wing governments New Zealand has ever seen. Recall that Jacinda Ardern won an outright majority of seats for Labor in October of 2020 at the height of the Covid panic (this being near impossible under the German-style MMP voting system, in my view one of the world’s worst systems). It seemed that a solid majority of Kiwis bought hook, line and sinker all the Covid fear-mongering and wanted to be led by a PM and Labour party who would impose one of the world’s strictest lockdowns, sky-high costs be damned!  (I ask you readers, what nice, moral, public broadcaster-watching person who loves his grandmother counts the future costs to children, to the poor, to the economy, to future trust in the police and the doctorly caste, to future excess deaths tallies, or indeed any future bad consequences when weighing up what to do? One is either categorised as a ‘non-grandmother killer’ or not, right?) Remember during the Covid thuggery the Ardern line that ‘unless you hear it from us [i.e. her government], it is not the truth’? And recall that she later stood by that contention in parliament saying ‘we [i.e. her government] will continue to be your single source of truth’.

Finished laughing hysterically yet at that sort of shameless conceit that flies in the face of the entirety of Enlightenment thinking? The knock-on costs of the lockdown brutality have been huge across the Tasman, right up there with those in the state of Victoria. Kids’ school results have taken a massive hit; indeed, some poor kids will never recover and their lives will be forever diminished. Productivity has tanked (as it has here in Australia).  The budget hit was, well, what’s a synonym for ‘massive’ and ‘huge’, but even bigger? Paying people to do nothing has proven to be diabolically hard to unwind – does anyone seriously believe ‘working from home’ delivers as much output as working in the office? The public debt has ballooned. The Kiwi health service is ‘stretched’, to put things as kindly as possible. There is effectively no defence force, giving a whole new meaning to ‘free-riding’. Inflation is a problem. And the numbers of people working in the public service have mushroomed, as have those on the benefit.

But the most egregious factor of all might be race relations. This second Ardern Labour government set off down the path of ‘co-governance’. That’s a euphemism for giving more or less an equal say to Maori interests (representing about 17 per cent of the population) as is given to everyone else on issues such as planning, water and health care. Nor was that intention to go full speed down the path of identity politics and co-governance in any way signalled to the electorate before that 2020 election. Put the situation as bluntly as this: a recent poll showed upwards of one-fifth of Kiwis considering emigrating, the key factor no doubt being whether Labour wins this October election.

So given all that you would expect the main right-of-centre party in New Zealand to be miles ahead in the polls. But National (the rough equivalent of our Liberal party) is not. Its best recent poll had National at 35 per cent with Labour dropping to about 27 per cent. Now it’s true that with the small ACT party and its 13 per cent support a right-of-centre coalition would squeak a bare majority on these polls. (By the way, this ACT party would be described by the ABC here in Australia as ‘hard-right’ or ‘disgustingly populist’ or ‘on the extremist fringes’, though you’d be hard-pressed to point to many differences between its desired policies and those of John F. Kennedy.) But why aren’t National doing better?

I put it down in part to the National party being the home of the ‘moderate wets’. Their leader, Chistopher Luxon, is a former head of Air New Zealand. His political hero seems to be David Cameron (which tells you all you need to know as Cameron basically just continued on with the Tony Blair vision for a lefty Britain).

And Luxon brings all the virtue-signalling, invertebrate traits of today’s big corporates in Australia (the ones who have donated tens of millions of dollars of shareholder monies to the Voice Yes camp here in Australia or opted to plead for customers to vote Yes). It’s not even clear how many, if any, of the co-governance, He PuaPua race-based laws Luxon would repeal if he won – though ACT is saying that it will make doing so a condition of entering into a coalition, which goes a long way to explaining how this party that not all that long ago was hovering around 1 per cent of support now attracts almost one in seven voters. Fingers crossed that the ACT leader David Seymour holds his nerve on that one, or forces the referendum that he has been mooting on this race-based guff.

One last point and an apology of sorts. The Winston Peters’ party NZ First is now hovering a bit over five per cent in some of the polls, what you need under MMP to make it into parliament. Back in 2017 Peters was the kingmaker who opted to put Labour and Ardern into government even though National won 44.5 per cent of the party vote to Labour’s just under 37 per cent. I have lambasted him ever since as Peters gave us, in effect, the whole Jacinda Ardern fiasco.  He now promises NZ First will never go into coalition with Labour. But a correspondent reminded me that before that Peters’ decision Helen Clark and Labour refused to sign up to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. That decision was John Key and National’s. Labour’s Helen Clark had passed a Seabed and Foreshore Act to keep most of the coastline in public ownership.  Nationals under Key replaced the Labour Act. His Marine and Coastal Area Act exhibited a stunning naivety about how unelected judges (many his appointees) would interpret this legislation. Plus, National inserted ‘iwi participation agreements’ into planning legislation and continually refused NZ First offers pre-2017 to remove race-based considerations from the legislation. Put simply, picking between Labour and National in 2017, with Ardern then hiding her radical co-governance agenda, was a no-win choice on this race-based front (though on others it was stupid to pick Labour). Alas, the fact is that ‘moderates’ in Anglosphere conservative parties have almost nothing that appeals to those like me, which explains how in the midst of NZ Labour’s current trainwreck of a government the National party is only at 36 per cent support. Spinelessness, thy name is Luxon!

So a half-apology of sorts to Winston Peters and my sincere hopes that ACT gets dealt the best possible hand for after-election coalition negotiations.

Mr Seymour will need it given the pusillanimity of Team Luxon and the dire state of New Zealand.