This is a weekly thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or IR history. I usually start off with coverage of some current events from a mix of countries I follow personally and countries I think the forum might be interested in. Feel free to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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Notes -
New Zealand
New Zealand held elections this Saturday that ousted the Labour Party after six years in power. This was perhaps somewhat expected after the party’s charismatic leader Jacinda Ardern resigned half a year ago. Her replacement, party creature Christopher Hipkins, immediately got hit with floods and cyclones upon taking the office. Hipkins made his main issue addressing the rising cost of living, which ended up being the highest polling issue in the election. Apparently voters didn’t think he did enough, because they gave 44.95% to the conservative National Party, 5% to the classical liberal ACT, 31.33% to Labour, 7.25% to the Green Party, 2.7% to the populist right wing party New Zealand First and 1.17% to the Maori party Te Pāti Māori.
The coalition hasn’t been finalized yet but to form a majority the National Party will need both ACT and possibly New Zealand First (you actually only need 48% support, but in terms of seats, not the overall vote, and exact seat numbers are still to be released). If that comes together it will almost certainly result in the National leader Christopher Luxon becoming the new prime minister of New Zealand. NZ under Ardern was known as a bit of a progressive icon so it’ll be interesting to see where the rightward shift takes the country. Here’s a runthrough of their short term goals:
You're quoting the electorate votes which don't typically affect the makeup of parliament, instead of the party votes which actually correspond to the proportion of the house they'll control under MMP.
Not sure where you're getting this 48% of seats figure from. You need a majority of seats to form a government. Currently, there are expected to be 122 seats in the house, but this might change slightly after special votes and the byelection is taken into account. 62 seats will probably be the number ultimately required. National/ACT currently have 61 between them, so it's on a knife-edge whether they'll need NZF or not to form a government.
NZF is an interesting case. The party leader Winston Peters has sometimes been compared with Trump, but this is a very low-resolution take. He's mostly carved out a niche of connecting with an older and lower-class section of the electorate who are generally ignored by other parties. Think: enjoy horse racing, smoking, low engagement with society, marginal living, small-c conservatives. Winston doesn't seem to hold many firm views of his own, and is happy to bluster and, for example, call for an inquiry into the 2020 covid response he was the deputy PM for. Usually he's bought out with something like Foreign Minister, a few low-profile ministerial roles for his mates, and a bunch of random capital spending in the regions.
Despite the breathless takes on twitter about how this election represents a repudiation of Ardern, most non-partisan Kiwis I've talked to agree that this was the lowest-stakes election in recent memory. The government's books were opened pre-election and revealed we've just been spending too much, and accrued too much debt post-covid for any big spending promises to be credible from either major party. Both promised to balance the books, and National's fiscal plan is to take us roughly back to Ardern's 2019 'Wellbeing Budget' levels. Putting the varying influence of the minor parties aside, and differences on the details of particular policies, there is little disagreement on the fundamental issues e.g. cogovernance with Māori, climate change, housing permit reform, the need for local government reform, etc.
Ah thanks for the clarity on the vote counts, I know pretty much nothing about New Zealand; i got the 48% from the embedded CNN article as the percentage of the popular vote that equates to 61 seats in parliament, I miswrote it above. Interesting to hear both parties have roughly similar positions on most major issues. You have any opinion on how effective the National agenda will be?
Ah right. A very misleading statement from CNN. Only parties with >5% of the party vote, or who win an electorate seat win representation in parliament. This means that there are always some votes 'wasted' voting for parties that don't get in (single-issue parties, joke parties, etc.). Seats in parliament are allocated according to the proportion of non-wasted party votes. Thus, post-election, we find that the proportion of party votes cast on the day needed to form the government might be anywhere from ~45% to 50%.
As for National's effectiveness:
Spads from the last government have told me there was a growing realisation towards the end that the civil service was out of control. All was fine when Jacinda was PM, and her general direction was well aligned with the desires of that class, but tensions rapidly boiled over under Hipkins as ministers struggled to get their agendas actioned. Accusations of ministerial bullying began to surface in the press, leading to some high-profile resignations. Unfortunately, Labour is ideologically blinded from being able to understand the issue, preferring to blame it all on Neo-Liberalism (i.e. many believed that the senior civic service were obstructionist Tories). We've talked plenty over the years about the tendencies of the PMC. Of course, there are interesting local idiosyncrasies, as well as various details relevant to the civil service in particular which I think are under-discussed on this forum. However, suffice it to say that the absurd belief that the problem was closet Tories doomed Labour from taking any meaningful action, especially given they were complicit in dramatically exacerbating the problem under Ardern who grew the size of the core civil service by some 28%, and enacted sweeping changes to recruitment, DEI practices, preferring Māori in procurement, etc. Note that Wellington Central, home of our nation's civil service, swung hard-left in the same election that the nation went 15%+ to the right.
The National Party has undergone an almost complete renewal of its senior members/former cabinet ministers since the days of the Key/English Government in 2017. Luxon himself worked as a private sector CEO, has only been an MP for three years, and by all accounts is still lacking public sector experience and understanding. My impression in watching Luxon and National Party, speaking with Tory-aligned think tanks, etc. through the campaign is that most of their attention has been on high-level policy, rather than the practicalities of governing with an essentially hostile civil service, let alone thinking about public sector reform in general, let alone even beginning to form a mandate for addressing some of the fundamental unresolved constitutional issues at the core of the problem such as the role of the Treaty of Waitangi, the rights and responsibilities of iwi, etc. Maybe after three years in government, they might start to realise the scale of the problem. We'll see how that plays out next election.
Ah, that makes perfect sense.
It's interesting to hear that aside from Jacinda's 2019 economic plan being centrist enough that it bears resamblance to the current National agenda, that the civil service was also basically functional under her and mostly only spiraled under Hipkins. From a distance she's portrayed as the more radical one and he's an uncharismatic guy who inherited a host of problems from her. I guess that's to some degree compatible with a lot of her structural changes to the size of the civil service only manifesting later under less competent / less aligned leadership.
Pretty unfortunate the National Party doesn't seem to be focused on the issue of the civil service if it was a problem even for the party that elevated it to its current status. If the fiscal situation enjoys a national consensus that some fat needs to be trimmed then hopefully their fiscal reforms won't have too much difficulty being implemented?
It's more that the ends to which Ardern was turning the civil service were neatly aligned with the zeitgeist, and she was an international megastar. Ardern had something of a reputation for sitting on a vast hoard of political capital and had enough personal popularity that practical delivery was essentially superfluous. Take Labour's 'Kiwibuild' policy to build state houses, one of the highest priorities of their 2017 platform. The goal was to build 16,000 homes over 4 years. They managed to build... 1000.
Obviously, these failures didn't affect Ardern's popularity (she won the first outright majority government under MMP in 2020), and she continued to enjoy the abbasiyah of a civil service who were being well paid to decolonise Aotearoa, etc. Once she resigned however, straight-white-man Hipkins was left holding the bag. His motivations were always more practical and union-focused rather than ideological. In any case, he obviously could not rely on personal popularity to win the next election. Hence: the eruption of tensions between ministers desperately trying to deliver meaningful results for the electorate and a civil service that had higher loyalties to their cause.
Of course, I'm speaking in generalities. Plenty of good people in Wellington, and pockets of high competence. However, since National has deliberately avoided getting involved in the culture war while out of office, they're therefore, I believe, largely ignorant of how far things have shifted in this regard.
New Zealand has a unicameral house, so I don't expect National will have any difficulty implementing its fiscal agenda - or rather, whatever fiscal agenda emerges after coalition talks with ACT and NZF are concluded. However, as Labour found with Kiwibuild: changing budgets is easy for the party in power, fixing problems is far more difficult.
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