While I was digging around for something else, I had a look at the New Zealand Election Survey for the 2023 election at what voters issues were in 2023. I suspect that it looks very similar in the major issues to what the same cloud would show today. Economy and cost of living predominating, then health, climate change and crime. That has to be problem for the conservative coalition and especially for National. They haven’t moved the needle to anything except worse.
This is the word cloud from the 2023 NZES of the most important issues for voters polled.
The NZES doing their wash of the 2023 election said…
The issues that mattered for voters provide insights into why voters wanted change in 2023. The Election Study asks people what the most important issue was for them when voting.
A word cloud (see below) of the most important issues shows two responses stood out: the economy and the cost of living.
However, unlike 2020—when COVID dominated—in 2023 there was a range of issues people cared about, including health, climate change, and law and order: 73 percent wanted tougher sentencing laws. National’s strong stance on law and order was therefore also part of its mandate.
Moreover, there are clear differences between the two connected issues of the economy and cost of living.
Voters who said “the economy” was their most important issue tended to feel National was the party best equipped to address this problem. Voters who answered “cost of living” (and other related terms, such as poverty) were more likely to say Labour would be the best party to deal with those problems.
That last seems kind of ironic when we now have Swarbick from the Greens edging out Willis from National in a poll about who is more trusted running the economy. The cause isn’t hard to find virtually none of the large word cloud concerns have changed significantly for the better since the 2023 election. Most haven’t even remained the same – they are now worse.
The economy is in worse shape by almost all measures apart from inflation – and that was diminishing rapidly in 2023. Because of that, the government is larger portion of the economy than it was in 2023, and the government debt has increased significantly. Businesses have very limited confidence that it is going to get better any time soon because it is really hard work when cost inflation keeps cutting into profits, cost of living effects and poor wages mean that people spend less with businesses.
The cost of living is ridiculously more expensive – prices are up,wages are effectively way down because of inflation and a lack of wage gains, and unemployment grinds especially as kids can’t leave home because the youth unemployment levels are so high. Health – well everyone knows what a complete shit house job National has done with that – they deliberately didn’t fill jobs as the population got older. While there may be a minor boom in export commodity prices, that tends to go into killing debt. No competent business expects that to last.
Climate change has been hitting NZ harder over the last few years than ever before, and is liable to have an even bigger impact as the super El Nino years take hold on the South Pacific. The events are bigger, more extreme, and more frequent as the more energy in the system winds everything up.
Changing how things are measured doesn’t change how they are experienced. So diddling with waiting lists, crime figures, and percentages on tax doesn’t actually do much apart from giving silly headlines, and a general disbelief in the bullshit. It doesn’t change how hard it is to find a GP practice with room to take on new patients, the time it takes to get seen in a hospital emergency department, the actual crime levels rather than the reported levels, or how far your wages go in buying goods and services once the cost of living goes up.
About the only thing that has happened is that housing prices have dropped. However that is a two edged sword, great for purchasers and problem for sellers and mortgage payers.
The last election was pretty finely balanced in attitudes.
While economic issues were front-of-mind for many and people wanted change, levels of satisfaction with the previous government’s performance were still surprisingly high.
Some 54 percent said the Labour government did a “very” or “fairly” good job—strong support for a government dismissed at the election. And 64 percent of respondents also continued to approve of the previous government’s COVID response, suggesting Labour was still getting credit for its management of the pandemic.
The previous Labour government was therefore not widely considered to be incompetent, as National and its partners perhaps hoped it would be.
National and its partners should have looked closely at the NZES wash. The summary of the NZES accurately concluded with (my bold):-
Only 30 percent of New Zealanders wanted the restoration of interest deductibility for landlords, whereas 46 percent wanted landlords to pay tax on this income.
Half of the electorate wanted stronger measures to reduce carbon emissions, while just 23 percent did not want them. Voters also wanted more health and education expenditure.
Our results suggest the National-led coalition government has a mandate from voters to reduce inflation and to manage the economy towards growth and improved living standards.
Voters also want to see a reduction in crime, and better government services, especially healthcare.
If the coalition fails to deliver on this challenging set of expectations, National and its partners are likely to feel the wrath of voters at New Zealand’s next election—particularly considering people retained relatively favourable attitudes about the outgoing Labour government.
The short answer is that they didn’t deliver. A increasingly large proportion of the electorate clearly don’t think that they can.