Since pundits are pontificating, experts are expert-ting and blowhards are bloviating, I figured I would add my 2 cents worth of commentary into the mix. I certainly do not profess to by any sort of expert on NZ politics, so what follows is more an impression rather than an informed opinion. Yet the goddess knows that this cannot be worse than what was displayed on election night and generally since then. Here I will just tabulate a scorecard of winners and losers and leave it for others to pick through the entrails.
BIG WINNERS:
Big money. Billionaires and well-funded rightwing astroturf organisations. They worked hard to game the system and the succeeded spectacularly. The found loopholes that, as Andrew Geddis and others pointed out, may have adhered to the letter but not the spirit of the Election Law, and both the Electoral Commission and the Left opposition were slow to react when the advertising campaign in favor of giving party votes to minor rightwing parties was sprung on the public. National reacted negatively but half heartedly because although it did not want a stronger tail wagging its dog, the overall effect would be to keep the dog as the Alpha in the government yard.
The Opportunities Party won big by getting into parliament. A Trojan horse party with a chameleon facade, it siphoned votes mostly from Labour while introducing tech-bro capitalism into the political equation. OP represents a different capitalist fraction than farmers and traditional Northern Club businesses, have a more environmentally sensitive and younger orientation, but are no friends of the working classes (blue and white collar salarymen and women). They are the Internet Party without the Kim Dotcom weirdness and a more technocratic orientation as they pursue profit “with a conscience” rather than via rapacious, visibly exploitative means. While an improvement over the Mowbrays and export protein-based and other primary good economic interests, they are not necessarily advocates for the collective of everyday people. Theirs is the individual agency of the well-to-do, not the collective solidarity of the common people.
LESSER WINNERS:
The minor puppet parties of the billionaire and astroturf-backed Right have in fact become stronger tails on the National dog. Given the incompetence of the current National leadership and its imminent post-election leadership changes, the minor part tail wagging will be more like a rudder for the National-led ship of state in its second term as majority government coalition partner. No wonder the ACT First leaders had drunken grins at Election Night parties.
National won by not losing but, for reasons that may have to do with the MAGA-ification of the party under a slow-moving Christian fundamentalist take-over or perhaps as a way of lancing the boil of incompetence infecting its senior cadres, saw the purge of key secularist members of its ranks in what was basically a “getting rolled by voters” scheme. Why these senior figures allowed themselves to be placed in electorates where they were exposed, and who placed them there, is unknown to me (and I welcome edification on the matter). But if there is a move rightward within National towards more fundamentalist-influenced “values” and policy, then this election served its purpose (the matter of incompetence remains an open question).
The Greens solidified their claim to being the voice of NZ progressive forces and expanded their base. Te Pati Maori gamed the system the other way from the right-wingers, going for the electorate vote in Maori-heavy electorates where they won 5 out of 7 contested. This consolidates the current leadership and orientation even as it reaffirms their primary status as a separatist party.s
LOSERS: The NZ voting public, which in a low turnout contest gave similar numbers of popular votes to the major coalitions (both between 49 and 50 percent of the total of votes cast), but who were out-maneuvered by the clever strategic voting campaign waged by the Rightwing party sponsors. Money and voter ignorance speak loudly, and lack of public awareness of strategic voting schemes and the amount of big money poured into them left the voting public in a position of being less agents of their own collective destiny and more pawns in an elite contest to ensure that power was ultimately made contestable but non-transferable.
BIGGEST LOSER: The Labour Party. Although it won more of the popular vote than did National, the MMP framework is not a head-to-head race between major parties and unlike the rightwing strategic gaming, Labour did nothing to counter-balance what was happening out on the right with the party vote (say, by pushing for Green or Opportunity votes at the party level while focusing on electorate seats). In fact it failed to see what the rightwing strategic voting campaign was set up to do until it was too late. Worse yet, the combination of ideological stagnation (clinging to discredited and outmoded Blairite and 3rd Way tropes and shying away from re-affirming a class line of any sort), institutional timidity within the Party apparatus (no one apparently pushed for a a breakthrough policy platform that took advantage of the discontent with National’s arrogant incompetence and ACT and NZ First’s divisive and corrosive brand of MAGA-influenced politics), and individual cowardice (not just by mini-meek Chris Hipkins but his retinue of senior enablers and bootlickers as well), combined to doom its chances. Once again it snatched defeat from the jaws of victory–a victory that was all but handed to them as the default option before voting began –and frittered away its opportunity to close the door on the Ardern era of Labour politics and begin a new chapter out of the ashes of the obviously failed “neoliberal” (the term itself is a leftover relic from three decades ago) and market-driven precepts that have given us the current era of cowboy capitalism, one percenters, income stratification, wealth concentration, reduced tax revenues and public spending and the consequent massive declines in social services.
Instead, Labour argued about the taste of the toppings on the socio-economic pie (no capital gains!) rather than on the distribution of its slices or the reduction in its overall size under the market-driven precepts. It refuses to address root causes but instead fiddled with cosmetic fixes to a model crafted by and for the benefit of capitalists (the propertied classes), not workers (the non-propertied classes). That is the sad fact of the matter. Labour is not a working class party and has ceded its vanguard role to the Greens, who after years of Morris dancing and participating in healing circles have begun to address the bread-and-butter concerns of non-propertied people (i.,e., most of us).
So that is my short-term synopsis. Perhaps things will change once special votes are counted at a pace more befitting Niger than New Zealand. But the failure of the election to result in a change of government given the context was ultimately caused by the combination of ignorance, complacency and conformity among some voters and political leaders in the face of a well-planned manipulation of the rules as given.