OPINION: Michael Swanson
When the polls closed on election night in 2023, Labour had been reduced from a governing majority to a rump of 34 seats and 27 percent of the vote, its worst result in a generation. Three years on, and with the country heading back to the polls in November, Chris Hipkins finds himself leading a party that has spent the second half of this term (at least) ahead of National in the published polls, and, for stretches of 2025 and early 2026, comfortably so. On the numbers alone, it looks like one of the more remarkable turnarounds in recent New Zealand politics.
But look closer at how Labour got here, and a less flattering picture emerges. This isn’t really a story about a resurgent Labour Party. It’s a story about a coalition government that (some) voters have soured on, and an opposition that has been careful never to give them a reason to look away.
A recovery built on someone else’s record
The shape of the recovery tells its own story. As The Post’s polling analysis shows, Hipkins and Luxon were essentially tied as preferred prime minister in late 2024. It was only through 2025, as the National’s own numbers sagged, that Hipkins pulled ahead. The “wrong track” figure, the proportion of voters who think the country is heading in the wrong direction, climbed steadily across that period, reaching into the high fifties by mid-2026. That is the real engine of Labour’s recovery: not excitement about Hipkins, but exhaustion with the coalition.
Hipkins himself has all but conceded this. Speaking to the Herald in early 2025, he pointed to public disillusionment with the government rather than any positive case for Labour, noting it was “pretty unusual” for a government to lose support so steeply within a single term. Tellingly, in that same period his own preferred PM rating was falling even as Labour’s party vote rose. Voters were leaving National. They weren’t necessarily arriving at Labour out of conviction.
There’s a useful comparison with another Labour Party (or two). As RNZ noted in a piece examining lessons from Keir Starmer’s collapse in the UK, Starmer’s Labour rode a similarly hollow wave into government, a shallow mandate built on the other side’s unpopularity rather than any depth of enthusiasm for Labour itself, and it unravelled quickly once in office. Combined support for National and Labour in New Zealand is now sitting at multi-decade lows, according to reporting on recent TVNZ 1News Verian polling, a sign that voters on both sides are drifting to smaller parties rather than rallying behind either of the two big brands.
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The small-target strategy, and its limits
This is where Labour’s own choices come in. For most of this term, the party has run what political strategists call a “small target” or Ming vase approach: say as little as possible, avoid giving the government anything to shoot at, and let the coalition’s own unpopularity do the work. It is a strategy borrowed consciously from the Australian Labor Party’s playbook ahead of its 2022 win, and UK Labour in 2024.
For a long time it worked, in the narrow sense that Labour kept climbing in the polls without saying much about what it would actually do in government. But it came at a cost. As late as May 2026, less than six months from the election, the Herald’s Jamie Ensor was still asking when Labour would actually release policy, noting Hipkins had suggested voters didn’t much care about the details of his own signature Future Fund plan. When Labour did eventually roll out policy through mid-2026, including a targeted capital gains tax on investment properties to fund free GP visits and a public transport fare cap, it read as catch-up rather than agenda-setting.
Political commentator Chris Trotter has been particularly blunt about this, describing Labour’s platform as “a manifesto so foggily indistinct that its only visible element is a string of tiny, fiscally responsible policy footlights”. He points to a telling side effect: as Labour has stayed cautious, support has begun leaking to The Opportunity Party, which offers voters the kind of transformative agenda that Trotter argues Labour’s own activists have been quietly hoping for.
Leaving the boldness to the Greens (And TOP*?)
That gap has been filled most visibly by the Green Party. Where Labour has tiptoed around tax policy, the Greens have put a wealth tax, a corporate tax and an inheritance tax on the table as part of what co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick calls a response to the “cost of greed crisis“ rather than merely a cost of living one. It is true that the Greens have themselves narrowed their wealth tax target with each election, as analysis of the policy’s evolution since 2020 shows, so this isn’t unlimited boldness.
But it is still a party willing to put a genuinely redistributive idea in front of voters and defend it, including against a public dispute with the Finance Minister over Treasury’s costings. Hipkins, for his part, has been explicit that there is no room for Green-style tax policy in a government he leads. It leaves an odd dynamic where the boldest ideas on the left of politics are being tested by Labour’s prospective coalition partner, not by Labour itself.
A wider gap, a smaller offer
Here is the paradox worth sitting with. Substantively, I think National and Labour are probably further apart on the fundamentals of the New Zealand state than they have been for years. This coalition has pushed further on law and order, on reversing co-governance arrangements, on welfare settings and on the shape of the public sector than most National-led governments of the last two decades. That should, in theory, be fertile ground for an opposition to draw a sharp contrast and make a big offer of its own.
Instead, Labour has largely chosen to contest this election on competence and stability rather than on any transformative programme, betting that being the not-National option is enough. It may well be enough, given where the polls and the “wrong track” numbers currently sit. But it also means a Hipkins government, if one eventuates, would arrive in office with a mandate that is wide in seats but shallow in conviction, the exact trap Starmer’s Labour fell into in Britain. New Zealand’s Labour appears to have learned how to benefit from a government’s unpopularity. It has not yet shown it knows what to do with that opportunity once returned to office.
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