Fractiousness on both sides of the divide has only just started

Thursday, 4 December 2025

As the election creeps closer, Chris Hipkins’ so-far tetchy relationship with Winston Peters is going to come under ever-increasing scrutiny.

Janet Wilson is a regular opinion contributor and a freelance journalist who has also worked in communications, including with the National Party.

OPINION: We live in an age of performative paradox; where National comes to power with the second-lowest vote share of any party under MMP but exerts the largest centralised take-over of executive power in a generation.

Where their smaller coalition partners trample daily over MMP’s intent and exerts the kind of tail-wagging-the dog power that far exceeds their political mandate.

Where the three-party coalition passes the Regulatory Standards Act one week, only to have NZ First say it would repeal it, with National declaring it may campaign against it.

All of which proves that the coalition has morphed into what the kids call a situationship - a relationship that’s more than friendship but less than commitment.

Winston Peters during one of his trolling episodes targeting Chris Hipkins, when he suggested the Labour leader could get drunk on a wine biscuit, after Hipkins described Peters as a “drunk uncle”.

And Parliament, it seems, is awash in them. This week Labour’s Peeni Henare declared his own situationship, telling Stuff that he was regularly talking with his uncle, Winston Peters, about “opportunities next year” as “he takes a bloody good interest in our policies”.

Chris Hipkins was quick to deny Henare was having those conversations while Peters described the interview with the Labour leader as “headline-hunting drivel”, but there are advantages for both leaders in that narrative.

It allows Hipkins to further ringfence any association with Te Pāti Māori’s histrionics thus avoiding coalition-of-chaos accusations, while for Winston it reinforces the narrative that he and NZ First are Aotearoa’s political kingmakers for both the right and the left.

However, this argument collapses like a pack of damp cards when you consider that both have categorically ruled out working with each other, Winston in 2022 and Hipkins in 2023.

But that cuts to the essence of what situationships – and the dissonance between good policy and electoral reward that epitomises modern politics – are all about.

It’s the feels, baby. The superficial tension between will he/won’t he becomes but a spark for further courting.

'He's a sausage eater who doesn't know what a woman is,' the NZ First leader says of the Labour leader.

And while there are plenty of policies that both parties share - vows to disestablish the Regulatory Standards Act, campaigning against National’s assets sales, both promoting a Future Fund - there’s one defining reason why they won’t.

Both parties need to win the votes of working-class Pākehā men if they have any hope of being ushered into the halls of power in 2026.

They were once the core constituency for Labour, the party of Savage, Fraser, and Kirk, but they’ve become disenfranchised as teachers, lawyers and university lecturers hold sway in the party.

And it’s the black-and-white ideals of this bloc that’s become something of an ethical embarrassment to the party’s progressives.

Winston knows that these social conservatives are the perfect fit for a party that champions ending “the era of woke madness” by banning puberty blockers for children, or offering mothers the chance of a three-day hospital stay after giving birth.

Don’t forget, NZ First was able to entice 6% of former Labour voters to vote for it in 2023. That may seem small numbers, but it constituted more than half of its vote count. Labour’s abandonment of them continues to be Winston’s gain, as his party forges ahead from 6.08% of votes in 2023 to hovering between 9-11% in the polls now.

Which explains why disgraced ex-Labour minister Stuart Nash spoke at NZ First’s convention a couple of months ago. All his talk of “wokeness” and of Hipkins stabbing him in the back spoke to the disillusionment of these Lost Voters, even if Nash spectacularly self-imploded days later.

Former Labour minister Stuart Nash’s involvement with NZ First may have been overshadowed by his comments about what a woman is, but it reflects NZ First’s attempts to woo a traditional Labour voting bloc, writes Janet Wilson.

No doubt, they’d have quietly chuckled over a beer at the pub and misogynistically proclaimed that at least Nash could describe what a woman was, when Hipkins couldn’t.

But it’s not so much a question of whether Labour can entice these voters back, but whether it wants to.

Sure, the polls have delivered them hope which presented at last weekend’s Labour Party conference more like presumption, but the propensity for cockups and calamity from every party ahead of next year’s election is boundless.

Labour’s small-target policy offering could leave underwhelmed voters overlooking them, National might be able to shrug off the rabble’s predictions of a leadership coup and finally benefit from the green economic shoots they’ve touted for so long.

And Te Pāti Māori might be able to overcome the performative hegemony of its leadership and start to act like a party which truly represents the voters who carried them to Parliament.

Ok, that’s going a bit too far.

What is certain is that the growing fractiousness amongst the coalition partners, and within the left-bloc has only started its crescendo.

Next year what passes for political unity will be exchanged for bickering and fighting in the Shakey Isles, with factoids and feels replacing facts and decent policy.

In party rooms across the land media trainers will urge authenticity while handing out trite blandishments.

As this season of merriment devolves into anxious anarchy as Christmas Day looms, it’s best to turn your head away from this nonsense now.

Because next year it will be dished up in spades.