Labour’s lack of ideas wearing thin
Wednesday, 29 April 2026
OPINION: The election is in just 192 days.
At this point in 2023, National had launched its income tax policy, its FamilyBoost childcare policy, its renewable electricity generation policy, its policy on interest deductibility for rentals, its brightline test policy, some of its Overseas Investment Act plans, its boot camp and gang patch policies, its youth welfare policies, its “Local Water Done Well” repeal of Three Waters, and a whole bevy of other promised reversals or initiatives.
At this point in 2017, Labour had announced KiwiBuild, its Healthy Homes policy for tenancies, its intended expansion of the Reserve Bank’s mandate, its Tax Working Group to look at capital gains taxes (CGT), a Centre of Digital Excellence in Dunedin, and a whole bunch of other reversals and initiatives, all under the leadership of Andrew Little.
Labour under Chris Hipkins?
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The CGT, three free doctors visits paid for from the CGT, a technical change to GP funding to make visits policy work, a small rebate for the video game sector, and a detail-free “Future Fund” that will include an unspecified list of state assets.
Labour have some other broad intentions, like a commitment to do some kind of reversal of the Government’s pay equity changes and electoral law shifts, but its actually-announced election policy can be explained without pausing for breath.
This is, of course, on purpose. Labour wants to provide as little attack surface as possible for its opponents, and to avoid promising policies it can’t be sure it can deliver.
But so brief are its stated election policies that one wonders what exactly finance spokeswoman Barbara Edmonds discussed with credit rating agency Fitch before it decided to downgrade its outlook on New Zealand’s credit rating. Fitch noted its understanding was that if elected National would look to fix up the books by cutting spending, while Labour would look to raise revenue.
Asked about this, Edmonds on Tuesday said she and Fitch had talked about her plan to introduce a CGT - but the conversation did not feature the fact that she is already planning to spend the extra revenue on extra doctors visits, meaning in the near term it wouldn’t help fix up the books all that much.
Edmonds can quite reasonably note that her plan to fund GP visits with the revenue is hardly a secret. But the fact that Fitch mentioned “revenue measures” has also quite reasonably got a lot of people asking questions about the plural here. Did she commit herself more fully to again removing interest deductibility from landlords, a policy that the party is officially keeping quiet on? Did she indicate that the Government’s $1.7billion “Investment Boost” policy might be tweaked or scrapped?
Labour is not keen to be monstered by National on tax once more, so has ruled out any serious changes to tax outside of the CGT, while staying a bit quieter on these kinds of technical changes. It makes the reasonable-sounding point that all will be known ahead of the election, but after the party gets a chance to see what Nicola Willis does in her Budget.
But there is risk here. Such a narrow policy platform makes it easy for opponents to intimate that there must be something far scarier hidden up your sleeve - or in the platforms of your potential coalition partners. It forces your MPs into media appearances where they can only talk of the problems with their opponents and never about the positive ways they want to change New Zealand. And it can simply make you look unserious and uninterested in the challenges the country has, like a restorationist project for New Zealand in 2023, rather than a team trying to take things forward.
The natural response of this is a look at the polls, where Labour is now consistently the most popular party. There is some weight to the argument that Hipkins has bitten off one big controversial policy with the CGT and thinks that is enough to keep him going, at least until after the Budget. Yet that is a plan and an argument that made a lot more sense before we headed into a fuel crisis - a crisis where the Government and the Greens are the ones generating ideas, not the party that used to be seen as great policy innovators.
Hipkins made an interesting argument on Tuesday about those smaller parties. He said Kiwis were sick and tired of smaller parties ruling the roost in this Government, and that “voters should get a Government that broadly reflects what they voted for” - meaning the larger party should have “the most sway” and not allow smaller parties to force through policies “there isn’t a public mandate for”.
He’s speaking to a rich vein of public opinion here, a wide gamut of voters who don’t really mind Labour or National but can’t stand some of the other guys. Yet when offering so little these arguments ring a little hollow. Say what you like about the Greens or ACT - they are parties of a mobilised sector of society that have defined ideas about how to change the country. They are parties that know that the way to get into the public consciousness is to actually talk about where they want to go, and to campaign to get there. This is not something only a small party can manage - Labour had a very clear reason to get elected in 1999 and 2017. Will it have a clear one in 2026?