Labour looks to reframe election around jobs as parties stick to comfort zones
Monday, 29 June 2026
ANALYSIS: Ahead of the 1972 election, there was a spat about unemployment figures.
Labour’s Norm Kirk was convinced that the Government was actively keeping very bad unemployment figures out of the public eye ahead of the vote, and sought to highlight the issue as much as possible. Kirk was onto a good strategy - unemployment had spiked: from an average of 1200 people in 1971 to 5700 in 1972. There were several reasons Labour went on to win that election, but unemployment was undoubtedly one of them.
There are now 163,000 unemployed people in New Zealand. New Zealand’s population is larger than it was in 1972, but not that much larger. Yet unemployment is barely an issue in the approaching election.
Labour leader Chris Hipkins did his best to change that with his conference speech yesterday. He highlighted the Government’s push to cut jobs in the public sector, arguing not against “efficiency” but against the idea of “cuttings jobs for the sake of it - celebrating people losing their livelihoods.” He sought to highlight job losses in construction. And he offered a policy aimed at fixing it - an expansion of the “apprenticeship boost” from one to two years, and an expansion of the roles it covered, alongside a $1000 “tool kit” cash for the apprentices themselves.
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This is vintage Labour stuff, right in the comfort zone of the party and the former Education Minister Hipkins. It is relatively cheap at an estimated $57 million a year, will be welcomed by the businesses who actually get the cash to hire said apprentices, and is relatively difficult to argue against. (National notably focused on its cost in responding, not whether it was a good thing to do.)
There is nothing wrong with a bit of playing in the comfort zone. Labour’s campaign slogan has been “jobs health homes” but its announced policy thus far has largely focused on “health” with a side-serving of “cost of living”, which would have been included if it could be pithily summed up in one word.
Labour would be very happy if the election campaign focused a little bit more on unemployment, and a little bit less on issues friendlier to National. The party has an 11.5 percentage point lead over National on the issue of “creating jobs and unemployment”, according to the latest The Post/Freshwater Strategy poll, but it is only the most important issue for 10% of voters.
The party was not the only one sitting in its comfort zone on Sunday.
ACT leader David Seymour announced a souped-up version of the policy he announced earlier this year at his State of the Nation speech - a push to radically reduce the size of the bureaucracy to 19 “coherent” departments controlled by a single minister each. While his full plan has little chance of happening, there are elements of it that could be picked up in a future coalition, like the direct appointment of chief executives by ministers, rather than by the Public Service Commission.
“At the moment, ministers are held responsible for delivery, but they do not appoint the person leading the department responsible for that delivery,” Seymour noted. This would be quite a big push away from public service independence and into directly politicised chief executives. But it is also far from impossible to imagine some version of it coming to pass.
NZ First leader Winston Peters had no new policy to offer on Sunday, but was in his comfort zone too - attacking the Opposition as too effete and woke and the rest of his Government over the India Free Trade Agreement and immigration.
Parties playing to their base at big speeches and conferences is not that unusual. You don’t really want any chance that those in the room don’t cheer when you roll out your big lines. But it was hard for political journalists to avoid the contrast with National’s bombshell KiwiSaver policy when questioning Hipkins on Sunday, asking if people would really still be talking about his apprenticeship boost the following week, as they are with National’s push to make KiwiSaver compulsory.
“We should be talking about apprenticeship boosts all the way up until the election!” Hipkins responded cheerily. This is unlikely. Yet Hipkins is not currently in need of as much of a circuit breaker as Christopher Luxon is. He might not be able to immediately reframe the election around jobs or health, just as he couldn’t clear the storms that stopped some Labour delegates flying into Wellington. The question is whether an election focused instead on cost of living rebounds to his small target strategy or Luxon’s newly-found boldness.