The Spinoff: Are New Zealand’s youngest voters really shifting right?

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Quite apart from the overall defeat it delivered, last year’s election seemed to spell bad news for the left in one key demographic: the youth. A Guardian Essential poll, taken in August 2023, showed just one-third of voters under 35 were backing Labour and the Greens, against one-half supporting National and ACT. The “youthquake” that in 2017 helped propel Jacinda Ardern to power had been replaced with frustration over a lack of social progress and “an overwhelming sense of exhaustion” among young voters, Green MP Chlöe Swarbrick argued. 

The poll also seemed to echo trends offshore. In the UK, after 14 years of calamitous mismanagement, the Tories may be so hated that they can command the support of just one in seven young people. But US president Joe Biden has lost vast swathes of young voters discombobulated by the first inflationary crisis of their short lives. One survey has Donald Trump winning the Gen Z vote by 43 points to 42. North of the border, a poll taken last year put Canada’s left-wing Liberals, led by Justin Trudeau, some 12 points behind the Conservatives among voters under 30. 

So are New Zealand’s young voters shifting right? The answer to this question starts with data from polling firm Talbot Mills, which shows that, two decades ago, voters aged 18-24 – and to a lesser extent 25-29 – were solidly left-wing. Some 62% of the youngest female voters, and 50% of their male counterparts, backed Labour or the Greens. Older voters, by contrast, were increasingly conservative, at least until age 60.

Fast-forward to 2024, and the pattern is broadly the same. Although young women have shifted even further left, nearly three-quarters of them backing either Labour, Greens or Te Pāti Māori, their male counterparts are exactly as left-wing as they had been two decades before. The kids may be alright, but they are certainly not all right. If rising conservativism is visible anywhere, it is in the older age brackets: left-wing support among men aged 70-74, for instance, has cratered, from nearly one-half to just one-quarter. Nor should this come as a surprise, given the number of older men publicly venting their objections to co-governance and cancel culture.

How, then, can we explain last year’s Guardian poll? Turns out young voters are less independent than one might have thought. Talbot Mills has data right back to 1991 on what might be called the youth’s leftward bias: the lead that left-wing parties have over right-wing ones among the under-30s, broken down by gender. For the most part, it follows the path carved by the wider electorate. The left’s lead among young voters soars in the early 2000s, as New Zealanders as a whole flock to Helen Clark’s Labour; it falls again when the country becomes captivated by John Key, then rises once more as Jacindamania takes over. Last year’s dip just reflects the generalised, and perhaps temporary, dissatisfaction with Labour. Already the young female vote has rebounded to within its normal range; the young male vote appears to be following suit. 

Across all the data, young men are noticeably more right-wing than their female counterparts. (Similar results are reported by other polling companies, including Curia and Roy Morgan.) At first blush, this seems to reflect divergences detected overseas. The trend is especially stark in the US, where young women are rapidly shifting left: in the last decade, Democrats have increased their lead in that demographic from 26 to 38 points. At the same time, the Democrat lead among young men has fallen, from an already-slim nine points to just five. This divergence seems to be driven by the culture wars: young women are alarmed by rising anti-abortion sentiment on the right, while half of US men under 50 believe feminism “has done more harm than good”.

No such yawning chasm, however, can be detected here. In part, this is because young Kiwi males aren’t shifting right. Talbot Mills has charted the left’s lead among young males, repeating their line from the graph above, against the left’s lead across the whole population. Whereas, before 2004, young men were slightly more right-wing than the country at large, they have for the last two decades been slightly more left-leaning. The culture wars haven’t left Kiwi males untouched – the uber-misogynist Andrew Tate, for instance, has a following here – but the impact on voting appears negligible. If there is any polarisation in the New Zealand electorate, it lies – based on this data – in the contrast between increasingly left-wing younger women and increasingly right-wing older men.

It is not inconceivable, in fact, that New Zealand’s youngest voters could get swept up in a different Western trend: the waning correlation between conservatism and age. Traditionally, voting behaviour seemed to validate the proverb, erroneously attributed to Winston Churchill, that if you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart, but if you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain. Voters typically became more conservative as they aged and acquired wealth they wanted to defend against the taxman.

Recently, though, research by the Financial Times has found British and American millennials bucking that trend. Historically, a typical 35-year-old was already just five percentage points less conservative than the whole-population average, and becoming more conservative over time. People in that age group today, however, are roughly 15 points less conservative than the average – and showing no signs of shifting right. This makes them, the Financial Times declared, “by far the least conservative 35-year-olds in recorded history”. And, given what four decades of economic conservatism has bequeathed them – gaping inequalities, runaway climate change, insecure jobs and homes – no-one should have expected anything else.

The Post: Housing – and the unhoused - left out in the cold

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In this week’s Budget, housing was the dog that didn’t bark.

Initial analyses of Budgets focus on what was in them. As the dust settles, it becomes clearer what wasn’t. And housing wasn’t, to an extraordinary degree.

One rough measure of a government’s Budget Day priorities is what it deems worthy of a press release. Housing didn’t get one. Its only overt mention, in fact, was one line in a press release on infrastructure.

It’s a deeply unimpressive line, too: $140m to fund the running costs of 500 new social houses a year, built by NGOs. That’s it.

It’s not entirely unreasonable for the government to divert that funding from first-home-buyer grants, as trailed last week, since the latter tend to push up house prices. But the Budget pledge remains an oddly inadequate move at a time when we have 25,000 families on the waiting list for a state home, and housing is a colossal political issue.

Meanwhile, the Budget predicts rents will keep rising at a remarkable clip. Seems like very little of that $2.9bn landlord tax cut will trickle down to tenants.

When quizzed at the Budget press conference, the housing minister, Chris Bishop, insisted he had a clear long-term plan for private house-building, at least. He will, in theory, require councils to zone enough land for 30 years’ worth of construction.

This may have merit – but equally councils may find ways around it, or there may be other issues blocking development, such as a lack of infrastructure. And it feels like a policy for a few years hence, when we have a housing crisis right now.

Many of the government’s actions to date are intensifying that crisis. National has thrown into doubt both the state house-building programme run by the homes and communities agency, Kāinga Ora, and the social house-building programme run by NGOs. Both provide housing where rents are set at a quarter of tenants’ incomes.

Recent news bulletins have been filled with reports of Kāinga Ora freezing developments and NGOs mothballing plans. That’s partly because of National’s unwillingness to guarantee them funding (although the Budget fractionally improves that situation).

Recall that Jacinda Ardern’s government took a Key-era set-up that was selling more state houses than it built, and turned it into one that delivered 2000 social houses a year, albeit some were purchased from the private market. Not everything Labour did was perfect, but it built real momentum. That momentum is in severe danger of being lost.

Bishop’s other key step has been to commission a review of Kāinga Ora led by Bill English, his former boss. The English review’s claims were always suspect, given they made so much of Kāinga Ora’s debt being “unsustainable”.

This debt is, in fact, money spent to create assets: housing for the poor, one of the greatest investments this nation could conceivably make. It doesn’t generate an immediate cash return, but that’s not the point. Nor do libraries, hospitals and schools.

The reputation of the English review, what’s more, has been badly tarnished by the revelation this week that it contained basic errors of fact, did not attempt to corroborate anecdotes, and largely ignored the Kāinga Ora board when it pointed out these problems.

Of course Bishop is entitled to take a different approach to his predecessors. Even good, socially minded developers report finding it difficult to work with Kāinga Ora. A genuinely independent review of the agency’s costs and quality standards could do no harm. But the responsible thing would have been for Bishop to gradually introduce improvements, while ensuring existing developments aren’t damaged.

This matters all the more when, as the Budget shows, housing consents have fallen catastrophically, following interest-rate hikes. A responsible government would be stepping in, ensuring the state’s demand keeps house-building going while private developments struggle. Instead we have the state virtually vacating the field, and a short-term collapse in affordable house-building.

This is all the more egregious given National’s promises in Opposition. Bishop told RNZ last year that National would “build enough state and social housing” to clear the state-house waiting list, which, then as now, sat at around 25,000. Also last year, Nicola Willis, as National’s finance spokesperson, promised 1000 new state houses every year in Auckland alone.

Unless Bishola, as the two are sometimes known, can magic up those homes from somewhere, they are going to be guilty of broken promises. Alan Johnson, one of the housing market’s most experienced analysts, warned this week of a likely increase in “homelessness in the streets and cars and carparks of the country”.

The “hatchet job” on Kāinga Ora, he predicted, would be followed by “the panic button being pushed”, as National came face to face with the slowdown it had engineered. “I think,” Johnson added, “the government will come into the next election lamenting its lack of interest in social housing.” There will, indisputably, be something to lament.

The Spinoff: Budget 2024 is starving the future’s needs to pay for today’s politics

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Evidence of a continued addiction to spending? Or, conversely, a slash and burn approach to the public finances? Neither of these rival interpretations of finance minister Nicola Willis’s first budget can be made to stick. What Willis did, in fact, was to craft a short-term hand-out to key political constituencies – while averting her gaze from the increasingly unmanageable long-term pressures building up in the public finances and, by extension, the social fabric.

First off, it is hardly austerity, in a pure sense, when public spending is projected to rise from $138.3bn this year to $156.4bn in 2028. Over the next four years, billions and billions of dollars will be poured into health and education in particular. In the same period of time, government borrowing will be $17.1bn higher than was expected the last time the books were opened. Small wonder the Taxpayers’ Union is not best pleased.

These spending increases, however, are much less impressive than they seem. As the economy grows, the population lifts, inflation increases and needs multiply, government spending has to rise just to keep up. And because the economy is forecast to grow more quickly than state spending, “core crown expenses”, as they are known, will fall from the current 33.5% of GDP to 31.1% in 2028. The state’s share of the economy – its presence in our lives, if you like – will noticeably decline.

This, of course, is still not slash and burn. For around half a century, the working assumption has been that New Zealand governments “naturally” spend around 30% of GDP. And we are not projected to get back to that mark until the 2030s. Again, it is unsurprising that conservatives are cross.

The 30% assumption, though, is a big problem. There is nothing natural about it. To take a few European examples: German governments typically spend around 38%, Dutch ones 40%, and Austrian ones 42%. (And that’s not even counting the tax-loving Scandinavians.) If we taxed at those overall rates, our government would have around $20-30bn extra to spend each year. The Europeans get those funds by levying wealth, capital gains and inheritance taxes, and payroll taxes to boot; in return they get better public services, reduced poverty rates, and more convincing efforts to reduce carbon emissions.

New Zealanders, in contrast, have champagne tastes on a beer budget: we want those high-quality public services, but aren’t – currently – willing to pay for them. And the problems with that approach, which is mirrored in Willis’s ideological determination to (slowly) get spending down to 30% of GDP, are plain to see in this budget.

Take the $16.7bn that Shane Reti proudly proclaims has been allocated to health. Sounds impressive – until one realises that last year, officials estimated $13bn was needed just to maintain current services, and that this year they said the true figure was probably higher. This is known as meeting “cost pressures” or, less formally, “keeping the lights on”: compensating for inflation, allowing for wage increases, and maintaining service levels to an ageing population. Another $1.8bn of the Reti money goes to Pharmac for new drugs. There could be, in short, just a few hundred million each year to improve primary and hospital services in much of our calamitously over-stretched health sector. Some parts of that sector may even find themselves going backwards financially.

It is a similar story in education. A $2.9bn package over four years sounds good, but most of it ($1.5bn) is just to maintain and repair creaking school buildings. The actual operating grants to ECE centres and schools are probably only in line with inflation, broadly speaking – and this in a sector that has been hammered by rising costs in recent years. The much-touted “structural literacy” drive to improve the way children learn to read, meanwhile, gets a grand total of $67m over four years. Again, the funding needed for a real overhaul of a struggling sector – for investment in an array of new programmes and a serious step-change in teaching – is nowhere in sight.

This picture repeats across the whole of the public finances. In the Budget documents, the Treasury warns that the money Willis has set aside for new spending in 2025 and 2026 – $2.4bn in each case – is not even enough to compensate for inflation and maintain existing services. Something, surely, will have to give.

There is, of course, money in the budget to appease the constituencies National thinks are vital to winning again in 2026. Landlords, as well-trailed, get a four-year, $2.9bn tax cut via the restoration of their ability to deduct mortgage interest from their tax bill. Around $10bn will go on raising tax thresholds and expanding the independent earner tax credit. Some $700m is spent on childcare rebates. If you are a middle-income family with kids, and in particular if you also happen to own a rental property, National has your short-term interests covered.

The country’s long-term interests, however, are neglected. Infrastructure spending rises sharply this year, to around $18bn, but falls to under $10bn in 2028, even though the population will grow significantly in that time, and we already have massive under-investment to make up. Because the budget’s “squeezed middle” policies – including tax cuts and raising the in-work tax credit – explicitly exclude beneficiaries and do almost nothing for minimum-wage workers, child poverty rates are projected to rise or, at best, stagnate. Funding cuts will slow Commerce Commission work that could help break up the oligopolies that push up prices and stifle innovation. There is no extra support to help retrain the tens of thousands of people made redundant in our anti-inflation drive. The government seems to have closed its eyes to these long-term realities; it appears unwilling to make the needed investments in our long-term prosperity.

As Willis’s “sinking lid” slowly pushes spending back towards 30% of GDP, in other words, short-term political desires are met – but long-term public needs continue to boil away. As the population ages, the demand – and need – for healthcare spending will grow. Climate change mitigation and adaption – managed retreat, in particular – will demand billions of extra dollars. The lifetime costs of leaving tens of thousands of children in poverty will keep mounting up. The 30% spending target never made sense, but it is getting increasingly unsustainable. Willis looks very much like someone trying to hold down a heavy lid on a huge pot that, heated with ever greater intensity, boils harder and harder, threatening to blow the top right off.

The Spinoff: The real meaning of tax relief

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The American pollster and strategist Frank Luntz is famous – or infamous, depending on your point of view – for coining the phrase “death tax” to describe estate duties. He also promoted the use of “climate change” rather than “global warming”, the former being less likely to frighten people into action; later, he tried to frame attempts to widen healthcare coverage as “a government takeover” or “coup”.

Luntz is not, evidently, on the side of the angels. But he understands, better than most, the power of language to shape reality: to evoke emotions, to elicit certain responses, to change the very way we see the world. “Death taxes”, reportedly, engender far more resentment than “inheritance taxes”. No wonder Luntz’s bestselling book was called Words That Work.

Closer to home, the clearest current attempt to manipulate language in this way is National’s thus-far successful campaign to rebrand tax cuts as “tax relief”. This phrase may have stood out as you scanned the news; more likely, it slinked its way into your consciousness unnoticed, blending into the background. What it does, subtly but unmistakably, is position tax as a bad thing: something from which one needs to be relieved. “Less tax? Oh what a relief.”

This is hardly a neutral way to describe matters. Not everyone, admittedly, fills out their tax return, or contemplates their PAYE details, with joy in their heart and a song on their lips. But most of us are at least partly pleased to pay tax, to fund all the good things government does. Even though I am not, in general, an especially high earner, I don’t feel relief at the thought of my taxes being cut: I’m much more worried about how those less fortunate will cope if the cuts lead to weaker public services.

National, of course, will keep using the phrase, as is its right. But no-one with the job of describing politics neutrally or accurately should do so. Except for direct quotes, the media should not, and in particular RNZ – our state broadcaster – should not. Especially when there is an indisputably neutral and accurate alternative: tax cuts.

Words, in short, matter. Just look at the lengths to which National went to get the phrase “ute tax” into the vernacular. The ultimate prize, in this game, is not simply to say things your own way, but to get others – in particular the media – to say things your way.

Journalists might argue – with some justice – that Labour, when in government, didn’t necessarily play fair with language either. National’s “ute tax” was, in Labour’s original hands, the “clean car discount”: the positive inverse of National’s negative. Some more neutral term was needed: though clunky, the “feebate” – half fee imposed on polluting vehicles, half rebate for cleaner ones – was probably the best candidate.

The closer one looks, the more these linguistic sleights of hand become apparent. It’s not just “tax relief”: the state’s levies are often described, even in ostensibly neutral publications, as “the tax burden”. A wholly negative word is, once again, used to describe something that isn’t so. The “tax take”, or “tax obligations”, would be nearer the mark.

Reframing can, of course, be a force for good. One of the most successful campaigns in recent memory foundered when marching under the banner of “gay marriage”, but enjoyed far greater success when recast as “marriage equality”. Here, happily, language and accuracy went hand-in-hand: the fundamental moral point of the campaign was not that a specific group should get some specific privilege, but rather that something of value should be made universally – and equally – available.

None of this is to suggest that language is all-powerful. Something desperately unpopular isn’t going to become suddenly beloved just because it’s given a new name. Sometimes progressives make that mistake, thinking, for instance, that a capital gains tax will magically become more acceptable if renamed a “speculators’ tax” or similar. It won’t, not least because there is only so far words can be pushed: over-stretch them, and one strains credulity as well as language. The public, rightly, won’t take the bait, and the media won’t either.

It’s better, surely, to make the obvious point about a capital gains tax: that income is income. (This would echo the “love is love” tagline from the marriage equality campaign.) Income from selling investment properties is income; income from a salary is income. We should tax it all equally. And wouldn’t it be great if we did so? Now that is something that – although I wouldn’t expect the media to use this term – I really would find a relief.

The Post: The memorial we owe to those who died at Loafers Lodge

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Kenneth Barnard. Liam Hockings. Peter O'Sullivan. Melvin Parun. Mike Wahrlich. These five men died in the Loafers Lodge fire, a year ago this week, and their city, and perhaps the country at large, made an implicit pledge not to forget their names.

That, at least, was the message sent when the local mayor said it had been one of the city’s “darkest days”, the prime minister talked of “an absolute tragedy”, and multiple inquiries were urgently launched. Things wouldn’t be allowed to stay the same; we wouldn’t forget.

And yet we have. Thursday, the anniversary of the fire, brought a raft of commemorative stories. But all sounded the same theme: how little has changed, how quickly the deaths have passed from our minds.

The basic facts of the fatality are these. Loafers Lodge, situated on Wellington’s Adelaide Rd, was a boarding house, defined in law as a private dwelling with more than six tenants, each renting separately and long-term. There are at least 800 such establishments nationwide, probably more. Some are unremarkable. Others, though, are cramped, down-at-heel, dangerous places that cater to people who might otherwise be sleeping rough.

I first encountered this world in 2012 when I went undercover in a Wellington establishment called Malcolm’s, in order to write about it for the Listener. Malcolm’s housed 14 people, many of them alcoholics, in rooms that were sometimes foul-smelling, dirty and damp. I vividly remember Bob, an elderly Scottish man, telling me that the window in his room didn’t close properly, so in wet weather the rain “just comes hosin’ thru”.

The building boasted only one working shower, with a cracked concrete floor; there was no washing machine and no hot water in the handbasins. And even then, 12 years ago, the rent was $150 a week, with no bond, no tenancy agreement, no paperwork and, I suspect, no tax paid.

Thankfully Malcolm’s was bulldozed some years back. But other boarding houses stay in business. As another tenant at Malcolm’s told me: “I’ve got nowhere else to go.” Most landlords won’t rent to elderly alcoholics and their fellow strugglers.

Boarding houses do also serve working people locked out of our country’s woefully inadequate and over-priced rental market. But these are hospital orderlies and the like, not accountants or lawyers.

These are not, in other words, middle-class people leading standard middle-class lives. And that’s why the memory of the Loafers Lodge fire has so quickly faded. Had the victims been bright young middle-class men and women, we would have had a year’s worth of media and political activity: heart-rending family photos shared, campaign groups set up, parents rightly using their cultural capital to bring about change.

Instead we have the news, announced in March with no real fanfare, that a review of 37 other boarding houses nationwide found 134 defects, some potentially life-threatening. Smoke detectors either missing their batteries or absent entirely; fire alarms not monitored; wires cut or systems switched off because of bills unpaid. Routine violations of basic standards for weather tightness and warmth, and no interest from owners in compliance.

Other inquiries will establish who is to blame for the Loafers Lodge tragedy. But we already know it could all too easily recur. After the fire, the Listener reprinted my 2012 article in full, because essentially nothing had changed. And here we are again, with essentially nothing changed.

Our politicians have agreed to toughen penalties for negligent inspectors who certify dangerous boarding houses as safe, and to review the fire safety provisions in the Building Code. But that is, at best, half the story.

The deeper problem is that boarding houses aren’t meaningfully regulated. The government doesn’t always know where they are. Responsibility for monitoring them is spread across multiple laws and multiple agencies; the checks are of the once-over-lightly kind; inspection generally is under-resourced. Tenants are scared to complain lest they be evicted. Owners face minimal penalties for non-compliance. ACT’s David Seymour wants to deregulate the country; the irony is that large swathes of it are desperately under-regulated.

Our politicians also know that, if they put the worst boarding-house operators out of business, the homelessness crisis will worsen. Bad as they sometimes are, boarding-house owners are picking up the pieces left by an inadequate welfare state and a failed housing market.

On Thursday night I walked past the grey concrete hulk of Loafers Lodge, the fire damage on its façade looking like infected flesh, its upper-storey windows gaping open as if people were still trying to escape. Down below, the boarded-up entrance spoke of a desire to forget.

But just around the corner, by the Te Whaea bus stops, a memorial plaque to the victims had been unveiled. And I can imagine a better memorial still: a change in our laws, and in the way we care for each other, of such magnitude that these tragedies can never reoccur.

The Guardian: One year ago, a deadly boarding house fire shook New Zealand. We must prevent another tragedy

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One year ago, Wellington’s mayor said her city had endured one of its “darkest days” after a fire broke out at the Loafers Lodge boarding house, killing five people. On that day the air in New Zealand’s capital filled with black smoke and soot, and the city later mourned the loss of some of its most vulnerable residents.

Twelve months on, not enough is being done to prevent another such tragedy, experts believe.

Official data suggest there are at least 800 boarding houses in New Zealand. Predominantly multi-storey dwellings, they often house people who would otherwise be sleeping rough.

Loafers Lodge was a four-storey, 92-room hostel, described by visitors as a “rabbit warren”. Constructed in 1971, it was exempt from having a sprinkler system. Under New Zealand law, older buildings don’t have to automatically meet current safety standards, and even new ones don’t generally have to install sprinklers if they are under 10 storeys. A 48-year-old man has been accused of arson and charged with murder, and is due to stand trial later this year.

After the disaster, the government launched an investigation into safety and compliance at boarding houses across New Zealand. The findings released in March were alarming, identifying 134 breaches of fire safety and rental quality standards at 37 boarding houses. Loafers Lodge wasn’t part of the investigation.

The breaches included fire safety systems that were often severely inadequate, rendered useless by missing parts or certified compliant despite not being so. Fire alarm systems were frequently “damaged, obstructed, or not working”. Smoke detectors were sometimes missing, and only about half of those installed “were found to be in good working condition”. In many cases the battery had been taken out or was dead, or the alarm mechanism had been removed, leaving only the case.

Half of the buildings’ fire alarms, meanwhile, were not monitored. In one instance, the wires connecting the alarm to the monitoring company had been cut, while another building had repeatedly had its monitoring discontinued because the owner failed to pay the bill.

Despite being non-compliant, many fire safety systems had been signed off by the private inspectors who act as the first line of regulation. The report also noted that local councils struggled to even determine what counted as a boarding house, owing to “a lack of consistency” in the definitions used.

Clare Aspinall, Wellington-based housing researcher at the University of Otago, said boarding houses were “a very sad, very classic example of a systematic failure of policy and practice”. Responsibility for regulating them is “scattered” across multiple agencies and enforcement often underfunded, she said.

Aspinall, whose Master’s thesis examined boarding house regulations, said some of the failures highlighted in the March report had been raised with authorities as far back as 2010 – and little action had been taken.

In 2019, the then Labour-led government contemplated introducing tougher standards specifically for boarding houses, but focused instead on wider reform of residential tenancies and rental quality, according to documents released under the Official Information Act. Although these reforms notionally applied to boarding houses, the March report found a widespread “lack of basic compliance” with the new standards.

Now, steps are being taken to address some boarding house defects. Government officials have asked local councils to ensure the 134 breaches identified in the March report are fixed. Progress will be reported this month.

The Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) said in a statement that Cabinet had agreed to create a new offence for private inspectors who incorrectly certify defective boarding houses, with a maximum fine of $150,000. The minister for building and construction, Chris Penk, will review the fire safety provisions in New Zealand’s building code. Consultation on potential changes is expected later this year. MBIE is also investigating five of the boarding houses identified in the investigation for potential non-compliance with the Residential Tenancies Act.

Still, not enough is being done, many believe, and authorities are moving too slowly to protect vulnerable residents. Experts have called for a full register of boarding houses, simplified legislation that makes one public body clearly accountable for regulating them, and more resources for inspections.

Politicians have long been deterred from introducing tougher standards by the country’s lack of affordable housing, which could leave tenants homeless if their boarding house closes. But Aspinall argues that, alongside an increase in affordable housing, there must be “more responsibility and accountability” placed on landlords, especially those found to repeatedly flout the rules, and the worst ones should be “weeded out.”

But with seemingly little to guarantee the safety of the next set of boarding house tenants who find themselves at risk, the need to act more quickly appears clear.

The Spinoff: A record-breaking year for political donations is no cause for celebration

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A couple of years ago, a National Party contact told me it had “never been easier” to get big donations from businesses. Anger about the Covid-era “fortress New Zealand” policy, combined with an instinctive distrust of Labour, meant wallets were opening wide for the political right.

All this could be seen in the recent publication of political donations returns for 2023. In these returns, parties set out everything from anonymous gifts of $100 at a church hall fundraiser through to the $500,000 that manufacturing magnate Warren Lewis gave National.

Christopher Luxon’s party, unsurprisingly, led the way with a $10.4m total haul. Act, meanwhile, scored $4.3m – a startling sum for a small party, and a reminder of how it was kept on life support throughout the 2010s by dollops of cash from the likes of 80s corporate raider Alan Gibbs. The last of the coalition parties, New Zealand First, declared $1.9m, marking a distinct change from its pre-2020 strategy of using something called the “New Zealand First Foundation” to channel gifts of hundreds of thousands of dollars from wealthy supporters to the party, without actually going to the trouble of – you know – notifying the public.

On the left, meanwhile, Labour pulled in $4.8m, a respectable sum but half National’s amount, while the Greens declared $3.3m. Te Pāti Māori received just $160,000. All up, the left’s tally, $8.2m, was almost exactly half the $16.6m that the right harvested. The trade unions, which in right-wing mythology somehow balance out big business’s influence, contributed a princely $335,000 – less than that single Lewis donation to National.

Why does any of this matter? Because, in politics as elsewhere, money talks. It potentially generates undue influence: giving a political party large sums can induce it to look kindly on you. While there is little evidence of cash directly buying favours, one National donor, interviewed by myself and my Victoria University colleague Lisa Marriott in 2022, said donors had “more opportunity” to get a meeting with ministers.

In the same interview series, another donor, after insisting he enjoyed no special influence, noted that one party leader had come to his house, another was a social contact, and a third “popped in a couple of times and had a chat about life”. This was mentioned nonchalantly – as if the rest of us are constantly fending off politicians’ attempts to come round for dinner – but in fact bespoke a cosy world, evident right throughout our interviews, in which party leaders, fundraisers, MPs and donors constantly rubbed shoulders, with no firewall between decision-makers and coffer-fillers.

Consider this example. Last year, Chris and Michaela Meehan gave National over $100,000. Also last year, their company, Winton, sued the government for refusing to fast-track its Sunfield property subdivision in South Auckland. Also also last year, National MP Chris Bishop issued a press release backing Winton but not disclosing the donation. (Bishop says he was unaware of it at the time.)

Fast-forward to this year, and Winton is one of the companies specifically told it could apply to have its projects expedited under the government’s highly controversial Fast-track Approvals Bill. One of the ministers who would sign off on the fast-tracked projects is Chris Bishop. Another is Shane Jones, who has taken over $50,000 from individuals associated with Kings Quarry, yet another firm on the list for potential fast-tracking. The prospect of ministers ruling on projects run by the people who funded their election campaign seems – how can I put this? – suboptimal.

Donations can also tilt the political playing field. It’s not the case that great wealth can just “buy” an election: a Labour strategist once told me they’d rather have a great candidate with a great message and no money, as opposed to a terrible candidate with a terrible message and lots of money. National’s 2020 election campaign (relevant components: Judith Collins; “Demand the Debate”; more donations than Labour) bears this out.

But, the strategist said, all things being equal, they’d rather have more cash. National’s pollster, David Farrar, concurs: “You always want more money than less, because it gives you options,” he told RNZ last year. Money buys not just advertising but also polling, political consultants, voter databases, travel, venue hire and field organisers. No wonder, then, that the latest international research finds that more money tends to lead to more votes.

It’s worth noting, too, that when it came to donations under $1,500, Labour and Green fundraising ($4.6m last year) largely kept pace with National and Act’s efforts ($5.4m). It was in donations over $5,000 where the right ($6.5m) really smashed the left ($3.1m, a good chunk of which came from their own MPs). It’s that class of donor that made the difference in parties’ reach.

This resource imbalance may also be accelerating. In the three electoral cycles leading up to 2020, National pulled in $19.3m in donations (albeit we have no solid data on donations under $1,500 for that period). In just three years since, it has raised $16.5m. This is, as Farrar acknowledges, “unprecedented”.

It’s unlikely, though, that anything will be done about the problems donations pose. The answers – as set out in the report that Marriott and I wrote in 2022, Money for Something, and reiterated by last year’s Independent Electoral Review – are intellectually straightforward. Cap the amount that anyone can give at around $10,000 a year, ensure that only individuals (not organisations) can donate, disclose the names of more donors, give the Electoral Commission stronger powers to investigate fraud, and spend about $1 per New Zealander each electoral cycle to publicly support political parties.

The problem is that it’s not in National’s interest to implement such reforms, and Labour doesn’t want to wear the right-wing backlash that would greet any such attempt on its part. So we may be left with this stark example of inequality: late last year, Warren Lewis’s workers, many of them on or around the minimum wage, went on strike, asking for a pay rise. That’s New Zealand now, a country where the wealthy can find $500,000 for a party that will advance their interests, but won’t pay their workers a living wage.

The Post: The question we should actually be debating about the public service

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Just as adults like to frighten children with tales of imps and monsters, so too do conservatives scare the public with large numbers out of context.

Last year we were told endlessly that Labour had increased public borrowing “to over $100 billion” – which sounded terrifying until one realised that state debt was still just 20% of GDP, around half the Australian figure, a fifth of the American one and one-tenth of the Japanese.

It’s the same story with the size of the state bureaucracy, one of the new Government’s great fixations. We’re told, ad nauseam, that between 2017 and 2023 Labour added 17,000 public servants. And that sounds like a lot.

But in the same time, the country’s workforce grew by over 300,000. Consequently, the core public service – the people who work in central government departments and agencies – have gone from 1.9% of the workforce in 2017 to 2.2% today. Hardly a drastic shift, considering that many public problems scale with time and population: every new technology that people invent, from drones to AI, poses new problems, which in turn requires new regulations enforced by more public servants. Hardly a drastic shift, either, considering how run-down parts of the state had become under National – a decay embodied in the raw sewage running down the walls of Middlemore Hospital – and the consequent need for rebuilding.

Put it a different way: each of the 65,699 public servants employed as of last December services around 80 New Zealanders. Again, in context, it doesn’t seem an extravagant number.

How, then, should we think about the Government’s public-sector cuts, which at last count will cost 3700 jobs (and rising)?

There is, arguably, some left-wing hyperbole about those numbers. Each potential job loss can be a source of great pain for those concerned, and for their families. (I should know: I have friends and relatives affected.) But in the last six months of 2023 alone, nearly 2600 extra public servants were employed, as agencies bulked up despite an impending change of government. The cuts currently proposed would only take us back to 2022 levels of employment.

If there is something catastrophic about a 3700-strong workforce reduction, presumably things were also in a catastrophic state in 2022. Yet no-one was saying that then.

The right-wing obsession with reducing state employment, though, is even more misguided.

First there is the manner in which the cuts are being made. Putting senior management in charge means that – surprise, surprise – not many senior managers are losing their jobs, despite the recent bloat in those areas.

And although some of the cuts are relatively surgical, as they relate to schemes National has scrapped, others are blunt. Some agencies’ policy teams are getting across-the-board cuts with little or no thought as to what capacity is needed or who should be retained.

I have been told of brilliant mid-ranking staff, people with private-sector experience and leadership potential, who are nonetheless being let go – and thus potentially lost forever to the public service – because of the unbelievably hasty and blunt manner in which the cuts are being made.

Those cuts are already affecting frontline services – foodbanks, wheelchairs, teams who help catch paedophiles – despite National’s promises to the contrary. The distinction between front and back office is, in any case, somewhat meaningless. If, for instance, back-office police staff are cut, officers may simply end up doing more paperwork.

The bigger point, really, is that the size of the state workforce is the wrong focus. What matters most is not how many public servants we have but what we need them to do. Which problems, in short, are they required to solve, and are they equipped to do so?

As I look ahead, I see an ever-growing pile of public challenges. We need to future-proof our infrastructure against climate change. We need to unravel the intertwined problems of poverty, mental health and educational failure that afflict so many young people. We need to build homes for the 25,000 families on the state-housing wait list, and work out how do so more efficiently – and beautifully – than before.

All these tasks will be solved, at least in part, by people working in the public service. Recall that government comes into existence, as the humanist John Dewey argued, when people cannot just live privately but find themselves bumping up against each other. It is a collective attempt to solve collective problems, to undertake tasks that people cannot do, or do so well, by themselves.

The scale of these tasks, the number of these problems, the extent to which we rub up against each other in our complex world: all this will only increase. Mass public-sector redundancies, then, make little sense. We should be redeploying our existing public servants to new goals, and ensuring they work more effectively, rather than letting them go en masse.

Spinoff: Government risks own goal in cutting funding for Growing up in New Zealand

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The government risks sabotaging its own targets – on school attendance, for instance – if it cuts funding for one of the jewels in the country’s research crown, the Growing Up in New Zealand study. It also risks wasting money already spent preparing to collect the study’s data.

That’s the message from people who know the study well and have spoken to The Spinoff while ministers debate whether or not to renew its funding.

Since 2009, Growing Up in New Zealand has tracked the life course of 6,000 kids, starting with pre-birth interviews with their expectant parents. The study collects data from the families across a host of issues – from housing quality to health problems, from poverty levels to immunisation rates, from school results to reports of depression and anxiety. It holds a treasure trove of information about the problems affecting young New Zealanders – and the potential solutions.

“The better our data are, the better we can make decisions,” says Kate Prickett, a Victoria University academic and one of the lead researchers for the study. Without this kind of research, she adds, the country has “less confidence that government resources are getting to those who need them, or whether the money we’re spending is making a difference”.

Growing Up in New Zealand is, crucially, a longitudinal study: it follows the same group of people, rather than interviewing a new cohort each year as standard surveys do. This allows it to say far more about cause and effect: researchers can look at changes in families’ lives and see whether they are linked to a particular policy. In this sense, Growing Up in New Zealand is like the famed Dunedin study, but focused on a younger, more diverse cohort.

Waikato University’s Polly Atatoa Carr, another lead researcher on the study, says it has already changed policy. Its findings on the number of rentals lacking smoke alarms, for instance, directly influenced a 2016 decision to mandate alarm installation. Its research into families’ experience of paid parental leave similarly inspired extensions to that programme.

Yet the axe hovers over Growing Up in New Zealand. It received $30m over four years in the 2023 budget, but in February the contract to carry out the work was not renewed by the Ministry for Social Development. 

It is not clear why: the move may reflect scepticism about the study or just a general desire to run the rule over all pre-existing spending. Social development minister Louise Upston told RNZ that her government “values the work that the … study has produced over time, and we would like to see it continue. We are considering options for ongoing funding of the study and will be making decisions on this in due course.”

Something for Upston and colleagues to consider is whether they can even achieve their goals without surveys like Growing Up in New Zealand. Take the much-heralded drive to reduce truancy. “Context drives outcomes,” Atatoa Carr says. Families may be dealing with multiple life shocks, or having to help others in their community, or experiencing poverty that forces their children into work. “If we are interested in government targets on school attendance, you actually aren’t going to understand the drivers of attendance, or non-attendance, without really rich data from those families and the children themselves.”

Some of the study’s findings have been startling. Last year, for instance, it revealed that between the ages of 8 and 12, half of all children move house, one-fifth doing so multiple times. Often these are involuntary moves, caused by events like rentals being sold, tenancies terminated and rents increased. Families’ links to local health services – GPs, immunisation appointments and the like – can be disrupted, sometimes permanently, while school and other community connections can also be lost.

“The changing situation of families is extraordinary,” Atatoa Carr says. “We never expected to find the level of moving house that we found.” And the longer the survey continues, the more valuable it is. The positive impacts of early childhood education, for instance, may not fully show up until adolescence. “We’re only just starting to get those outcomes now.”

Both the study and its participants are at a sensitive stage. The children are now 14 or 15, and this year’s planned interviews – now on hold – are the last before they turn 16 and will have to consent to data collection in their own right.

If, in other words, this year’s interviews don’t take place, researchers will have no chance to explain to the young people why they should take part in the next round, set down for two years’ time. The risk then is that, approached in 2026, they feel they’re being cold-called after a four-year gap – and refuse consent and drop out, weakening the study’s coverage.

Significant sums were also spent this summer training and equipping dozens of workers to carry out this year’s interviews. If they don’t go ahead, that money – an as-yet-undisclosed amount – will be wasted.

Protecting the study’s budget would make sense on many fronts, Atatoa Carr says, not least because the biggest expenses by far – designing the study and recruiting participants – were committed long ago. Money spent to maintain the future interview rounds – expected to last until the participants are 21 – would be “a marginal cost for maximal benefit”. She, and others, hope the government heeds that message.

The Post: Country’s populist shift manifests itself most clearly in Mr Jones

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Half of New Zealanders think that to fix the country, we need “a strong leader willing to break the rules”. Bracing stuff, isn’t it? The finding comes from this week’s Ipsos survey, in which 55-65% of the country apparently agreed that the economy is “rigged to advantage the rich and powerful”, and that experts and political parties neither care about nor understand them.

There’s clearly something in this populist shift. I’m on a Statistics New Zealand advisory board, and our briefings show anti-government beliefs are causing more people to refuse to fill out surveys. Then there’s the general sense of alienation and Covid-related anger, seen most obviously in the 2022 Parliament grounds occupation.

The 2023 OECD Trust Survey, meanwhile, found just 44% of us are confident that government institutions “listen to people”. Only 37% believed that if they took part in a public consultation, “the government would adopt the opinions expressed”. And that belief is even weaker among poor New Zealanders.

The country has long had a pronounced anti-establishment streak. I’ve met older Kiwi blokes whose conversations with strangers consist largely of anecdotes about how they “got one over” the authorities and the so-called experts. “That woman from the council came out to have a look at our project and, well, she didn’t know a thing! We soon showed her what’s what.” And so on.

This doesn’t mean, though, that we should unquestioningly accept the Ipsos survey. If half the country really hates the establishment that much, the fringe parties in last year’s election would surely have recorded something larger than a vote share you’d need a microscope to locate. Even Winston only got 6%.

Bear in mind, too, that in the Ipsos survey, 60% said we shouldn’t raise taxes to increase general public spending – but 70-80% argued for increased funds for specific areas like education and health! People can be incoherent; how one asks the question matters enormously.

So too with populism: if one polled people on specific scenarios where politicians could “break the rules” – appointing their son to a public-sector board, for instance – I suspect most would respond unfavourably.

Recall, too, that although the number of “hard” refusals to fill out the Census has doubled, it still stands at just 10,000 people. The vast majority of us completed the forms last year. The country doesn’t feel like it’s about to fall apart at the seams.

But nor can we ignore entirely the Ipsos results. Even if people are just venting, their answers suggest a broad frustration with elite decision-making, failing public services, and social and economic inequalities.

There is, of course, a significant difference between perceived left-wing elites (academics, some media, and progressive politicians) and right-wing ones (big business and conservative politicians). Probably the anger is aimed at both: people don’t seem to like our supermarket duopoly very much, but nor do they particularly like university professors.

The man most obviously channelling the latter sentiment, and currently dominating the news, is New Zealand First’s Shane Jones. He is overt in his dislike of people who want to protect endangered native species – clearly a middle-class indulgence, in his view – and is attacking the integrity of parts of the judiciary, notably the Waitangi Tribunal.

The Fast-track Approvals Bill, which would give him and two colleagues unprecedented power to unilaterally approve what may be environmentally damaging projects, is the clearest expression of his credo. Careful processes and judicial oversight are for weak-minded pen-pushers; the strongman gets things done.

Such an approach invites criticism – but then a large problem looms. Jones is a little like one of those cartoon villains who feed off their opponents’ energy: each time they are punched, they somehow grow stronger. Criticism from the likes of myself can just boost his standing among his supporters.

The solution? Take great care with the material and tone of any critique. Less wailing about Trumpian tendencies and the violation of abstract principles; more concrete, grounded examples of harm.

If Jones, as he has previously done, attempts to influence judicial processes involving a relative, we should say to voters: what if you don’t have these connections? Should your success – in, say, winning contracts or influencing government decisions – be influenced by having friends in high places?

We should also be better at showing exactly what happens to ecosystems – and thus our lives – when endangered species die out. And we need, finally, to recognise that although some of the current distrust of government is exaggerated, much is well-founded.

Our politicians have created or enabled a situation in which just 1% of the country holds one-quarter of the wealth, most New Zealanders don’t have enough savings to deal with major life shocks, and many of our schools and health services are inadequate, especially for poorer families. It is not – or not just that – the people are wrong; the system must also change.