There’s no rule to stop Peters, NZ First, or any MP in the coalition parties from no longer supporting the Government.
Labour leader Chris Hipkins gestured to this on Tuesday after Luxon’s confidence vote in the National caucus.
Hipkins used parliamentary questions to ask Luxon if he knew the entire National caucus was behind him.
Finance Minister Nicola Willis noted Peters has gone with Labour before. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Luxon needs most National MPs behind him, because if enough crossed the floor to prove that the Government no longer had the confidence of the House it would collapse, leading to fresh elections if Luxon couldn’t find enough opposition MPs to tide him over.
Nothing in the coalition agreement – or any other agreement – prevents this from happening.
So the question isn’t “is it possible?” but “is it likely to happen?” Likelihood is a question of politics, and the political answer to that question is “no”.
While it’s advantageous for Peters to hammer National, particularly when times are tough and the party’s voters seem quite happy to switch, he seems to have drawn the line at actually bringing down the coalition and heading to the polls.
On Thursday, Peters was asked whether he would contemplate leaving the coalition early. Responding in the negative, Peters emphasised the importance of “stability”.
“I’ve said to you, there’s one party that promises stability in this coalition and you’re talking to it – we’re the party that’s in for stability all the way to the seventh of November,” he said.
There’s good reason to believe this. Polling shows voters feel negatively about the economy and the direction of the country overall. Peters, who has attacked his own Government’s management of the economy, and his coalition partners more generally, seems to be harvesting this discontent from within his own Government.
But voters have also tended to punish instability. Peters need look no further than his own history for evidence of this. NZ First nearly crashed out of Parliament in 1999 after Peters’ fractious stint in Government with National.
So what is happening?
One of the reasons things feel so febrile this week is that NZ First and National have found each other’s pressure points.
Dame Jacinda Ardern and Winston Peters signing their coalition agreement in 2017. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Peters amped up these tensions this week, attacking Luxon’s political tactic of calling a confidence vote in his leadership of the National Party. Peters also claimed to know the margin of that vote, which, if true, would be a serious breach of caucus confidentiality, implying Luxon’s leadership of National was very weak indeed.
But National fought back – and fought back harder than it has done at any point this term.
Deputy leader Nicola Willis demonstrated that she knows Peters’ pain points just as well as Peters knows National’s.
She told the Mike Hosking Breakfast on Newstalk ZB there was always a “live risk” that NZ First would “get into bed with Hipkins, Swarbrick, the Greens … which is a bad recipe for New Zealand”.
Luxon piled in on the radio station’s The Country, reminding listeners that Peters was the leader who put Jacinda Ardern in power.
It’s a fact that Peters has twice formed a Government with Labour and twice with National, but the conventional wisdom among Parliament, backed up by data from the likes of the NZ Election Study, is that NZ First’s voters skew right, and that they want (and wanted) NZ First to support right-wing Governments.
It’s not helpful for Peters to have voters reminded that he brought Ardern, who is still a controversial and often unpopular figure among his base, to power.
It is, however, helpful to National. In the past, the major party of the coalition has tended to stay as far above the fray as possible. But with National’s support plummeting so low that the party has itself become unstable, this seems no longer possible.
Willis and Luxon’s intervention shows National has decided that enough’s enough, and if NZ First is going to come for National’s vote, then National will do its best to defend it.
Peters seems to have been concerned enough about the attack that he strengthened his 2022 ruling out of Labour so long as it was led by Hipkins.
He posted to social media to assure voters he “won’t do a deal with Labour” – a higher threshold.
Peters’ very clear decision to rule out Labour ahead of time is arguably the most unambiguous position he’s ever taken to an election – a far cry from the strategic ambiguity he used to campaign on.
This wasn’t enough for Willis, who noted Peters “will always find a way” to get around previous comments.
NZ First is fighting back, noting National was the party that brought Te Pāti Māori, then known as the Māori Party, to power.
National was also the party that pioneered ideas like co-governance and Te Mana o Te Wai, innovations currently controversial on the right.
It’s a high-stakes game from both. The coalition still fundamentally thinks it will be re-elected, and therefore it’s worth campaigning for the biggest share of the vote to ensure maximum power in the next Government. Taxpayers’ Union-Curia polling out on Thursday validated this view, showing that when voters were asked to pick between a return of the coalition and an alternative Labour-Green-Te Pāti Māori Government, the coalition won 45% to 39% (with a relatively high 16% undecided).
There’s a risk, if that calculation is wrong, that this internal squabbling might compel stability-minded voters to walk to Labour.
There’s also a bit of grumbling behind the scenes. The final Budget ministers’ meetings are being held before the Budget heads to Cabinet to be agreed on. The three coalition parties have very different ideas of what that Budget should look like. What we may be seeing is some of that frustration and grumpiness spilling into the public domain.