List candidate Ibrahim Omer, who, like Chen, was an MP in the last Parliament, made the same trek, leaving even later and only arriving in the capital in the wee small hours.
The congress met at the new Wellington convention centre Tākina, which once had a starring role in a diss track of a speech Prime Minister Christopher Luxon delivered to mayors and councillors about “white elephant” council spending.
The $180 million venue, with its persistent losses that are underwritten by the council, is indeed a gift to column writers. It’s a vast, muddy-coloured edifice with an undulating, glassy facade that bears an unfortunate resemblance to a cresting tsunami of wastewater – an easy metaphor for critics of councils’ often questionable investment choices.
Former National Party MP Jami-Lee Ross drove to Wellington from Auckland in one night. Photo / Jason Oxenham
But convention centres, particularly ones with a controversial back story, are actually tūrangawaewae for the National Party, who have historically championed their construction. In fact, there was something vaguely National-esque (with apologies to the party’s 2014 campaign) about Labour’s congress: slick presentation, tight audio-visual game and exceedingly strong message discipline.
In fact, on the discipline side, Labour continues to lock down its conferences to the media more than National; the latter allows media to witness some of the back-and-forth debate between members and the wider party. Labour locks media out for all of that, allowing the press in to see set-piece speeches delivered to adoring members, and moving them on for more sensitive speeches.
Labour pulled out all the stops to get the media to scram from the more sensitive parts of the congress.
Emcee Ayesha Verrall, after asking media to leave the convention centre, looked at her notes and remarked, “it says here I can conduct a musical interlude” while media packed up their things and cleared off – an unexpectedly threatening remark that had its desired effect and got the press gallery to scamper off faster than a herd of duck-sized horses.
Labour tends to spend a lot of its conferences talking up its illustrious past: the creation of the welfare state, the Waitangi Tribunal, KiwiSaver and whatever happened in the 1980s (of which rather less tends to be said).
Not so much this congress. Although new candidate Sophie Handford talked about her Jobs for Nature programme, Dame Jacinda Ardern’s name wasn’t mentioned much, being name-checked about as much as Michael Cullen and the Mother of all Budgets.
Members, understandably, feel differently. The party’s Napier committee was raffling off a signed copy of Ardern’s book and the Whanganui committee was raising funds with an impressive quilt commemorating Labour’s history made by Barbara, a local member.
But at the leadership level and on the congress stage, this is very much the small-target party of Chris Hipkins.
Red, a Labour delegate from Mt Albert. Photo / Thomas Coughlan
Party president Jill Day opened the congress reminding members of what she thought was the party’s core value, “to use the power of government to improve the lives of ordinary New Zealanders”. It was a statement of such modesty that it wouldn’t have been entirely out of place in a modern National Party do as the Nats pivot to embrace KiwiSaver, promise a Labour-esque loan scheme for solar, and lean into threatening intervention against big businesses like banks and supermarkets.
As Labour moderates away from Ardernist “transformation” and National gets comfortable wielding the levers of the state, what’s remarkable isn’t how different the parties look, but how similar.
It wasn’t just history that was left on the cutting room floor – Labour didn’t spend much time talking about its own policies: the capital gains tax, free GP visits, free prescriptions and cheaper public transport didn’t get much of an airing at all.
Is it perhaps because the party faithful wanted something a bit more ambitious? Commentary around Labour’s policy tends to remark on its unthreatening, non-transformational modesty; the stuff that’s designed to go down well with Labour-National marginal voters but not so much paid-up members.
If that satisfies the members – if winning the next election really is more important than all of that – then we really will be dealing with a party that looks a lot more like National.
The National influence was explicit in the speech from finance spokeswoman Barbara Edmonds.
After running through all the standard stuff a finance spokesperson has to say about what they’ll do, Edmonds flipped the switch and said that soon, she would show “how I’ll make it all add up”, implicitly addressing Finance Minister Nicola Willis’ attack for National a fortnight ago.
Edmonds said the fact the numbers didn’t add up was “what we hear from National all day long”.
“And you know what, they’re right … ” she added, “their numbers don’t add up”.
Edmonds flipped Willis’ script, arguing that under the coalition’s economic management, “the numbers” weren’t adding up for many households around the country, beset by high inflation and grim employment prospects.
A quilt sold to raise money for Labour. Photo / Thomas Coughlan
Edmonds argued the coalition was so obsessed with making its own numbers add up, they’d resorted to pinching the economic security of households to bolster the public finances – robbing Tim to pay Treasury.
“I’ll make the numbers add up, I can assure you of that. Not just on a spreadsheet, but in every home in this country,” Edmonds finished.
It was one of Edmonds’ stronger speeches, admittedly delivered to a friendly crowd.
It borrowed a tactic from National itself. National’s argument has for decades been that should Labour’s ambitious spending plans not add up, the party is more likely to ask you for more tax than look to itself for cuts to make its spending more affordable.
The last Labour Government didn’t help itself, implementing or trying to implement a handful of sweeping tax changes like interest deductibility, a second bright-line tax extension, a trust tax hike and KiwiSaver tax reform, without first getting an explicit electoral mandate.
One thing Edmonds didn’t do, for all the talk of making the numbers “add up”, was actually answer that question about her own plans. And if deputy leader Carmel Sepuloni’s pay equity-focused speech was anything to go by, the party has no appetite to water down the policy that is at the centre of allegations that the party has a problem with its finances.
A few policy issues for an incoming Labour Government reared their heads.
Former party general secretary Chris Flatt made a plea to restore the Just Transition policy of the last Labour Government, which spent money to help sectors pivot away from fossil fuels.
He said New Zealand needed to ensure “ workers are not thrown under the bus” as the economy decarbonised, a transformation that could, if poorly managed, result in widespread unemployment.
This is a big issue for Labour’s sister parties in the UK and Australia, but it hasn’t reared its head in New Zealand much – yet. The UK Labour Party has been tearing itself to shreds over an offshore oil and gas exploration policy that consciously replicates aspects of our own Ardern-era ban.
The architect of that policy, former party leader Ed Miliband, has been tipped as a potential candidate for Chancellor of the Exchequer once Andy Burnham replaces Sir Keir Starmer as Prime Minister, which is likely at some point in the next few months.
But last week Sharon Graham, leader of the UK’s largest union, Unite, said Miliband shouldn’t be allowed near 11 Downing St thanks to his oil and gas policy and commitment to the country’s net zero target.
Graham went so far as to call the climate policy a “noose around the neck” of the UK’s ability to create jobs.
“Ed only seems to be interested in one side of the equation, rushing Britain to net zero with almost no thought for jobs, skills and national security,” she said.
The climate versus jobs debate hasn’t really made landfall in New Zealand, which is good news for parties on the left.
While there may be a line between Ardern’s exploration ban and the crisis in our manufacturing sector, it isn’t a straight one – and even if it were, the crisis only made landfall during the expensive winter of 2024, allowing survivors of the gas ban some plausible deniability.
But Flatt, representing dairy workers – some of New Zealand’s most climate-exposed – is right to be worried and the next Labour Government may not find it so easy to keep its red and green wings together.
Labour candidate and former MP Michael Wood with his injury. Photo / Thomas Coughlan
A more progressive future lurked on the fringes. Progressive Aucklanders Phil Twyford and Arena Williams managed to make it to the capital (Williams, not taking any chances, stayed in the city after Parliament wrapped up on Tuesday).
Then there’s Michael Wood, who was a shadow candidate for the Labour leadership in 2023 (never publicly declaring his ambition), and was at the conference and warmly received by members.
One side of Wood’s face is bandaged up and his arm is in a sling after an unfortunate accident in which, Wood told me, he was distracted by a tortoiseshell cat he saw at a bus stop, causing him to fall and hit himself on the kerb.
More conspiratorially minded members who learned Wood got into misfortune at a bus stop might ask whether it was the current party leadership who put him there. Indeed, there’ll be some in the party who’ll think it’s not the first time Wood’s been thrown under a bus (stop).
It’s an unfortunate visual metaphor for a candidate whose unembarrassed progressivism has fallen out of favour in the current Labour Party – even if Labour’s $20 public transport fare cap owes a lot to Wood, who tried to get a similar policy through Cabinet as Transport Minister in the Ardern Government.
But as the second life of that policy and Wood’s own political comeback story shows, history is full of resurrections, even if the current Labour Party isn’t keen to talk about them.