The Labour Party of 2025 is no such opposition. It assembled in Auckland a year away from what polling suggests could be an historic victory, wounds licked and well and truly healed, not to explain what went wrong in 2023 but what’s going wrong now, and how they’ll make it right in 2026.
The problem is simple: The economy isn’t working. There aren’t enough jobs, those jobs don’t pay enough, and everything is too expensive.
The Government has been captured by corporate interests, most spectacularly the tobacco industry. Instead of fixing creating jobs, the coalition is cutting taxes and rewriting regulations in the interests of its friends and donors. In Labour’s telling, this is a Government with its hand wedged firmly in an ever-diminishing till.
It’s a vision many voters share. November’s Ipsos Issues monitor poll was an anguished cry from the electorate, essentially saying everything was broken and they had no faith in the coalition to fix it (a Taxpayers’ Union-Curia Poll has different figures, suggesting voters do actually have faith in the coalition on the economy).
Chris Hipkins, leader of the opposition, speaks to media after the Labour Party conference. Photo / Michael Craig
Labour knows this economic message has resonance, and it’s relentless in hitting it. A closed-door campaign meeting led by campaign chairman Kieran McAnulty emphasised members needed to be relentlessly disciplined in campaigning on the economy, and not get distracted by the latest outrage.
In his public speech, Hipkins railed at a “Prime Minister who blames young people for an economic mess they didn’t create, then tells them to move to where the work is. Well, they have: To Australia”.
Cheer!
“For two years, this Government hasn’t been focused on you. It’s put its energy to looking after tobacco companies, tech giants, property speculators and the fossil fuel industry. And it has failed on the two things it promised: Grow the economy and fix the cost of living. National hasn’t [got] the country back on track – they’ve derailed it!”
Cheer!
“Trickle-down economics doesn’t work!”
CHEER!
It was heady stuff. Hipkins got personal too, telling the story of seeing his father come home from work in a taxi (an unusual sight, as he never caught taxis) after being laid off in the 1980s.
“Like so many Kiwis in the 1980s, the promise of a job for life had suddenly disappeared,” Hipkins said.
Work, in this story, was “more than just a pay packet. It’s stability. It’s dignity”.
After a long, grizzly recession full of heartache and embarrassment, as the economy navigates through its “gig” era towards an AI disruption billed to be the biggest economic shake-up since the industrial revolution, this is a deeply powerful message: The economy must materially provide for people and their families, but it must provide meaning too.
Hipkins personified this amoral economic malaise in the figure of Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, singling out Luxon’s decision, revealed in the Herald, to appeal the valuation of his property in an attempt to reduce his rates bill, something unthinkable for the two-thirds of New Zealand households, property owners, who have watched their household wealth being fed to the shredder these last few years. Only the very, very rich can afford to make themselves look poorer.
Where things get challenging for Labour is that the party cannot decide what kind of party it wants to be to solve these problems.
The party conference was drenched in nostalgia.
Hipkins surrounded by members and MPs at his party conference. Photo / Michael Craig
Hipkins mourned of the “promise of a job for life” and built the conference’s single policy announcement around the quaint notion of reviving the locally owned family GP clinic.
But can Labour really promise to bring these back? The modern party would baulk at the taxes and economic controls necessary to bring back jobs for life. At his post-speech stand-up, Hipkins even seemed uncertain about a union’s calls for automatic union registration, a teeny-tiny step in the direction of compulsory unionisation.
Hipkins attacked the selling-off of state assets, a likely National policy, but unlike Labour’s mid-century predecessors, Hipkins doesn’t seem to want the Nash-era higher-tax, higher-debt fiscal settings required if Labour were to keep the assets while continuing to fund the capital investment their rumoured sale is meant to pay for.
The party peppered the auditorium with sunny coloured signs written in drop-shadow capitals — a direct nod to the plagiarism quotation of the clever slogans and attractive branding that propelled Democrat Zohran Mamdani to the New York City mayoralty earlier this year.
Mamdani, much like Hipkins, campaigned ruthlessly on the unaffordable status quo, but Mamdani’s statist prescription to that, again a nod to progressive politics of the 1970s, was funded by hefty tax increases on the rich. Hipkins, speaking to media after his stand-up, hinted other tax changes like restoring last term’s digital services tax would be put on the table, but other than those relatively small amendments, Labour’s small capital gains tax is it.
Labour’s campaign collateral had stylistic echoes of New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. Photo / Thomas Coughlan
There was also a progressive take on the economic nationalism sweeping the globe — a desire to have a future made in New Zealand by New Zealanders, using New Zealand money, and a nod to Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s Australian “Medicard” campaign.
But Labour doesn’t really want this either. The party knows it needs to be open to offshore sources of capital. It took great delight this year in noting new Amazon data centres touted by Luxon as evidence of the coalition’s economic management were actually a legacy of the Ardern government.
It wants to stem the tide of New Zealanders to Australia and fund Australian-style services, but it is profoundly opposed to policies that would attempt to unlock a sliver of the mineral wealth that has powered Australia’s long economic boom, hosing up several generations of ambitious New Zealanders. A recent Australian paper that tried to pour cold water on the importance of mining to Australia reckoned it contributed just 6% of all federal tax revenue.
The Cullen tax working group reckoned New Zealand’s extractive sector contributed about $500 million in tax, or about 0.5% of all revenue at the time — a figure that includes not just company tax but personal income tax too. In inflation-adjusted terms, New Zealand’s meagre extractive revenue isn’t far shy of what Labour expects to make from its CGT. If New Zealand were to lift this to “just” 6% of Government revenue, it would be enough to increase the education budget by nearly 50%.
New Zealanders aren’t just being pushed to Australia by callous economic policy here. Australia’s environmental agnosticism acts as a significant pull factor. Labour loves talking about New Zealanders leaving for Australia, but it is uncomfortable with policies that would make it a more Australian-style government.
New Zealand singer and songwriter Annie Crummer performs at the Labour Party conference. Photo / Michael Craig
And then there’s pay equity, a major legislative achievement of the Ardern government.
Despite being one of the coalition’s most unpopular decisions this year, Labour made little mention of the pay equity cuts in the public parts of the conference.
Labour is committing to bringing back some form of pay equity, but is distinctly uncommitted to putting up the $12.8 billion Treasury estimates will be saved through the coalition’s cuts.
And no wonder. The sum is enormous — only slightly less than the defense budget. Labour can nip and tuck here and there, scrapping Investment Boost and a number of coalition tax initiatives, but it will be very, very hard to fund by cutting coalition policies and stealth taxes on the rich. A backdown of some kind seems highly likely.
Again, Labour wants to be an Ardern-style values-led party, but it doesn’t want to be the high-debt, high-tax mid-century-style Labour Party it would need to be to pay for it.
In some ways, Labour is cursed by its success. In 2010, two years into its last stint in opposition, Labour leader Phil Goff floated for the first time exempting GST from some foods, an unworkable and ridiculous policy that haunts the party to this day.
At that point, profoundly unpopular, Labour’s mission was to be relevant and get attention, not to get ready for government.
The coalition’s economic seppuku has truncated the life cycle of this particular opposition.
The current Labour Party is in the complicated and messy position of getting attention, promising ambition, and trying to temper members’ expectations.
The party has completed the first task necessary to win back power: Diagnosing what’s wrong. But it is still a long way from working out the type of Labour Party it wants to be to fix it.