The End of the Red-Blue Monopoly
A Blessing, A Curse, or Just MMP Working as Intended?
For decades, New Zealand politics has been a drab ping-pong match between Labour and National. The paddles change hands, the ball goes back and forth and occasionally a voter gets smacked in the face for daring to think they were part of the game. Now, however, the grand duopoly appears to be cracking. Labour and National are both polling at historic lows, their combined share the weakest since the early 2000s. Suddenly, the smaller parties - the Greens, ACT, New Zealand First, Te Pāti Māori, are no longer polite support acts but the main show.
Cue panic from the establishment.
National under Christopher Luxon finds itself in the bizarre position of being the lead act in what increasingly looks like a circus run by ACT and NZ First. Luxon insists this is just coalition reality, nothing unusual, but the voters can smell the sweat on his collar. The moment National ditched its centrepiece tax cut plan and quietly shelved raising the retirement age, the illusion of control evaporated. Instead, we got NZ First’s populist grumblings and ACT’s ideological experiments dressed up as policy. So much for the promise of “Getting Back on Track.” The train has derailed, the engine is on fire and Winston Peters is in the dining carriage demanding a better wine list.
Labour, meanwhile, sits smugly in opposition, convinced that pointing at National’s shambles is an adequate substitute for policy. But its silence leaves a vacuum happily filled by the Greens and Te Pāti Māori. Every week that Labour dithers, its potential partners shape the agenda - climate urgency, wealth taxes, Treaty commitments. Labour may hope to keep the middle ground by keeping its mouth shut, but sooner or later the public will want to know if it stands for anything more than “We’re not them.”
Herein lies both the beauty and the terror of this new era. On the one hand it is healthy that the political furniture is being rearranged. Labour and National have treated the electorate with casual contempt for decades, offering stale managerialism disguised as vision. Their dominance left too many New Zealanders alienated, too many issues -housing, inequality, climate - fobbed off with excuses. Smaller parties breaking through is, at least in theory, a corrective. A diversity of voices, more genuine debate and less arrogance from the big two.
But on the other hand - good God. Hobbyhorse politics can gallop very fast when given actual reins. ACT dreams of rewriting the Treaty principles as if centuries of colonisation could be tidied up with a whiteboard marker. New Zealand First thrives on sowing suspicion, promising everything to everyone and delivering mainly confusion. The Greens, with James Shaw gone, are flexing harder than ever, knowing Labour can’t win without them and Te Pāti Māori, with its unapologetic radicalism, frightens centrist voters who still yearn for a calm voice reassuring them that nothing too interesting will ever happen.
So, what are we left with? A politics where coalition is no longer an accident but the default setting. Every election result now guarantees a post-poll bazaar where parties hawk policies for ministerial portfolios. Voters can no longer assume that ticking National or Labour means those parties’ manifestos will be carried out. Instead, every ballot comes with fine print - “Warning - contents may be altered by coalition negotiations.”
The benefits are real. Smaller parties can force issues into the spotlight that Labour and National would otherwise bury. Without the Greens, climate policy would be even thinner gruel. Without ACT, debates about regulatory reform wouldn’t exist at all, even if their solutions are best filed under “Mad Science.” Without Te Pāti Māori, Treaty justice would slide off the agenda. Without Winston… well, we’d lose the comic relief, at least.
But the dangers are equally clear. Policy zig-zagging. Governments paralysed by vetoes. Leaders defined not by their vision but by how well they appease their cranky allies. Luxon is already finding that defending inaction as “coalition management” doesn’t sound inspiring, it sounds like the political version of being henpecked. Labour, when its turn comes, will discover the same thing. You can’t promise stability while clinging to partners whose very purpose is to make noise.
The irony is delicious. MMP was supposed to break the stranglehold of Labour and National, but it took voters 30 years to fully embrace that possibility. Now, as the duopoly collapses, the question is whether we’ve traded boredom for chaos.
Should we cheer? Probably. Nothing keeps politicians honest like knowing they no longer own the keys to the kingdom. Should we worry? Absolutely. A Parliament full of small parties wielding oversized leverage could turn every budget into a hostage negotiation and should we feel sorry for Labour and National? Not in the slightest. After decades of arrogance, they are finally reaping what they sowed - irrelevance dressed up as leadership.
The future of New Zealand politics is a patchwork quilt stitched by parties with wildly different fabrics - scratchy wool, shiny polyester and the occasional piece of velvet. It might keep us warm, or it might fall apart at the seams. Either way, the days of the bland duopoly are over. And perhaps, just perhaps, that’s the most democratic mess we could ask for.
As we enter these choppy and uncertain waters, one thing is clear. The childish bickering, point-scoring, dishonesty and unwillingness to even attempt to walk a mile in another’s shoes has got to stop. We have a country here that despite successive governments best efforts is still one of the most attractive and desirable places in the world to live, but let’s not kid ourselves.
The absolute cluster**** that is our infrastructure, the alarming degradation of our natural environment, the callousness of our treatment of the marginalised and our disgusting gutlessness about having our voice heard about the evils rampant in other parts of the world are eating away at our national soul.
We’re better than this, but what makes us special can and will all slip away if we aren’t vigilant and the first place we need to exercise our collective disappointment is with our political parties and the instruction to them needs to be unequivocal – “grow up, you’re embarrassing us all”.