Kiwis are fed up with Jacinda Ardern

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Last week, Roy Morgan Research reported that Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Party had clawed its way back into contention for next year’s election, after New Zealand Opposition leader, Chris Luxon, lied about holidaying in Hawaii.

As shown in the next chart, National’s primary vote tanked 4% in July, whereas Labour’s rebounded 0.5%, according to Roy Morgan:

New Zealand voting intentions

Roy Morgan: New Zealand election on a knife edge.

Not so, according to this month’s 1News/Kantar poll, which shows that support for Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern fell by three points to 30%, marking her worst approval rating since coming into office in 2017.

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The poll also revealed that Labour’s primary vote dropped to 33%, well behind the opposition National Party’s 37%. This marked Labour’s lowest support in five years, with Labour’s primary vote down 10% from September last year.

The below graphic shows the breakdown in primary vote by party:

New Zealand primary vote

1News/Kantar poll: National and ACT well ahead of Labour and Greens.

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Based on this polling, these results would give National 48 MPs and ACT would have 14 – enough to take power:

NZ seats in parliament

1News/Kantar poll: National/ACT poised to take office.

National leader Christopher Luxon claimed the poll shows “Kiwis are over the Government and they want change”:

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“I think they understand this is a Government that is not good with money and not good at managing the economy – they get that and they see that. It’s a big driver of what’s happening here”.

“But I’d also put to you that when we don’t have our kids going to school regularly, we see a healthcare system falling apart with wait times blowing out, we see rising levels of crime, and we see housing that, actually, has been an abject failure for this Government, they look at the sum of all of those things.”

Arguably the biggest barrier to Jacinda Ardern’s re-election is the Reserve Bank. It has flagged further aggressive interest rate hikes all the way into September 2023, just in time for the election.

If the Reserve Bank follows through, it will lead to further sharp house price falls, rising mortgage repayments, sagging consumer and business confidence, and a possible recession.

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Those factors are a lethal cocktail for Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Government.

About the author
Leith van Onselen is Chief Economist at the MB Fund and MB Super. He is also a co-founder of MacroBusiness. Leith has previously worked at the Australian Treasury, Victorian Treasury and Goldman Sachs.