On the lawn of a suburban home in Coromandel, the prime minister’s dress shoes have been scuffed ochre by a softened bed of clay. Chris Hipkins stands in front of the house, perched atop a tide of packed earth. It has been carried about 15 metres downhill by a landslide, walls crunched and bowing. The buckled porch has come to rest halfway across the lawn, flattening a well-tended hibiscus shrub.
“We’ve got a long journey ahead of us,” he says.
A little over a month since he took the job of prime minister, New Zealand’s new leader has been thrown into back-to-back natural disasters. Devastating flooding hit the largest city, Auckland, in February, followed a fortnight later by Cyclone Gabrielle, which destroyed homes, businesses and infrastructure across swathes of the North Island. The recovery is expected to cost billions and take years, with arterial roads fractured, infrastructure destroyed and entire towns flooded with silt.
But the extreme weather events are also reshaping the landscape of the coming election, seven months away. At the close of 2022, Ardern’s Labour party seemed locked in a gradual but unceasing slide, bogged down by economic woes. Successive polling placed the centre-right National party, along with rightwing partner Act, as the likely winners, in an election dominated by cost-of-living concerns. Now, the race looks tighter than ever, with climate adaptation and disaster recovery planted centrally on the political agenda. The right bloc still leads the polls, but this week, for the first time in a year, Labour overtook National.
‘A future of road cones’
A television camera tracks Hipkins’ steps as he walks around the crater of one of Coromandel’s destroyed roads. He is clad in a black National Emergency Management-branded jacket, the de facto uniform of most recent public appearances. Visits to cyclone-hit towns have become a regular chunk on the prime minister’s weekly calendar.
“Obviously being on the ground here helps me to get a good flavour, a good understanding of what the community is grappling with, what their concerns are,” Hipkins says. “We are going to reach a point where many of the rest of the country get back to their day-to-day lives, and the news cycle moves on. But we’re not going to forget about the big rebuild job that we’ve got ahead of us … We’re going to still make sure that we see this through.”
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In the weeks since the disasters, the prime minister has leaned heavily into a straightforward, functional frankness – a political style more prone to understatement than soaring speeches. “A really big job,” he says, after looking over the collapsed ruins of a highway, hundreds of cubic metres of soil toppling down the hill. “We have got quite a future of road cones ahead of us.”
“There’s not a lot of hype – there’s not a lot of highfalutin rhetoric in his spoken style,” says Ben Thomas, a staffer for the former National-led government, which led through the Christchurch earthquakes. So far, that approach, and the wider priorities of Hipkins’ government, seem to be resonating with New Zealanders. On Thursday, new data showed that Labour had overtaken its primary opposition for the first time in a year. The poll, by Curia Market Research, placed Labour up 1.1 points from last month at 35.5%, inching ahead of National’s 34.8%. Hipkins’ personal popularity had also soared dramatically: having started his tenure at around zero in January, he achieved a 33% net favourable rating in March. It compared to a net negative favourability rating for his opponent, ex-CEO Christopher Luxon, at -2%, and is a steep turnaround from the last month of Ardern’s governance, when her net favourability dropped to zero. While a National-Act coalition would still hold a one-seat edge, it constituted Labour’s best result in some time.
“Perversely, natural disasters can be good news for governments,” says Thomas. “They give ample scope for decisive leadership, for concrete images of the government getting out in the community.”
In 2009, social scientists Neil Malhotra and Andrew Healy studied the effects of government disaster responses on subsequent elections and found, broadly, that when incumbent governments responded with large-scale relief, they tended to be rewarded by voters. It also found that spending on disaster prevention – even though it was more effective – didn’t typically influence voters.
‘A defining challenge’
The storms have placed the climate crisis centrally on the political agenda, with the environment shunted up the priorities cited as “most concerning” by New Zealanders. “It’s really interesting to see now how much it’s shifted the political conversation and how much it’s being talked about by politicians,” says political commentator and climate activist India Logan-Riley. “It’s just really awful that we haven’t been able to politically grapple with the impacts of climate change legitimately until it created such widespread disruption and loss.”
“There’s no question we have to be more prepared for extreme weather events,” Hipkins says. “I do think that’s going to be a defining challenge for us in the near future.”
But meaningful climate adaptation presents an enormous political challenge for his government. Particularly burning is the question of managed retreat, and shifting communities that are too unsafe or expensive to sustain. Comprehensive action will probably enrage some homeowners by eliminating the value of their primary asset – or, conversely, infuriate those who could be forced to bail them out.
“Nothing is more frightening in New Zealand politics than superannuants, or property owners with their backs up,” Thomas says. “Tackling the thorny issue of managed retreat … could be a bit of a landmine for all parties this year.”
Nor do the economic challenges that haunted Ardern have any quick-fixes in sight: New Zealand closed out the year with annual inflation on 7.2%, and the reserve bank estimates it will stay at 7.5% for the first quarter of 2023. “I don’t think it’s specifically Cyclone Gabrielle that has shifted things – I think it’s also the wider recalibration,” says Shane Te Pou, a political commentator and ex-Labour party activist, referring to Labour’s promises at the close of 2022 to refocus on “bread and butter issues” and the economy.
In the seven months before the election arrives, it is likely that those issues will rear up again – as the cameras retreat from cyclone-hit towns and the rebuild grinds on. There is plenty of time, too, for frustration at the government’s relief and rebuild approach to grow, as communities move on from the immediate task of digging silt from their homes, restoring road access and housing the displaced.
“I won’t get too carried away at this point in time,” says Te Pou. “There’s a lot of water to flow under the bridge.”
