This party was holding its midwinter away caucus, and its focus was the South Island. Hence, like locusts, MPs descended upon the fertile plains of Te Waipounamu, visiting flood-ravaged Nelson and Marlborough, health facilities in Christchurch, and in Dunedin pollies popped into the New Zealand Centre of Digital Excellence and the hardy perennial that is the KiwiRail Hillside workshop.
Meanwhile, party leader Chris Hipkins was in the not terribly red fastness of Queenstown meeting tourism and business leaders and considering housing issues.
All of which placed the party’s Dunedin MP Rachel Brooking in a tricky position; being in Dunedin would seem the obvious thing to do, but she is also her party’s buddy MP for the (National-held) seat of Southland... in the end, Queenstown it was.
Then yesterday the MPs all convened back in Christchurch for a jolly old chinwag about policy and strategy. The cynical might opine that Labour could do with a bit more of both.
But why this sudden interest in the South Island?
There was not a lot of red on the 2023 South Island electoral map, and at this point there seems little prospect of much more being added a year from now. What’s more, simple electoral arithmetic suggests that there are more crucial party votes to be gained by Labour in the far more populous North Island.
All true, but what the South Island offers is a few seats which can suggest to pollsters and policymakers whether Labour’s message is getting through to voters further afield.
But on election night 2023, on the crest of the blue landslide, Banks Peninsula was a surprise win for National, Vanessa Weenink victorious by 396 votes.
On current national polling, Labour and National are averaging about 32% of the vote apiece, the rest being divided between smaller parties or being undecided.
That means a very small percentage of voters, likely from the political middle ground, will likely decide who wins the next election.
Many of those critical voters will be in middle-class, middle-age places like Cashmere, Halswell and Sumner, voters who can be persuaded by a policy mix which appeals either to their heart or their hip pocket.
Naturally National, which held its own annual conference in Christchurch the other weekend, is well aware of this too and is targeting exactly those voters.
Further north sits the Nelson electorate, where Rachel Boyack defied the tide and held her seat by a razor-thin 26 votes in 2023. Boyack won the seat on the back of Labour’s Covid landslide in 2020 and grimly clung on to a seat which had been National-held for the previous 24 years.
National was surprised not to win the seat back, and will be determined to reclaim it next year. Labour could afford to be beaten here and still win power, but any sign of it loosening its grip on the seat would be ominous for its chances.
Hence the posse of Labour MPs in the seat on Thursday, and there will no doubt be many more such visits to come, given the criticality of the seat to the party.
Taking a step to the left (so to speak) into West Coast-Tasman, and you are in a seat where Labour will hold high hopes but also harbour grave misgivings.
Being the historic and spiritual home of the party, Labour places great emotional value on winning the Coast, and was visibly stung when Chris Auchinvole won the seat in 2008.
After a determined effort Damien O’Connor won it back in 2011 and held it securely until 2023, when Maureen Pugh snagged a relatively comfortable 1017-vote victory.
Labour’s fortunes in 2026 will very much depend on how National’s message of growth has resonated, and had results, on the Coast.
Home to many an extractive industry and with a mining-friendly government, many Coasters will feel that keeping the current government in power will offer it the best hope of economic prosperity.
Conversely, the Coast is also a place of great natural beauty and conservation estate, and it has many voters who cast their ballots on that basis.
The margin between Pugh and O’Connor was, approximately, the number of votes controversial lawyer Sue Grey received standing under the New Zealand Outdoor and Freedoms Party banner. Where, if anywhere, those votes go may be crucial for both parties.
As for the other southern seats, many have never been won by Labour and Rangitata being in the Labour column in 2020 was probably a one-off.
Seats like Waimakariri, Waitaki and Invercargill have been red in the past, but so long ago that it would take a cataclysmically dreadful election night for National for that to happen again.
While seats are all very well, party votes are the vital numbers for the make up of Parliament.
If you assume the 2023 and 2020 elections were so unusual as to be outliers, that makes 2017 the last ‘‘normal’’ contest we had.
In the South Island that year, National racked up about 60,000 more party votes than Labour. Interestingly, Labour won the party vote in Nelson but lost the seat; conversely, National won the party vote in the West Coast and the old Port Hills seats but lost both contests to Labour.
Fast forward to 2023, and 60,000 was about 2% of the overall party votes cast across New Zealand.
The 2017 election was so finely balanced that just 1% of the vote shifting — let alone 2% — would have made quite the difference to the final allocation of seats.
In a looming election likely to be decided on narrow margins, the South Island looks highly relevant.
You don’t need to take my word for it — the actions of the major parties speak volumes.
