Tova O’Brien: Biggest political plays of the year

ANALYSIS: Tova O’Brien is Stuff’s Chief Political Correspondent and host of the weekly political podcast, Tova. It was hard picking, but she counts down the top five political plays of the year.

Number 5: Debate delirium

Some of the hand-down high points of any campaign season are the political debates. If you want to see serious high-octane political plays on full display delivered with machine gun intensity, then the leaders’ debates are must-watch.

Policy on the hoof, bangers, zingers, flops – the debates have it all.

Debates are a one-stop shop where you can scoop up policy commitments political leaders have to that point been reticent to address or non-committal to adopt.

You want the bowel cancer screening age dropped? You got it. Menopause leave? Absolutely. Kids out of poverty? More police? A charities tax? You got it, it’s yours.

Most of these things will probably be reneged on or kicked to touch in government, but in the moment, in the heat of the debate, when the promises are flowing so freely, democracy is palpable. See they do really listen to us, we the people!

Watching the leaders forced to think on their feet, to divulge more about who they are as people, probably doesn’t feel like a power play for them as they scramble to answer truthfully and also in a way that will focus group well. But for voters, it can help fill in the gaps for our ultimate triennial political power play – who we choose to give our ticks to on election day.

Is it the guy who bought his first home at 24-years-old or the guy who bought his first home at 24-years-old? Is it the guy who spends $60 a week on shopping or the guy who spends $300-400? Is it the guy who constantly interjects or the guy who tells the other to “calm down”? The guy who hasn’t taken MDMA or the guy who also hasn’t? Is it the guy called Chris or the guy called Christopher?

The biggest political play of all three leaders’ debates, however, goes to Chris Hipkins. Upon being challenged by Christopher Luxon over the poor management of his Cabinet, Hipkins threw down. “I think people in glass houses shouldn’t be throwing stones. None of my MPs beat someone up with a bed leg.” Mic dropped, jaws dropped.

The reference was to National MP Sam Uffindell beating a student up while at boarding school with a bed leg (Uffindell admitted the beating but said he didn’t recall the bed leg, though couldn’t rule it out).

The reception to Hipkins’ power play was mixed. Some saw it as the Labour leader bringing the spice he’d been so sorely missing on the campaign, others saw it as a low blow that crossed the line by a mile.

The power of protest

The first tip off dropped into my DMs on the evening of 29 November, “Don’t Fuck With our Whakapapa”, the message read, “Next Tuesday, 5 December 2023 at 7:00am. We are planning the largest Māori protest in our history”.

What followed was a few days of utter confusion as no one in Te Pāti Māori – or anyone else for that matter – would publicly take credit or confirm what was going on and who was attending.

Eventually the Te Pāti Māori co-leaders took to the gram to lock in support for the protest action and six days after that first message dropped, it was on.

It definitely wasn’t “the largest Māori protest in our history” but for a hastily organised, often confused, hustle, the thousands that attended around the country were testament to the strength of the Māori movement and how quickly and vociferously it could mobilise in the face of government policies they consider anti-Māori.

The short notice and befuddlement only served to make this massive political power play even more effective. If this is what could be wrangled in under a week with no discernable early leadership, what would it look like with a bit more time and organisation?

We’ll no doubt find out next year with Te Pāti Māori promising that this was just the first of “many activations” to come.

An extra honourable mention here too for Te Pāti Māori. It wasn’t so much a political play as a tikanga play when, at parliament’s swearing in ceremony, the party’s MPs pledged their allegiance first to Te Tiriti before King Charles.

The high stakes rule in, rule out game

Clearly frustrated with Christopher Luxon dilly dallying on a decision and refusing to be drawn when he was asked daily whether he’d work with Winston Peters, David Seymour took matters into his own hands.

When asked by Stuff on the 2nd of August if he categorically ruled out working with Peters after the election, Seymour replied, “Yeah, look, it’s impossible to see us sitting around the Cabinet table.”

This wasn’t an off the cuff, on the hoof, spur of the moment, riff off the top of his dome-type decision. This was something Seymour and his team had long debated. It was calculated and considered.

A mega political play. One for the ages. Seymour was giving off big opposition leader energy.

That was until the actual leader of the Opposition undid all his hard work.

Luxon breathed life and oxygen into Peters’ campaign when he released a slickly produced social media video finally addressing the question he’d been saying wasn’t worth addressing because a) NZ First wasn’t polling high enough b) he was focused on securing votes for National and c) those conversations were way too premature and not to be thrashed out in the media.

On social media, however, Luxon finally conceded he would pick up the blower to Peters if need be.

But Luxon and National appeared to almost immediately suffer from a case of political power play remorse. Spending the subsequent days and weeks trying to convince voters Peters would only get the phone call as a last resort and that National’s extreme preference was to form a government with ACT and ACT alone.

National campaign chair Chris Bishop went so far as to casually drop the “very real and growing possibility” of a second election if Peters was in the mix and they couldn’t get a deal done.

But it was too late. Peters was back – and Luxon had sealed the deal.

Will Luxon regret it? That depends on how the rest of the term shakes down but for now, well, he’s prime minister. So there.

Political sacrifice

Putting the party above the personal gets a big tick in the ideological good book of politics so Jacinda Ardern throwing her Prime Ministership onto the sacrificial altar in an attempt to reverse Labour’s waning fortunes was one of the biggest political plays not just of 2023 but in Aotearoa’s political history.

Ardern went from adorned to abhorred in record time. The country’s shift from “she saved us all from Covid!” to pitchforks and torches was ugly and cruel in a way that history will not judge kindly.

Fight the policies, fight the party, insist on accountable leadership – sure – but angry lynch mobs brandishing a noose on parliament’s lawn, personal attacks, death threats, misogyny and violent imagery directed at any person is vile.

Ardern will, rightly, never say it was what drove her out and we should hope it wasn’t the underlying reason, but there was no doubt her Government’s later handling of Covid, the life-altering lockdowns particularly for Auckland, and a failure to properly communicate and get the public on board with a contentious policy agenda was plummeting Labour into the dumps.

So on 19 January, when Ardern blindsided much of the country, and the world, with her shock decision to resign, she was putting her party ahead of herself. For someone for whom popularity and personal perception means a great deal, this was no mean feat.

And it worked. For a minute.

Chris Hipkins, the anointed one, bolstered Ardern’s political play with an offering to the sacrificial altar himself. Hurling all or part of the previous administration’s fraught policies onto the bonfire.

It also worked. For a minute.

The polls went up but what goes up…

Hipkins and Labour weren’t able to whitewash history or the raw memories of centre-New Zealand. The rest is history.

Peak Peters power play

While there were bigger, more meaningful political plays in 2023 (see above) nothing can beat the maestro, the great coalition conductor. Winston Peters wielding his baton and gesturing as an orchestra of MPs yielded to his every move.

And of all the political plays that Peters peppered throughout the agonisingly long coalition negotiations, which sealed him an astonishingly bountiful coalition agreement, it was the ghosting of the then Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and David Seymour that takes the cake.

Chipper and assured Luxon arrived at Wellington airport on 14 November, buoyed by the expectation that this would be the day the first three-way meeting between his prospective coalition partners would be held. A government imminent, by George, he’d nearly done it.

Seymour dutifully arrived in Wellington that morning too, having also flown from Auckland.

Then the waiting began. Followed by the head-scratching as each arriving flight failed to deliver the unmistakable swagger and silhouette of ‘that hair’ and ‘those suits’.

The sources who had been drip feeding tid bits to journalists during the negotiations ran dry, the coalition confusion ran electric in the beltway breeze.

Winston Peters was a no-show.

But that wasn’t even the start of the biggest political play of 2023.

If Luxon and Seymour wanted their meeting, it was they, not he, who would have to board the flight of shame.

And so they did. On the very same day, just twelve hours after arriving in Wellington, tails tucked between legs, the leaders of the two biggest parties in the coalition traipsed back to Auckland where ‘that chuckle’ was waiting.