A snap Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll on the Labour Leadership was done on Thursday and Friday. ,The full report is online here. 

There’s been a couple of other polls done in the last 24 hours on the Labour leadership, but with respect the others have asked sub-optimal questions. Just asking who you want to be the next leader is interesting, but not insightful.

We asked, for each of the candidates, whether their leadership would make people more or less likely to vote for Labour. And also broke that down by who they voted for last time. This is about establishing electability. This is what Labour MPs want to know.

The poll shows a huge variance in electability between the candidates . Amongst 2020 Labour voters, one candidate increases Labour’s appeal by a net +22% while `It is very clear that Chris Hipkins is the best choice for Labour. I was somewhat surprised by how negative sentiment is towards Michael Wood. Hipkins net impact on 2020 Labour voters is +22% while Wood is -14%.

Also of potential interest are views on what policies voters want the new PM to scrap. The short answer, is lots of them! This is a reminder that it wasn’t so much Jacinda Ardern who was unpopular, but her policies!

A great analysis of the problems of Labour’s compulsory unemployment insurance proposal by Michael Fletcher. Fletcher is no right winger but a VUW academic and former economist for the Federation of Labour.

He states:

The scheme is huge, costing an estimated $3.5 billion each year. Administration of the scheme alone is estimated at $500 million per annum. This bill is to be funded by a 1.39 percent tax increase on wages, matched by an equal levy on employers. As Inland Revenue has advised, most of the employer levy will eventually be passed on to workers via reduced wage increases, reducing strained family incomes by nearly 3 percent in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis. 

A lot of people, including the self-employed, many migrants, and some precarious workers, will not be eligible. For those who are, the scheme sounds generous – anyone who loses their job because of redundancy or illness will qualify for 80 percent of their lost wages for up to six months. That in itself is a problem because it sets up a two-tier welfare system with higher rates – one might think of it as Koru club welfare for insurance recipients, compared to other beneficiaries in cattle class.

The key thing is that this scheme will take into account current support such as benefits and WFF, so the actual impact on lower income workers who lose their job is minor. Here’s the net increase in income for a single person who lose their job:

• minimum wage – $4,828
• median wage – $6,775
• high earner – $26,416

So a high earner will get five times as much as someone on the minimum wage and four times as much as someone on the median wage.

Now what is the person who loses their job is married and has two kids. Then the income boost is:

• minimum wage – $4,871
• median wage – $8,945
• high earner – $38,896

So here the high earning couple get seven times more than the minimum wage family and four times more than the median wage family.

So every worker will have a 3% drop in their take-home pay, for a scheme that will deliver high benefits to the highest income earners.

On my Patreon (sub needed, have to pay the bills), I analyse all seven potential candidates (as in not ruled out yet) for the Labour Leadership, and make the case for and against each of them.

My conclusion is Labour MPs should elect Chris Hipkins as Leader and Kiri Allan as Deputy Leader, as in that is who I would vote for if I was a Labour MP.

I have charted below favourability data for Jacinda Ardern ranging from the week she became Labour Leader to last week. They tell a very powerful story, that explains a lot. There are three charts – one showing her favourability, one showing her unfavourability and the final one showing the net favourability.

In the few weeks she was Leader of the Opposition, a very high 60% to 70% of New Zealanders had a favourable view of her (incidentally Bill English had comparable numbers – the 2017 election was a rarity in a choice between two very popular leaders).

As Prime Minister her first 15 months saw between 60% and 75% of New Zealanders having a favourable opinion of her. That is massively high, showing even those not voting Labour still liked her massively.

There was a decline in early 2019 to the high 50s but her masterclass handling of the Christchurch mosque massacre rightly saw her favourability go back up to 73%.

After that there was a sustained slide to around 55% at the end of 2019. Now 55% is not as good as 73% but still very good – anything over 50% is an election winning position. There was a small boost in 2019, which saw the White Island eruption tragedy.

Then Covid-19 struck and her favourability soared to an unprecedented 80%. Over the next six months it declined, but still remained massively high at around 65% going into the 2020 election, where she scored a majority Government.

There was a six month gap of polling so we pick up in mid 2021 where she is at 54% and she climbs to 60% in September. Then the big decline starts. Probably not a coincidence that Christopher Luxon became National Leader then, because that gave a more credible alternative. But that is only part of it, as people can like more than one leader.

Over the next six months she fell from around 60% to 50%. That was mainly, I believe, a reaction to continuing Covid-19 restrictions and also a feeling NZers were now overexposed to her. The protests at Parliament occurred late in that period.

Then over the last nine months her favourability fell from 50% top 40%. Any movement of more than 3% is usually significant. This probably reflects the cost of living pressures due to high inflation. Families were struggling, so you don’t think so favourably of the PM.

Also through all this has been what I call a delivery failure by the Government on almost all its major promises such as Kiwibuild, Auckland Light Rail etc. Jacinda was seen as well-meaning but ineffective in delivering. The three major crises of Christchurch, White Island and Covid-19 played to her considerable strengths and without them she may actually have hit 40% earlier than now. The decline in 2019 may have continued on.

This shows what proportion of New Zealanders have an unfavourable view of Jacinda Ardern. One can not have a favourable view but not necessarily have an unfavourable one. So it is significant as to how many people actually will say they don’t like someone, because if they don’t like you they probably can’t be persuaded to vote for your party.

For most of her first 18 months, fewer than 20% of New Zealanders disliked her. As National was polling in the 40s for much of that time, this means that most National voters didn’t dislike her (including me).

There was a slight increase to 22% in March 2019, and then again after Christchurch this declined to just 13%.

2019 then saw a pretty big increase in unfavourability on what was billed by Jacinda as the year of delivery. The slogan became a punching bag, for the lack of. Her unfavourables hit 27% in October 2019, dropped away over summer but back to 26% in early 2020.

The pandemic saw her unfavourables drop to a minuscule 8%. I doubt any democratic leader has ever had a lower number of unfavourables. The nation tuned into the daily 1 pm press conferences to be reassured by her.

Over 2020 the unfavourables rose to around 20%, but that is still massively historically low, especially during an election campaign.

Fast forward to mid 2021 and only a slight increase to 23%. But the latter part of 2021 saw growing resistance to the Covid-19 measures and for the first time in four years, criticism of Ardern was becoming widespread. Prior to then, if you were at a function, it would have been almost unsafe to say a bad word about her, but now anecdotally it was becoming common. Her unfavourables went to 33%.

2022 saw an undulating trend of growing unpopularity, culminating in 41% having an unfavorable view, this month. The cost of living is part of that, but also more and more people feeling the Government has not been transformational or even effective.

Now 41% unfavourability is five times the level she was at just two and a half years ago. But it is also not that high by world standards. Biden and Trump are usually around 55% unfavourable and Liz Truss managed 80%. So it is not that she was unpopular with the majority, but with a very large minority.

The net favourability is the one I refer to the most – the favourables less unfavourables. It combines the other two.

She spent the first two years at between +40% and +60% which is massive. John Key never got quite that high (but he sustained his much longer – when he retired after eight years he was at +19%).

Just prior to Christchurch she was at +37% and then hit +60%. From there the net rating fell to +30% in late 2019. Covid-19 saw it go from +30% (which is still a great rating) to +72% which is the sort of level George W Bush had after 9/11. In a disaster patriotism trumps politics.

By the 2020 election she was at +42%, much the same as in the 2017 election. A strong position after one term, and up against the third National leader in six months, hence a massive win.

By mid 2021 she was at +30%. This fell to +15% in late 2021 and then top a bit to +22% in early 2022.

2022 saw the net favourability decline to +4% mid year, rebound to +12% and then a gradual decline until she hit -1% in the Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll released today (taken 10 to 16 January).

So a brilliantly gifted communicator who was at +40% for many years, soared to +80% in early to mid 2020 and then a massive fall to -1% at the beginning of election year.

Comparisons can be made to both George W Bush and Winston Churchill. Bush remained popular for quite a few years after the 9/11 attacks, but he was also undone by a poor economy. Churchill saves the UK and the world from Hitler, but lost office because people don’t vote on gratitude for the past, but their hope for a better future.

Having failed to deliver so much in five years, it was proving harder and harder to excite people about what a third term for Jacinda Ardern would mean as almost every issue they got elected on in 2017 (housing, health, mental health, education) has got worse or is in a state of crisis. A third term for Janda would mean at best signing off a business case for Auckland Light Rail, when they had promised construction would be complete. It shouldn’t take nine years to develop a business case for a core promise.

I will write elsewhere on Jacinda’s legacy – the highs and low. This post is more about the data – charting her rise and fall with the public of New Zealand.

The Taxpayers’ Union Curia poll asks every month what NZers think of the significant party leaders. From time to time we also ask about other politicians. The data above is the results for ten senior Labour MPs (one nor retired). You can see in which month we asked about them.

The only Labour MP who had had a positive net favourability (just) is Chris Hopkins who was at +1% in July 22. Next closest is Andrew Little at -6% in December 2021. Note that this was before Labour started to tank in the polls so is probably lower today.

Megan Woods a year ago was at -13% and Grant Robertson just last month was -15%.

After that you have Kelvin Davis at -18%, Stuart Nash -29%, Nanaia Mahuta -31%, Willie Jackson -32%, Photo Williams -38% and Trevor Mallard 10 months ago at -54%.

This data suggests Chris Hopkins is the logical choice for Labour. But it isn’t quite as simple as that. Firstly the data is six months old, and also a new Prime Minister will have an opportunity to win more people over, whomever they are.

I analyse on my Patreon (sub needed) why Jacinda resigned as Prime Minister.

Jacinda Ardern has announced she will resign as Prime Minister next month.

The full thread is quite fascinating. To go from No 390 to No 1 is huge. More startling is the batting average which went from 15 to 124. Take that Don Bradman!

Christopher Luxon has announced some minor changes:

• Chris Bishop picks up Urban Development and RMA Reform, while Michael Woodhouse picks up Shadow Leader of the House.
• Louise Upston adds Family Violence Prevention to her portfolios.
• Judith Collins takes on the new roles of Foreign Direct Investment and Digitising Government.
• Todd Muller is confirmed as the Agriculture spokesperson, and also takes on the Climate Change portfolio.
• Todd McClay picks up the new Hunting and Fishing portfolio.
• Penny Simmonds takes on the new portfolio of Workforce Planning.
• New Hamilton West MP Tama Potaka picks up the Māori Development and Associate Housing portfolios, with a focus on social housing.

The Herald reports:

From April 1 to December 31, 2022, the total amount of fees received was over $105.1m.

The total amount of rebates paid out was over $203.3m over the same period.

It’s important to remember that the ute tax and electric car subsidy will not reduce our level of greenhouse gas emissions. Transport is in the ETS, so the scheme will merely reduce the cost of emissions permits in other sectors, as transport will consume fewer.

The scheme is meant to be self-funding, but it isn’t. So either taxpayers have to make up the difference, or they will have to double the level of the ute tax, to break even.

So the ute tax may double from up to $5,000 to be up to $10,000. All to subsidise new `Tesla owners!

Simon Wilson writes:

We face a choice between what could be the most progressive Government in our lifetimes, or the most reactionary.

To put that another way, the best Government yet, or the worst. You can decide which is which.

So Simon thinks a Luxon/Willis/Seymour Government would be worse than Muldoon and a third term for Jacinda with the Greens would be the best Government ever.

Nice Kool-aid.

This is the first of several posts about Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and his authorising of key journalists to publish findings after their examination of Twitter’s files and email communication records to make public Twitter’s various methods used to constrain and even ban the free speech of mostly conservative account holders.

Twitter is perhaps the highest profile of all the giant social media companies. Whilst it is easily dwarfed by Facebook and even Instagram in terms of sheer numbers of Followers and does not host the volume of watchable content that You Tube does, Twitter’s power to shape public opinion more than any other social media platform comes from the type of people who are on Twitter; that is opinion leaders in the world of politics, media, entertainment and sport. Twitter is a site where the great debates of the age and the most important political and current affairs matters are quickly and vigourously aired. Anyone of any substance is on Twitter: politicians, prominent reporters, media companies, large corporations, influential intellectuals, think tanks, government agencies, sports stars, actors/singers/celebrities and writers. Twitter is where important narratives about the big political and social events are shaped and driven. A narrative forms first on Twitter and then is echoed by the large opinion leading mainstream media outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, major broadcast networks, NPR, Fox , CNN, MSNC and outside the US; the UK’s The Times, Daily Mail, BBC, Sky News, Australia’s ABC and major metro dailies, Canada’s CBC and mainstream newspapers and in NZ; TVNZ, RNZ, NZ Herald and Stuff.

Twitter, like all social and regular media companies, always suffered from a liberal bias. With its headquarters in San Francisco and hiring the brightest but mostly progressive woke engineers and programmers, quickly a liberal oriented group think coalesced amongst management matching that found in the editorial rooms of all but Fox News in the wider mainstream media. When Donald Trump burst on the scene, his pugnacious, combative, take-no-prisoners and fight-his-corner style was tailor made for Twitter and Trump took to the medium with gusto and would easily engage in flame wars with his political rivals across both major parties and with many prominent left leaning journalists and garnered a huge following.

Twitter’s influence over the public square came sharply into focus as the Covid pandemic spread. It enthusiastically endorsed the various draconian measures taken to try and curb the spread of the virus and willingly encouraged and supported the various government health experts and administrators globally as lockdowns unfolded and mask mandates and other measures were enacted with varying degrees of severity depending on the country, state or province. As medical and other skeptics of the tactics used began to emerge, Twitter, along with other social and mainstream media companies, actively began to shape and control content through a variety of control mechanisms that included: shadow banning, de-monetising, adding warning tags for what their fact checkers deemed as misleading information, limiting reach via an inability to Like, re-Tweet, comment or forward offending Tweets through to suspensions and outright bans. Several doctors were early outspoken critics of the pandemic control measures including Stanford University scientist Jay Bhattacharya who was one of early drivers of the Great Barrington Declaration (a joint letter opposing lockdowns eventually signed by over 800,000 doctors and scientists), as well as renown Dallas, TX cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough (an early pioneer in effective non-vaccine Covid treatments), mRNA co-inventor Dr Robert Malone, Cameroon – American Physician Dr. Stella Immanuel (an outspoken proponent of successful treatment of Covid with Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine) and a host of other doctors and commentators all over the world who were all progressively subjected to the suite of controls Twitter could impose and most were ultimately removed from the platform.

In the run up to the 2020 election, Twitter began to restrict the content and reach of prominent conservatives such as Dan Bongino (former Secret Service agent and prominent TV/cable commentator), James O’Keefe (Founder of Project Veritas, an undercover journalism outfit exposing liberal excesses) and Charlie Kirk (Founder of Turning Point USA, the US’s premier conservative school/university outreach programme) along with a myriad of smaller accounts of conservative leaning contributors. Of course, the most high-profile conservative person restricted on Twitter was President Donald Trump himself whose tweets began to be restricted in May of 2020 when he commented that mail-in ballots were rife with fraud. Because of mainstream media reporting of the events of January 6, 2021 and the role MSM deemed Trump to have played in the protests, on January 8^th Trump was removed from Twitter for supposedly promoting violence and he was permanently banned a few weeks later.

In early 2022, tech billionaire, and Tesla and SpaceX founder, Elon Musk began to talk about how Twitter’s moderation policies were restricting freedom of speech and that bot activity was skewering debate. In January 2022 he began buying shares and by early April, he had acquired just over 9% of the stock making him the single largest shareholder. For this he was offered a seat on the Twitter Board which Musk initially accepted but then later declined. On April 14^th Musk made an unconditional offer of $44 billion to buy Twitter which was initially met with some hostility from the Board who opted for a ‘poison pill’ strategy treating Musk’s approach as effectively a hostile takeover but eventually the offer was accepted by the Board on April 25^th.

Musk began due diligence and in July, he announced his intention to terminate the offer due to his research unearthing more spam bots than the 5% Twitter had disclosed to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in their most recent filings required by all US publicly listed companies. Bot activity has relevance to the placement rates sold to advertisers as the rates are based on the number of views linked to the percentage of accounts that are actual real people. For instance, if bot activity was say 25% (as some of those advising Musk had estimated) rather than less than 5%, then the incoming advertising revenue would be slashed as the rates would have to be adjusted to match the actual true number of eyeballs viewing Tweets on the platform. Twitter’s Board then sued Musk for non-compliance of the sale contract and a trial was set down for October 17, 2022. A few weeks before the trial, Musk indicated he would proceed with the purchase and the sale settled on October 27^th.

Musk took the company private and fired the entire Board, CEO and other key executives and began the process of firing almost 50% of the total staff of 7,500. Other staff resigned either in protest over his stated intention to ease the strict moderation policies that had largely targeted conservatives or over the his demand that almost all employees return to full time work at the office. A good percentage of Twitter employees had relocated to less expensive cities and/or worked from home and yet enjoyed the high Bay Area salaries needed to attract staff to such a high-cost city. Gradually Musk began to restore the accounts of many of the conservatives (including former President Trump) and Covid/vaccine narrative critics that had been suspended or banned. He dispensed with the blue check mark system designed for exclusivity of higher profile accounts whose profile and market presence could be verified in favour of a monthly fee payable by anyone who applied. Musk courted controversy when he suspended the accounts of a number of prominent journalists who he accused of doxxing his family by linking to the banned account of a young college student who accessed confidential and public information about the whereabouts of Musk’s private jet. This activity had led to someone threatening Musk’s teenage son whilst driving.

As part of his takeover of Twitter, Musk promised greater transparency around Twitter’s moderation policies, and he agreed to allow selected journalists into Twitter headquarters to examine Twitter’s files and internal communications around their controversial moderation decisions. Elon cleverly chose several mostly left leaning (or former left leaning) but fair-minded journalists used to investigative reporting, many of whom had been hostile to Donald Trump, to go over the records and produce Twitter threads reporting on their findings. They are:

* Matt Taibbi – left leaning former Russia based journalist then political writer for Rolling Stone Magazine and long-time critic of conservatives but a more recent critic of cancel culture and skewered and politicised journalism. He also runs a popular Substack and freelances on a number of topics on modern culture.

* Bari Weiss – left leaning journalist who quit her political writer’s job at the NY Times in 2020 due to her belief that the NYT was caving to Twitter mobs who criticized her for not woke and left enough coverage. She now runs her own Substack and is Editor of The Free Press.

* Alex Berenson – former NY Times investigative and financial journalist then novelist, Berenson wrote a book opposing marijuana legalisation and was an early critic of the pandemic response writing a book called Pandemia and regularly covers Covid and vaccine harm related issues on his Substack.

* Michael Shellenberger – a mostly environmental journalist, author and supporter of nuclear power as the fastest and cleanest way to a green environment and a Time magazine “Hero of the Environment”.

* Lee Fang – a left leaning reporter and investigative journalist and blogger formally of left leaning Think Progress and The Nation and then at The Intercept. Seen as fair and balanced, he provoked a Twitter firestorm for reporting black fear about crime from a George Floyd memorial. Also prominent on Substack.

* David Zweig – a left leaning freelance journalist and author who has published in liberal publications such as the NY Times, The New Yorker and The Atlantic. He has published articles asking probing questions on Covid related matters.

To date there have been 15 Twitter File releases each one authored by one of the above journalists. I will cover a summary of the non-Covid related Twitter Files in Part 2, and I will do a Part 3 once all the various Covid related Twitter File releases have concluded as this aspect of Musk’s disclosures has only just begun.

An interesting article citing eight reasons why Ron DeSantis won Florida with a huge 20% margin. The summary is:

1. Stay on offence
2. You can create your own majority with the right approach
3. Competence matters
4. You don’t necessarily have to move to the center to win over independents
5. You can redraw the political map without pandering
6. Create a culture where wokeness cannot thrive.
7. Deliver a policy-driven approach that works.
8. Court the moms.

No 3 is especially important.

Stuff reports:

The use of thin asphalt for resurfacing roads has almost doubled since 2018, which ACT says shows the Government is doing more road resurfacing jobs “that aren’t built to last”. …

Greenwood said the question for road users was if they were willing to pay more in order to fund an increase in road maintenance.

“Fundamentally, it comes down to a discussion of service levels – road users can’t expect a five-star service if they are only willing to pay for a three-star service. The potholes of this past winter are a good means of adding to that discussion of what is acceptable, and what isn’t”.

If all of the money paid my motorists was spent on roads, then it would be fair enough to say we need to pay more, to fix the potholes. But it isn’t.

The 2023/24 planned spend for the National Land Transport Fund is $4.9 billion of which only $2.6 billion is marked for roads. So barely 50% of petrol taxes and road user charges go on roads.

I don’t advocate the spend on roads should be 100% of the NLTF, but it should be say at least 80%.

Stuff reports:

Business confidence has sunk to its lowest level since the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research began surveying sentiment in 1970, on a seasonally adjusted basis, the research firm says.

NZIER said its latest quarterly survey of business opinion made for grim reading, with a net 73% of businesses expecting conditions to worsen over the coming months.

This means business confidence is lower today than it was during the oil crisis of the 1970s, the sharemarket crash of the 1980s, the Asian Financial Crisis of the 1990s, the GFC of the 2000s and the Covid pandemic.

It might even be lower than during the Suez crisis of the 1950s or the Great Depression of the 1930s, but the data series only goes back to 1970!

Stuff reports:

An empty Wellington building cost taxpayers nearly $2.4 million over four months.

The Ministry of Education closed its head office in May last year, after an engineering report rated it to be at 25% of the New Building Standard (NBS) due to its concrete floors. More than 1000 staff members worked in the building. 

In answering questions from National education spokesperson Erica Stanford, Education Minister Chris Hipkins said the Ministry “continues to honour the lease and pay ongoing operating costs for the building which include rent, insurance, energy, cleaning, maintenance, and security for the building”.

Why are taxpayers still paying $500,000 a month for a building deemed too dangerous to occupy?

Surely the Government didn’t sign a lease that doesn’t have an exclusion for earthquake safety?

This data is very interesting to me.

First of all it shows the average UK voter has become slightly more left leaning since 2006.

Tony Blair was seen as very centrist (and the only UK Leader to win an election since 1974).

David Cameron won in 2010. Both he and Gordon Brown were seen as fairly moderate, and Cameron partially won on time for a change in 2010

Miliband was seen as more left than Brown and they lost in 2015.

Corbyn was seen as so far left that Boris Johnson won easily in 2019 despite Johnson also being seen as not moderate.

Rishi Sunak is seen as around where David Cameron is, but Keir Starmer is seen as more centrist and closer to the median voter. I expect him in 2024 to become the first UK Labour leader since Blair to win.

Two interesting facts in these charts. The first is that retail thefts have gone from around 2,000 to 6,000 which is a tripling since 2018 (and was steady before that).

The second is that less than 8% of retail thefts have resulted in court action. This probably explains why retail crime is out of control – no consequences for the criminals involved.