"If Labour wins next year, and it may well win, don’t expect much to change. The party has made that abundantly clear during the weekend. It’s just hoping voters don’t notice until after the ballots are counted." Bryce Edwards writes that the Labour Party is offering New Zealand something that looks remarkably like National-lite.
THE LABOUR PARTY faithful gathered in Auckland this past weekend for their annual conference, and for any progressives watching from outside the hall, there were two possible reactions. If you’re excited by the prospect of a change of government next year, then you’ll be buoyed by what you saw. If you’re excited by the prospect of progressive change actually occurring under that new government, you might well have your head in your hands.
Because the Labour Party conference of 2025 was above all a success in the narrow, tactical sense. The mood was positive. The polls are encouraging. The money is apparently flowing in. Record numbers of members attended. And Chris Hipkins looks like a man who genuinely believes he could become Prime Minister again by the end of next year.
But scratch beneath the surface of all the Annie Crummer disco dancing and Berlin-rave atmospherics, and what do you find? A party that has thoroughly internalised the lessons of its 2023 defeat, not by resolving to be bolder, but by resolving to be blander. A party that has decided the path back to power runs directly through the fiscal settings of its opponents. A party that, when you strip away the laser beams and smoke machines, is offering New Zealand something that looks remarkably like National-lite.
The real story of this conference wasn’t Hipkins, despite his set-piece speech on Sunday. It was finance spokesperson Barbara Edmonds. Her Saturday address set the tone for everything that followed. And it was a tone of almost aggressive moderation. Balanced budgets. Fiscal responsibility. Treating taxpayer money like her own. “We can’t say yes to everything”, she told delegates, in what became a refrain of the weekend.
This is the sound of expectations being managed downward at industrial scale.
THE EDMONDS MESSAGE
The various political commentators covering the conference picked up on this immediately. Luke Malpass in the Post observed that Edmonds used her speech to pursue two major themes: fiscal responsibility and investment in the economy. She told party members she wouldn’t be saying yes to everything, that every dollar of taxpayer money needed to be treated as her own, and that she would be balancing budgets. Her job, she said, wouldn’t be “to redistribute what currently exists — it’s to grow” the economy. That’s not a progressive vision. That’s a conservative talking point dressed in a red rosette.
Bernard Hickey was blunt in his assessment today. Labour’s leadership has been “careful to sign up again to the bipartisan fiscal compact of ‘balancing the books’ and ‘fiscal responsibility’ above all else,” he wrote, describing it as “effectively adopting a ‘low target’ strategy Labour hopes will get them across the line”.
Hickey isn’t buying it. “In my view, it’s not possible to invest enough in infrastructure without higher taxes, preferably on wealth, a larger Government, and larger gross public debt per capita, especially with an ageing and sickening population.” Both Labour and National, he notes, have committed to keeping government debt at or below 30% of GDP. Both have believed private investment could substitute for public investment, creating various public-private partnership mechanisms that haven’t worked because “they were too complicated, risky and expensive for private investors.” Hipkins and Edmonds said nothing to change that over the weekend.
In other words, for all the talk of doing things differently, Labour is accepting the fundamental fiscal framework of the current government. It will tinker at the edges. It will make some targeted changes, mostly in health. But the architecture of austerity remains intact.
THE BRITISH LABOUR PROBLEM
The sharpest critique came from Chris Trotter at Interest.co.nz, who painted a devastating portrait of what Edmonds represents. She has been “inspired”, he writes, not by the democratic-socialist victory of Zohran Mamdani in New York, but by Britain’s Labour Party. “Barbara Edmonds, like Sir Keir Starmer’s equally timorous Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, is not seeking to manage her nation’s economy in the name of the people, but for the benefit of the markets.”
And unlike Reeves, Trotter adds, Edmonds doesn’t even have to worry about leftwing MPs keeping her honest. “In any shape or form recognisable to the New Zealand socialists who led Labour to victory in 1935, there are none.”
Trotter has done the arithmetic on what Labour is actually proposing, and the numbers don’t add up. Labour’s commitment to restoring the pay equity claims extinguished by the current coalition (estimated at around $13 billion) coupled with its climate change obligations (somewhere between $2 billion and $5 billion) means an incoming Labour government would need to find at least $15 billion before it does anything else. “That would be a very tall order,” he writes, “even if the incoming Labour-led government was committed to lifting the rates of existing taxes and introducing a comprehensive array of new ones, which it most emphatically is not”.
Those who hoped that Labour’s thin capital gains tax might be the beginning of a broader tax conversation can stop hoping. According to Thomas Coughlan of the Herald, fiscal and monetary mavericks within the party “feel marginalised within Labour — and people on both sides of the debate agree they are right to feel that way.”
THE MAMDANI MIRAGE
Speaking of Mamdani, one of the stranger features of this conference was its aesthetic borrowing from his successful New York mayoral campaign. According to the Herald’s Thomas Coughlan, the posters delegates were waving, with their bold colours and drop-shadow capitals, were directly lifted from Mamdani’s branding. There were signs reading “good jobs,” “affordable homes,” and “free doctors visits” — straight from the New York playbook.
Henry Cooke and Luke Malpass put it well: “Yet despite borrowing the design style of New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani for the posters the party faithful were waving at Hipkins, the new policy he had to offer on Sunday was far less ambitious than anything Mamdani would put his name to.” The big announcement? Low-interest loans to help 50 GPs a year set up their own practices. It’s hard to see this being a policy that defines much of the campaign.
WHAT LABOUR WON'T TALK ABOUT
Tim Murphy at Newsroom highlighted another striking feature of this conference: what Labour has chosen to simply not discuss: “No room in his set-piece speech for education (just the occasional mention of the word ‘teachers’ in passing), no reference to climate change, no Te Tiriti, no child poverty, no law and order or justice, no identity politics.” Instead, the new pitch is: “jobs, health, homes”.
The absence of climate policy is particularly odd given how much ground the current coalition has given up on environmental issues. Murphy speculates that perhaps “the retreat from climate measures here and overseas isn’t polling badly for the other side, that saving the planet has been tarnished with ‘woke’.” Which, if true, suggests Labour is making its peace with that rather than contesting it.
On Crown-Maori relations, Hipkins was similarly silent. Murphy argues that the rolling back of court rulings and legal provisions hard-won by Maori over decades would normally demand attention from a Labour leader. Instead, he says the only direct connection to te ao Maori in the speech was in the opening and closing greetings.
When Hipkins was asked whether Maori sovereignty would be Labour policy, he answered by reframing it as tino rangatiratanga or self-determination for everyone in New Zealand. This is a neat rhetorical sidestep that dilutes the concept beyond recognition. It recasts Maori sovereignty as something safely universal rather than specifically Maori.
THE DIAGNOSIS WITHOUT THE PRESCRIPTION
Thomas Coughlan’s column in the Herald is probably the most incisive piece of analysis to emerge from the conference. His central point is that Labour knows exactly what’s wrong with New Zealand, but it just can’t bring itself to propose serious solutions.
“The problem is simple,” Coughlan writes, summarising Labour’s diagnosis. “The economy isn’t working. There aren’t enough jobs, those jobs don’t pay enough, and everything is too expensive. In Labour’s telling, the Government has been captured by corporate interests, most spectacularly the tobacco industry. Instead of fixing creating jobs, the coalition is cutting taxes and rewriting regulations in the interests of its friends and donors. It is a Government with its hand wedged firmly in an ever-diminishing till.”
It’s a sharp analysis of crony capitalism and regulatory capture (even if Coughlan or Labour wouldn’t use those terms). And Labour is onto something here. Coughlan points out that recent polling shows an electorate “essentially saying everything was broken and they had no faith in the coalition to fix it.”
But here’s the problem: Labour can diagnose the disease, but it won’t prescribe serious medicine. Coughlan puts it bluntly: “Where things get challenging for Labour is that the party cannot decide what kind of party it wants to be to solve these problems.”
The party wants to revive jobs for life and locally-owned GP clinics, but it would “baulk at the taxes and economic controls necessary to bring them back.” It attacks the selling-off of state assets but “doesn’t seem to want the higher-tax, higher-debt fiscal settings required if Labour were to keep the assets while continuing to fund the capital investment their rumoured sale is meant to pay for.” It wants Ardern-style values-led politics “but it doesn’t want to be the high-debt, high-tax mid-century-style Labour Party it would need to be to pay for it.”
The result? “It has mid-century ambitions for public services, spending, and the role of the state, but a 21st-century approach to revenue”. This is another retelling of the general problem of New Zealand politicians who all seem to want New Zealand to have a Scandinavian-style welfare state, but Singaporean-style low taxes.
THE LEFT WING VIEW
The most pointed criticism from the left came from blogger Steven Cowan, who argued after the weekend that “Labour will campaign next year merely as the party better able to manage the market economy. That is not an inspiring vision of transformation, but a lacklustre promise of technocratic stewardship.”
Cowan calls it what it is: “the politics of managerialism dressed up as pragmatism,” which “leaves untouched the structures of inequality that have hollowed out New Zealand’s social fabric.”
During the weekend, the Council of Trade Unions called for nationalising the energy industry, and Edmonds dismissed it with the line that a Labour government “could not say yes to everything”. Cowan found this revealing: “This was not a serious engagement with the demand for public ownership, nor an acknowledgement of the crisis in energy affordability and climate responsibility. It was a reflexive defence of the status quo.”
CTU president Sandra Grey’s speech to the conference, telling delegates to “give workers a reason to vote for you” and calling for courage and change in “the economic, industrial and social order”, appears to have fallen on deaf ears. Chris Trotter was right: if Grey believes her challenge is going to fall on anything other than deaf ears, “clearly, she has not been paying attention.”
WILLING TO DO WHATEVER IT TAKES
Perhaps the most honest assessment came from Luke Malpass, who observed that “if this conference is anything to go on, Hipkins Labour has accepted” that it lost in 2023 “because of their ideas and governing ability, rather than the public being misled by the other party.”
The conference showed a party “prepared to do what it takes to win”, including “telling supporters and everyone else that they won’t be trying to promise loads of vague abstract things”. This is a recognition “of tossing aside at least some of the things that voters rejected at the last election.”
But what does that willingness to win actually mean in practice? It means accepting National’s fiscal settings. It means refusing to commit to progressive tax reform. It means distancing itself from Jacinda Ardern. Tellingly, the conference merchandise featured Michael Joseph Savage and David Lange on the tea towels, not the party’s most recent Prime Minister.
And it means managing expectations so aggressively that victory becomes its own reward, regardless of what that victory actually delivers.
CONCLUSION
As we head into election year, New Zealanders increasingly look set to face a choice between two versions of centrist managerialism: one that already holds power and one that wants it back. The current National-led coalition has been captured by vested interests, from the tobacco industry to property speculators. Labour’s counter-offer is apparently not to challenge that capture at its roots, but to be slightly nicer administrators of the same basic framework.
Richard Harman summarised the fundamental challenge Labour now faces: “How does it balance the aspirations of its members and supporters with the reality of presenting itself as a credible government?” But this framing assumes those aspirations are somehow unrealistic or politically impossible. In truth, Labour has simply decided they’re inconvenient.
For those of us who track issues of integrity, power, and democratic accountability, this conference was instructive. A party that once built state housing and nationalised key industries now, in Cowan’s words, “recoils at the very idea of challenging private capital.” It promises competence without courage, management without transformation.
If Labour wins next year, and it may well win, don’t expect much to change. The party has made that abundantly clear during the weekend. It’s just hoping voters don’t notice until after the ballots are counted.
This article was first published by The Democracy Project. Dr Bryce Edwards is Director of The Democracy Project.
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