VOTE LABOUR FOR A LABOUR-NATIONAL ALLIANCE!

This week Labour leader Chris Hipkins signalled that Labour's priority is not to challenge National but to work with it. 

 

NEW ZEALAND is heading toward yet another grim general election, and the mood of the country reflects it. After years of economic stagnation, rising hardship, and a political class that seems incapable of imagining anything beyond the narrow confines of the market, voters are once again being told that their only choice is between two parties who differ more in tone than in substance. The economic status quo has failed working people, yet Labour’s pitch is not to overturn it, challenge it, or even question it. Instead, Labour is offering to 'manage' the same failing system slightly better than National. That is the full extent of its ambition.

This week, Labour leader Chris Hipkins made that reality even clearer. Hipkins openly floated the idea of forging a bipartisan arrangement with National after the election. His words were revealing: 'So what I’m offering now … is a very competitive election campaign but then an ability to say, ‘Okay, the election result has been delivered, the voters have had their say, for the next few years let’s work together to figure out how to actually move forward.'

There it is, laid out plainly. No talk of offering an economic alternative. No recognition that the neoliberal framework of the past four decades is the source of the crisis. No willingness to confront the structural failures that have produced soaring inequality, a cost-of-living crisis, and a generation locked out of secure housing. Instead, Hipkins is signalling that Labour’s priority is not to challenge National but to work with it. The message to voters is unmistakable: a vote for Labour is a vote for a Labour–National alliance in everything but name.

This is extraordinary even by Labour’s standards. For years the party has drifted steadily rightward, shedding any pretence of being a vehicle for transformative change. But Hipkins’ comments mark a new stage in that evolution. Or should that be devolution? Labour is no longer simply timid or risk-averse; it is now openly positioning itself as a partner to National in the management of the very system that is immiserating its own base. The differences between the two parties on economic policy have shrunk to the point of near-irrelevance. What separates them is not ideology but emphasis: Labour promises to feel your pain while National promises to ignore it. But both promise to keep the system exactly as it is.

This leaves voters with a bleak choice. On the one hand, a National Party committed to deepening the market-driven policies that have already failed. On the other, a Labour Party that has abandoned even the pretence of offering an alternative. The result is a political landscape in which the major parties are converging, not diverging. And Hipkins’ bipartisan overture only accelerates that convergence. If Labour is already signalling its willingness to work hand-in-glove with National, then what exactly is the point of voting Labour at all?

This also exposes, in the starkest possible terms, the failure of the Green Party’s election strategy. For years the Greens have tied themselves to Labour, insisting that their influence within a Labour-led government is the best path to progressive change. But if Labour is now openly contemplating cooperation with National, where does that leave the Greens? If Labour is willing to work with National, then by extension the Greens—who have tethered themselves to Labour—could find themselves indirectly propping up a Labour–National arrangement. Is that what Chloe Swarbrick and her colleagues intend to tell voters on the campaign trail? That a vote for the Greens could end up supporting a government that includes National?

The Greens have spent years insisting that their role is to 'pull Labour left.' But Labour has made it abundantly clear that it has no intention of being pulled anywhere. It is not being dragged to the right; it is sprinting there. And the Greens, by refusing to break with Labour or articulate an independent political identity, have trapped themselves in a position where their fate is tied to a party that has abandoned the very idea of systemic change.

The tragedy is that the country is crying out for an alternative. People know the system is broken. They know that tinkering around the edges will not fix the housing crisis, the cost-of-living crisis, or the climate crisis. They know that the political establishment has run out of ideas. Yet the parties that claim to represent progressive politics are offering nothing but more of the same. Labour is promising to manage the crisis; the Greens are promising to manage Labour.

And so we head into an election where the political imagination is narrower than ever. Where the major parties differ only in rhetoric. Where the prospect of a Labour–National alliance is floated as a sensible, even responsible, option. And voters are told that real change is impossible, unrealistic, or undesirable. It is a politics of resignation, not hope.

If Labour wants to campaign on being the better manager of a broken system, that is its choice. But voters deserve to know what that choice really means. A vote for Labour is increasingly indistinguishable from a vote for National. And if Labour is already preparing to work with National after the election, then the slogan writes itself: vote Labour for a Labour–National alliance.