Labour’s MPs, candidates and party faithful have gathered in Wellington this weekend for the party’s annual conference, the last big set-piece before the 7 November general election and a chance, in the words of leader Chris Hipkins, to get everyone “fired up” for the campaign ahead.
The two-day conference opened on Saturday with speeches from party president Jill Day, deputy leader Carmel Sepuloni and finance spokesperson Barbara Edmonds, before Hipkins takes the stage on Sunday to close the gathering and, by his own admission, unveil a fresh policy. Asked what that announcement would be, the Labour leader was not giving anything away. “You’ll just have to wait and see,” he told reporters.
Hipkins framed the conference as the moment Labour shifts into full campaign mode. “We’ll get our members all fired up, we’ll be talking about the campaign ahead,” he said, adding that the weekend would showcase the party’s new candidates and move Labour “onto the election year footing.” With just over four months until polling day, the message from the top is that the party is done warming up.
The gathering comes at an awkward moment in the polls. The latest 1 News Verian survey put Labour on 32 percent, a five point drop that wiped out much of the lead the party had built over the summer. Both Labour and National are now sitting at levels that, for the two big parties, are historically low. Yet on the same numbers the wider left bloc of Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori would still have enough seats to form a government, which is the figure Hipkins and his team are keen to keep front of mind. A drop in Labour’s own party vote is less alarming for the leadership if the combined opposition still outnumbers the governing parties.
Labour has spent recent weeks rolling out the building blocks of its platform rather than saving everything for the campaign. The party has promised free doctor visits, free prescriptions, free cervical screening and free maternity scans, a suite of health pledges it says would be paid for by a capital gains tax. It has also floated a $20 weekly cap on public transport fares, a Future Fund to invest in long term assets, and a Crown guarantee to underwrite social bonds for community housing providers. Taken together the announcements sketch out a campaign built around the cost of living and access to health care, the two areas where Labour believes the coalition is most exposed.
The capital gains tax sits at the centre of that pitch and is also its biggest political risk. Labour has tried and failed to land a capital gains tax before, and the party knows the government will spend the campaign warning voters that the policy is a tax grab dressed up as a health plan. By tying the revenue directly to popular and easily understood promises like free GP visits, Labour is betting that voters will judge the tax by what it buys rather than by the principle of the thing.
The conference is as much about mood as it is about policy. After the heavy defeat of 2023, Labour has spent this term rebuilding its organisation, selecting candidates and trying to give members a reason to believe the party can do something no Labour opposition has managed in modern times, which is to turn a one term government out of office. Conferences are where that belief is either fed or starved, and the leadership clearly wants delegates leaving Wellington convinced the election is winnable rather than resigned to another term in opposition.
For Hipkins personally the weekend is a test of his grip on the party. He has talked this term about stamping his own mark on Labour and about asking the party to be disciplined about what it promises, a quieter and more targeted approach than the sprawling agenda Labour carried into its last term in government. Not everyone in the party loves that restraint, and conferences have a habit of surfacing the tensions between a leadership that wants to look fiscally careful and a membership that wants bold commitments. How those tensions play out on the floor this weekend will say a lot about how united Labour heads into the campaign.
The governing parties, for their part, have spent the past fortnight pushing their own agenda through Parliament, from the India free trade deal and the charter schools shake-up to changes to the conservation laws, and they will be watching the Labour conference for any policy they can attack. The contrast the coalition wants to draw is between a government getting things done and an opposition promising to spend money it would have to raise through new taxes. Labour wants the contrast to be between a government it says has run out of ideas and a party ready to fix the health system and ease the squeeze on household budgets.
With the election now firmly in view, voters who want to work out where the parties actually stand can compare the policies for themselves using Newswire’s voting tool, which lines up the major parties on the issues that decide elections.
You can read RNZ’s coverage of the conference here.
What do you make of Labour’s pitch for the election? Is the party fired up or running out of steam? Have your say in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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