Labour has settled on the three words it will put on every hoarding between now and polling day. The party unveiled its 2026 campaign slogan, “Better starts now”, at a suburban home in Christchurch on Monday, with the first billboards going up behind the leader as he spoke. Voters go to the polls on Saturday 7 November, which leaves a little over ten weeks of formal campaigning.
“Labour’s campaign obviously kicks up a gear today,” leader Chris Hipkins told RNZ’s Midday Report. “We’ll have signs going up all over the country over the next two weeks and we’ve got more policy announcements to come.”
He put the slogan in the simplest terms he could. “My message to Kiwis is pretty clear – better is possible, and better starts as soon as we change the government.”
The launch came a day after a poll that Labour would rather not have had. The RNZ-Reid Research poll released on Sunday morning had Labour down 1.8 points to its lowest result since the 2023 election, and put the Opportunity Party on 5.3 percent and in the position of deciding who forms the next government. Hipkins’ own preferred prime minister rating fell 2.6 points to 21.3 percent. He still leads Christopher Luxon on that measure, but only by 1.4 points, with the Prime Minister on 19.9 percent. We covered those numbers in full in our report on the Opportunity Party holding the balance of power.
National was quick to turn the slogan back on its author. Campaign manager Simeon Brown said it was “the closest thing to a confession we will ever get from Chris Hipkins, because with 10 weeks until the election, he had better start now”. Brown added that New Zealanders “do not need to imagine Labour’s version of better, because they have already lived it. Six years, $120 billion more debt, new taxes, a cost-of-living crisis, and mortgage rates through the roof.”
Brown also claimed Labour was planning nine new taxes. Hipkins called that untrue, saying the only new tax his party would campaign on was a targeted capital gains tax. “We’ve ruled out all of the other taxes that the National Party are putting in all of their advertising materials,” he said. “And I think the fact that they now are into this post-truth era where they just make things up shows how increasingly desperate they’re looking.”
Behind the slogan sits the more consequential announcement of the weekend. Labour released its fiscal strategy on Sunday, and it runs to six commitments. The party would aim for a surplus in 2029/30, bring net debt down to about 20 percent of GDP over time, hold core Crown expenditure and revenue at around 33 percent of GDP once its capital gains tax is fully in place, set up an independent Parliamentary Budget Office to cost election promises, restore the Reserve Bank’s dual mandate so it must weigh employment alongside price stability, and bring back wellbeing reporting. The commitments are set out on Labour’s own fiscal strategy page.
The surplus promise is doing more work than it first appears, because it turns on which yardstick is used. Labour would go back to the original OBEGAL measure, the operating balance before gains and losses, and drop the OBEGALx variant that Finance Minister Nicola Willis introduced. OBEGALx strips ACC’s deficits out of the total, which flatters the bottom line, and Treasury did not support the change when it was made. RNZ reported at the time that the new measure arrived alongside a bleak set of books.
Hipkins leaned on the pedigree of the older number. “That is the measure that Bill English, Stephen Joyce, Grant Robertson, Michael Cullen, all of them used – what’s called the OBEGAL measure to track whether the government’s in surplus or in deficit,” he said. “We’re going back to that. Nicola Willis couldn’t achieve a surplus using that measure, so made-up her own. We’re not going to do that.”
Finance and economy spokesperson Barbara Edmonds said the plan would balance the books without taking a chainsaw to the things that generate the money in the first place. “Labour will return the books to surplus by 2029/30 and reduce net debt over time but we won’t do that by cutting the foundations of our economy,” she said. She also argued the current record does not support the government’s case. “Under National unemployment is at an 11-year high, business liquidations are up 71 percent, homelessness and KiwiSaver hardship withdrawals are at record levels, and public services are under pressure – that isn’t economic success.”
Edmonds said fuller costings would follow the Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Update, and defended the 20 percent debt target as insurance rather than a number for its own sake. “It allows for buffers for economic shocks,” she said, pointing to the borrowing New Zealand did during the pandemic.
National spent its own Sunday drawing the tax line in the opposite direction, ruling out any new taxes for the coming term. That decision landed badly with Auckland and Queenstown Lakes, both of which had signed regional deals with the government containing a commitment to look at a bed night levy on visitors. We wrote about that fallout when National ruled out a bed tax and a bank tax.
With the Opportunity Party now sitting on the numbers that decide the government, Hipkins was asked whether its MPs could end up in a Labour-led Cabinet. He would not rule it out. “We’re leaving all of those options on the table in terms of what the makeup of a future government could look like. It doesn’t need to look as chaotic as the current government.” He was cooler on Te Pāti Māori, calling Cabinet seats for that party unlikely and noting Labour intends to contest all seven Māori seats. “They need to make sure that they’re focused on what they should be focused on rather than bickering amongst each other.”
Slogans rarely decide elections. But this one tells you what Labour thinks its problem is. “Better starts now” is aimed squarely at voters who are unhappy with how things are going and have not yet decided the alternative is any better. Whether the fiscal strategy released the day before makes that argument stick is the question the next ten weeks will answer.
If you want to see how your own views line up with what the parties are actually promising, our voting tool compares the policies side by side.
What do you make of Labour’s slogan and its fiscal plan? Tell us 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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