It was easy for election night commentators to use the ‘landslide’ trope to describe Labour’s winning of the 2020 election. But the historical record suggests that such landslides may not last long.
In 1935, the First (Savage-Fraser) Labour Government won 53 seats in a parliament of 80; National won 19. However, the whopping margin was a consequence of fragmentation among right-wing parties in a Front Runner election. Although they collectively won fewer votes than Labour, the vicissitudes of the electoral system could have meant that had the right been united it would have won more seats. The real ‘landslide’ was in 1938 when, faced with a united right, Labour won 55.8 percent (up almost 10 percentage points on three years earlier) of the vote. In the interim it had demonstrated it could govern credibly; it also offered guaranteed prices to dairy farmers, universal social security and won the hearts of Maori.
Labour won the 1941 election (comfortably, especially if you allow for the splinter Democratic Soldiers Party) but 1946 was a narrower win, relying on the Maori seats. After 14 years in government it lost ...
By a landslide in 1949 in which the First (Holland-Holyoake) National Government won 46 out of 80 seats. It increased the number in 1951 on a lower turnout after the Waterfront Dispute, squeezed through the 1954 election as Social Credit split the opposition, and lost by the slimmest of margins in 1957 (39-41), to a Labour Party led by a tired, vain, old man, which nonetheless did some good things.
And so 1960 was another landslide of 46 seats. The Second (Holyoake-Marshall) National Government, then won the 1963 election, and the 1966 election – it was said against the odds, an industrial dispute intervening – and lost ....
To a landslide in 1972 when the Third (Kirk-Rowling) Labour Government won 55 out of 87 seats. On the day after the election, Norman Kirk promised "New Zealand is in for a long period of stability. It will be a long-term government.' At the next election night in 1975, his successor – big Norm had died – conceded defeat ...
To a landslide when the Third (Muldoon-Muldoon) National Government, reversed the 1972 election result by winning 55 seats. Muldoon then went on to lose the 1978 and 1981 elections on the popular vote, but he was just ahead on electoral seats – the vagaries of front runner elections confounding Labour this time. In 1984 he reluctantly conceded victory ....
To a landslide when the Fourth (Lange-Douglas) Labour Government won 56 out of 95 seats. In 1987 it increased its seats to 57, but in 1990 the now shambolic government was defeated ...
By a landslide in which the Fourth (Bolger-Birch) National Government won (a record) 67 seats of a total of 97. Yet it would have lost three years later in 1993, except that left voting was fragmented between Labour and the Alliance. In 1996, the first MMP election, National won more seats than Labour by 44 to 37 out of 120, but had to rely on a coalition with New Zealand First to govern. In 1999 the (now Shipley-Creech) National Government was defeated ....
By a left landslide in which the Labour Party won 49 seats (out of 120) and formed a coalition with the Alliance which won ten seats and the Greens which won seven. The ‘Fifth’ (Clark-Cullen) Labour-led Government again won another ‘landslide’ in 2002 with 59 seats – National won only 27 seats (fewer than 2020) – but Labour still had to form a coalition government. In 2005 it squeaked in. National led by Donald Brash could have formed a government with the Maori Party but they were angry with his treatment of Maori issues, and sat the trimester out. However, in 2008, a straggly Labour-led coalition government was defeated ...
By a landslide in which the Fifth (Key-English) National Government won 58 seats against Labour’s 43. It won again in 2011 and 2014 – not uncomfortably. (An important factor in the National triumph may have been the internecine warfare between factions within the Labour Opposition.)
The Key-English electoral achievement was more like that of the National Governments of the 1950s and 1960s, or even Peter Fraser’s of the 1940s (although there was not then the struggle of maintaining a coalition).
By 2017 we might have assumed things to have settled down again. In that election Labour won only 46 seats to National’s 56 seats, but it formed a coalition government by adding New Zealand First and the Greens.
Does the landslide of the 2020 election represent a new phenomenon or a deviation from the return to the normalcy of the 1938 to 1966 and 1999 to 2017 periods? It is really too early to tell,
What I learned from this review of our history is that there is no certainty that Labour will ‘win’ the 2023 election. Or that Jacinda Ardern will lead a ‘glorious decade’ of leftish innovation. (A lesson from history is that after three terms she is likely to be exhausted – even bored – and move on; Neve will be nine.)
Humility is important. There is a story of some boys playing in Parliament Grounds asking an older distinguished gentleman whether he had a job in there – pointing to the building. ‘It’s a temporary one’, said our longest-serving postwar prime minister.
But there was a second lesson from this review. However you count the governments – there have been 18 prime ministers since 1935 (excluding acting ones) – the majority did not leave stunning changes in the direction New Zealand was moving nor did they accelerate the movement much. I would list as exceptions the Savage-Fraser Government and the Lange-Douglas Government. Kirk I would add for his redirection of foreign affairs and Holland-Holyoake for shifting the economy back towards the market.
I am not saying that good things never happened; the portfolio is outside my expertise but I am struck by an extraordinary number of progressive Ministers of Justice – not all of them, of course. Generally, economic policy has struggled with technological changes and the shocks impacting on the economy rather than having a ministry in charge of what was happening.
Preparing this column I got to thinking about physical landslides, and recalled the Abbotsford one in 1979. It caused a furore at the time; today you drive past on your way from the Airport into Dunedin and hardly notice it.