John Campbell: Will New Zealanders let the wealthy decide the next government?

Analysis: Enrolment rates are impressively high in Epsom – New Zealand’s richest electorate. But a short 25-minute drive away, John Campbell finds a very different scenario.

On Thursday, Meretuahiahi Molyneux voted for the first time.

Andy Dalton (the cameraman I’m so lucky to work with) and I were were shooting pictures outside a polling booth in Ōtara, when a car pulled up driven by someone about the same age as my son.

The heart is a faithful beast. Everyone that age now makes me feel like a dad.

“Hello.”

“Hello,” said Meretuahiahi Molyneux, grinning at the preposterousness of us being there.

“Are you going in to vote?”

“Yes. It’s my first vote.”

Mere is nineteen. She speaks fluent Te Reo Māori and English. She’s one of those young people whose sense of self sparkles. Her bilingualism must be such an affront to those of us so insecure we paint out the word ‘rāpihi’ on a rubbish bin. That strange, mean, brittle fear, that makes being enriched feel like being diminished.

Anyway, Mere had watched the first Chris v. Chris leaders debate on Tik-Tok, where it was live-streamed, then the excerpts from other debates that had also ended up in her feed. All those promises. All that noise. Some of it had resonated with her and some of it had left her cold.

“But if the party I vote for doesn’t win”, Mere told me, “at least I know I voted.”

“Are your friends voting”?

“Some aren’t. But I worry that most of them aren’t. I tell them you can’t complain if you don’t vote.”

We followed her inside.

(Do you remember your first vote? Mine was 1984. The year David Lange beat Rob Muldoon. The old man who gave us the Springbok Tour – gone. It felt like I had taken part in something magical.)

Meretuahiahi filled out her voting form, taking her time because the ticks are a form of magic. Then she folded it and held it above the ballot box while Andy took her photo.

And then, just like that, she voted.

There were one or two elections in my childhood in which my mum voted Labour and my dad voted National.

They’d get dressed up and off they’d go. Down to the school, or the church hall, or wherever the polling booth was, to do this thing that appeared to be at least as sacred as the church services we still attended. And then, bless them, they’d cancel each other’s votes out.

This was under First Past the Post.

What a dreadful electoral system FPP was. Worse than Hawke’s Bay’s Ranfurly Shield upkeep, with way less white powder. You’d get one vote, for an electorate MP, often some gormless dullard who’d managed to win the support of the local Party hierarchy with a pavlova made by his (sic) wife. And that was it. The party with the most electorates won, even if they had fewer votes. In 1978, Labour received 10,000 more votes than National, but got eleven fewer seats. It was batshit crazy.

Anyway, my mum and dad could have stayed at home. There was no List, no Party Vote, no proportionately, nothing but mum’s local dullard v. dad’s local dullard, with an inevitable one – all draw. But they voted anyway, because voting matters.

I believe this.

Very much.

Which is why my final column of this election campaign is asking you to do one thing – vote.

Be like Mum and Dad.

Be like Meretuahiahi.

Vote.

“We do not have government by the majority”, Thomas Jefferson said. “We have government by the majority who participate.”

Who participates?

We can guess the answer.

Participants are more likely to be middle-aged or older than young, they’re more likely to be in households with higher income than lower, and they’re more likely to be engaged by a process which they recognise as being about them.

This isn’t unique to us. Nor is this country’s voting rate as bad as many others’. But we could be better. And if we were, we’d better reflect the aspirations of the people who are most likely to be excluded from power, and who therefore have the most to gain from greater access to it.

“The promise of democracy rests on the premise that citizens participate in the democratic process and that they participate equally”, wrote Armin Schäfer and Hanna Schwander, in a paper published online by the Cambridge University Press, in 2019.

But, and this bit is critical...

“We find a consistently negative effect of income inequality on (voter) turnout… We find that turnout declines for all income groups in unequal countries but particularly strongly for low-income groups… The idea that inequality mobilizes the poor to greater political activism because ‘more is at stake’ clearly does not have any empirical grounding… This is a worrisome finding for the fight against inequality and poverty.”

We’re seeing that this election. In which inequality and poverty, as I’ve complained repeatedly in these columns over the past few weeks, have not much been in view at all.

Instead, it’s been Chris v. Chris, in a scrap for the centre, or the middle, or the floating voter, or the floater, or whoever the emptiness and banality of National and Labour’s non-campaign has been aimed at.

All that ardour, so little art.

I wrote about it here. And reading it back, I fear I was too kind.

National thundered on about tax cuts, which were non-existent for beneficiaries, almost non-existent for those on the minimum wage, a boon to landlords (but not, probably, for their tenants, which is such a profoundly revealing prioritisation), and a moderately impactful windfall for, wait for it, the 3000 families who would receive the much touted maximum of $250 per fortnight.

If you’re going to the country screaming TAX CUTS, and it’s a “look over here” routine, designed entirely to distract people from the fact that the rest of your policy offering is reheated leftovers from the last Key government, minus that special JK barbeque sauce, it’s best to offer the $250 per fortnight to more than 3000 families.

Although not so much dystopian as low-hope-ian, it felt a little like the lottery in George Orwell’s 1984. “Winston had nothing to do with the Lottery, which was managed by the Ministry of Plenty, but he was aware (indeed everyone in the party was aware) that the prizes were largely imaginary. Only small sums were actually paid out, the winners of the big prizes being non-existent persons.”

“The Ministry of Plenty”. Yes, Chris. Yes, Nicola.

A “scam,” Labour called it.

"Christopher Luxon will say anything to get elected,” said Grant Robertson. (Maybe it was National’s “nuclear free moment”?) “And that includes misleading New Zealanders about the size of their tax cuts.”

If only Labour had said anything much at all.

It’s one thing to mislead people, it’s another thing to campaign with such risk aversion, timidity and hollow centrism that the enduring image of Labour’s leader this election has been filling his gob with sausage rolls. (Did Labour’s focus groups consist entirely of people from Bakels?)

Anyway, as I wrote last week, addressing poverty is the loser here. And if addressing poverty is the loser, poor people are less likely to vote.

And young poor people are the least likely to vote of all.

Which is a disaster.

Nationwide, in New Zealand, 66 percent of 18-to-24 year olds are enrolled to vote. Somewhere in the region of 100 percent of people aged over 70 are enrolled.

But it’s when we reach into those figures that we can see how youth enrolment mirrors the findings from the Cambridge University Press paper we saw before.

Take Epsom, for example, which is the electorate with the highest number of households with a total income of over $150,000.

Eighty-five percent of 18-to-24 year olds have enrolled to vote in Epsom. That’s a remarkable number.

Let’s compare it with Māngere and Panmure-Ōtāhuhu (previously Manukau East). Those two electorates are neighbours – separated from Epsom only by the Maungakiekie electorate, which straddles the southern motorway between the city and south Auckland.

Like Epsom, the Māngere and Panmure-Ōtāhuhu electorates are number one in a few metrics, but almost all at the other end of the socio-economic scale.

Between them, they have the most dwellings containing three or more families. The most dwellings with eight or more residents. The most people aged 15-plus with income below $5000. The most people with no source of income at all. The most people “looking after an ill/disabled household member” unpaid. The most homes with patches of mould “over A4 size – always". The most homes that are “always damp”. The most homes with “no access to telecommunication systems”. And the most homes with no “access to basic amenities“.

Remember, in Epsom the enrolment rate for 18-to-24 year olds is 85 percent.

In Panmure – Ōtāhuhu, it’s 51 percent. And in Māngere it’s even lower. There, 46 percent of 18-to-24 years olds are enrolled to vote.

This is terrible.

And it’s in the same city.

From the shops in the centre of the Māngere electorate to the Newmarket shops in Epsom, it’s just a 25-minute drive. You sit on State Highway 20, merging with the traffic from the airport, becoming almost stationary over Māngere Bridge, then turning right as the houses begin to increase in value, heading north, towards the country’s flashiest Westfield mall, with its Alexander McQueen, and its Balenciaga, and its Burberry.

Eighty-five percent in Epsom, 46 percent in Māngere.

And will those 85 percent voting to address poverty?

Lewa Tanidrala is sitting in the sunshine with her friends, having lunch.

We have come to M.I.T. in Manukau, near a Westfield mall that does not have Alexander McQueen, Burberry and Balenciaga, and we have found ourselves parked beside the ATC Military Prep kids, outside NZSE College.

Lewa is 20. She wants to join the New Zealand Defence Force and is here to make that happen.

I ask her if she’s enrolled. “No”.

I ask her if she plans to vote. She thinks she should but she isn’t sure she will.

Her friends are the same. Here are young people with sufficient ambition and determination to be doing “military-style training” to get them where they dream of being. But they have no real sense that voting is for them.

We talk about how Lewa doesn’t see reflections of herself in politics. And how it feels like politicians don’t see her.

We sometimes think of not voting as a kind of apathy. But Lewa isn’t apathetic. She’s full of drive. She reminds me, instead, of the young people I met in Hamilton, in August, when I first started writing about this election campaign.

There are things in this job you don’t forget. One was when I asked 21-year- old midwifery student, Qdezjah, what she wanted from politicians?

“Just listening to, and understanding, people,” she answered, immediately, as if she’d been waiting for someone to ask her. “I know they go on about wanting what’s best for the people, but they don’t necessarily listen to our people cry.”

Two months later, Lewa is reminding me of Qdezjah.

Whatever will happen will only happen because of them. They have no sense that politicians see them, or hear them, or even really notice that they’re there.

Politics is another country.

I don’t know where they came from, but as I was writing this, those mournful lines of T.S. Eliot dragged their way into my mind: “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.”

If Lewa doesn’t vote, what do we lose?

Absences are hard to define, but in America, where voter turnout is often so very low, they’ve attempted to do exactly that.

“Why Voting Matters” is the headline of this fascinating piece of work by Sean McElwee, which finds, “large disparities in turnout benefit the donor class".

“Low-income non-voters are significantly more likely to support increasing aid to the poor…” They’re significantly more likely to support “a strong role for government in guaranteeing jobs and living standards”.

In short, they’re significantly more likely to support policies which would make a difference to their lives.

And if they don’t vote?

Spend a minute or two, if you have the time, running your cursor over the map of the USA in this.

And then consider what the Report attached to it tells us. “Low-income people vote about 20 percentage points lower than higher income voters.”

But, and this is such an extraordinary but,“If these potential low-income voters had voted at a similar voting rate as higher income voters in the 2016 election, then they would match or exceed the presidential election margin of victory in 15 states.” That’s the states in orange on the map. Texas, Florida, Arizona, Georgia, Tennessee, Missouri, Illinois… The states that made Trump president. All of them had low-income non-voting rates, relative to high-income non-voting rates, greater than Trump’s majority.

And what happens when those low-income non-voters turn out?

This answers that.

“In 2008, for instance, 57.1 percent of the voting-age population cast ballots – the highest level in four decades – as Barack Obama became the first African American elected president… But two years later, only 36.9 percent voted in the midterm election that put the House back in Republican hands. For Obama’s re-election in 2012, turnout rebounded to 53.7 percent.”

Voting matters.

Which is why the people who really want power do it.

And why, as I wrote a fortnight ago, really wealthy people donate to political parties.

In January 2009, I went to Barack Obama’s inauguration. (This story is leading somewhere, I promise.)

We were accredited and had seats on the bleachers – beside CNN, the BBC, and all the famous media companies and agencies. You name them, they were there.

It was a dream spot – a lottery win, in TV terms. But they were all going live-to-air in real time, and we were shooting for Campbell Live, which was screening hours later.

And so that we didn’t simply repeat the same shot as everyone else, we did something mad – and left our spot in the official camera area and walked along Pennsylvania Avenue to stand amongst the people.

This is where life intervenes.

We didn’t have accreditation to stand amongst the people, we only had it for the bleachers. And Phil Johnson, our camera operator, was carrying what was probably a camera but may have been a weapon of some description. And security was so tight that no-one with anything remotely suspicious was getting anywhere near the front of that crowd, to stand street-side as the President and Michelle Obama made their way down Pennsylvania Avenue, from the Capitol to the White House, and into history.

At first we were turned away.

By this stage, Barack Obama was approaching. We could hear the marching bands in front of him, leading him in our direction. And it was too late to get back to the bleachers. And I had this moment of blinding panic. So we begged to be let in. Begged.

And for reasons I will never understand, a man whose sole purpose was to protect the new President by keeping people with large and foreign objects out, let us through.

And because this was pre-Trump America, and the TV camera was not yet emblematic of an establishment people felt estranged from, and even hated, the crowds parted to let us to the front. The very front.

And there we were. Right amongst the people, as Barack and Michelle did something extraordinary, and got out of their Presidential car and walked, right in front of us.

And the people around us, who had waited many hours, and a lifetime, to be there, were witnessing something incredible. A Black man, becoming President.

People wept. A woman beside us, cried so hard her nose began running too, and as she wiped her face with her sleeve, more tears came, and mucus-tears. And she sobbed.

And it was then we really comprehended that nearly everyone around us was elderly and black. And what they were seeing had once, in their lifetime, been so unimaginable that being there to witness it must have felt like a miraculous thing. Something good beyond all odds. Something that makes you realise your dreams were not foolish at all.

That’s why you vote.

Because one day, one day, if you vote, and people like you vote, and if you try hard enough to encourage others to vote, and if you never give up, even against odds as insurmountable as racism, segregation, and the more discrete villainy of voter suppression, someone who looks like you may finally win.

One day.

And if that seems glib. Ask the people on Pennsylvania Avenue on January 20th, 2009.

We had met Meretuahiahi Molyneux and we were leaving Ōtara when we saw Julian Hafoka.

Julian was wearing a Moana Pasifika jacket. (What’s not to like about that?) And we said hello. Julian is 24. He’s a physiotherapist, having studied at AUT, and he sometimes works with the Moana Pasifika players. This is his third election.

“Mum forced me to vote in the first one”, he laughed. (He was only 18 then.) “Then my sister and I went and voted together last election.”

And now, here he is, a veteran of democracy.

Julian is greeted at the polling station like he matters, because he does. (I love this sense of voting feeling particular and special. And every polling station worker who manages to make voters feel that way, thank you.)

And then, empty booths spread out beside him, he fills out his voting form.

Tick. Tick.

Like Meretuahiahi, Julian worries that lots of young people may not vote. He worries about what that means. “Everyone deserves a voice”, he says. “Everyone.”

And then Julian Hafoka walks over to the ballot box, smiles, spends a second or two thinking about the small piece of magic he’s about to do, and drops in his vote.