SUMMER READS: In this extract from his memoir, former deputy prime minister Grant Robertson remembers the tense days after the 2017 election, as he and then Labour leader Jacinda Ardern twisted in the wind, while Winston Peters pondered over which party to select as his coaltion government partner.
National had polled just under 46%. They were going to need both ACT and New Zealand First to be able to govern, but they were in the box seat.
As the results became clear, Jacinda called me. She felt she had let people down. She had written a couple of versions of her speech and was preparing to deliver what sounded to me like a concession. I counselled her against it. We knew that in the latter stages of the campaign we had enrolled a large number of voters who had cast special votes, and these, along with the votes from overseas where Jacinda had resonated, had not yet been counted. We were not entirely convinced they would make a difference, but it was worth just holding back a little. Besides, it was an incredible result in many ways – we had lifted our vote from the low 20s to the mid-30s in just seven weeks. It was in fact something to celebrate. Jacinda gave the more upbeat version of her speech, and we waited for the final results.
Interestingly, Winston Peters said right away that he was not going to be doing anything until the special votes had been counted. Two weeks later they came in, and we had gained a seat, as had the Greens. National, while still well ahead as the preferred party, had lost two seats, and this created a little room for us.
While the Greens were not an absolute given to be in a formal coalition with Labour, they certainly were not going to go with National. We began our preliminary discussions with them about what an agreement might look like. On the right, David Seymour was on his own as an ACT MP and he was locked in for the Nats. That left, as it has before, Winston Peters in the driver’s seat. And what a ride it would be.
We thought carefully about who we wanted in a negotiating team with New Zealand First. Jacinda, Kelvin as deputy and I as Finance spokesperson represented the Caucus. We also wanted people Winston would relate to. Annette King had a respectful relationship with him and was happy to add her experience to the team. Michael Cullen also joined us in the early stages. Jacinda had already approached former Helen Clark chief press secretary Mike Munro to be her Chief of Staff, and he was added to the team.
New Zealand First booked a meeting room on the second floor of the Beehive, accessible from Parliament House and far enough away from the Executive offices to be seen as neutral ground. They would alternate morning and afternoon meetings with National and Labour.
On the first day we arrived under the full glare of the media. Jacinda brought along a ginger loaf baked by her friend Julia and a copy of the New Zealand First manifesto. The New Zealand First team that day was Winston, his Chief of Staff David Broome, his friend Paul Canard, Ron Mark MP, Tracey Martin MP, and her sister Kirsty who had been a New Zealand First staffer. People came and went on their side, but the pattern set on that first day stayed the same for many days after.
Jacinda noted at the outset that our 100 Day Plan was the core of what we wanted to do, but that we understood that New Zealand First would have priorities too, and we wanted to hear them. Winston spent much of the first meeting talking about the need to do things differently, the state of the global economy and how trickle-down economics had not worked. He then said that he wanted to work through New Zealand First’s manifesto policy area by policy area. And that is what we did. Day after day. We went into some excruciating detail. New Zealand First wanted a New Zealand Jazz Orchestra. They had a problem with rumble strips on roads, and drone regulation. There were also bigger-picture issues, especially about areas like regional development. And there was, thankfully, some common ground too: the need to review defence spending, reform the Reserve Bank Act, ban foreign buyers of existing housing and more. We would eagerly note these areas as common to our view.
Winston, it felt to me, did not seem especially interested, however, in what Labour’s policy might be.
Each day we would mark issues as either agreed, needing more discussion or not agreed. Many issues would fall into the middle category simply because we really didn’t know exactly what New Zealand First wanted, or how what they wanted could be implemented. But the process was respectful and detailed, and seemed to be the discussion that New Zealand First had in mind.
As the days stretched on, nothing was ever given away about how discussions between New Zealand First and National were progressing. One day we arrived early for an afternoon meeting and New Zealand First were not there. There were papers on the table, some with the National Party logo on them. The temptation to pick them up was huge. But Jacinda, ever the responsible one, told us to leave them where they were.
Eventually we ran out of policy to discuss. Jacinda broached the need for us to get the Greens on board with whatever Labour and New Zealand First were agreed on. We had already begun a series of talks with the Greens who had a long list of policies they wanted included in an agreement. Winston made clear that the Greens were for us to deal with. He was negotiating only with us, end of story. This made life difficult and meant that we reduced the number of meetings we had with the Greens on the grounds that there was not a lot of point in going further until we knew more of what Winston wanted.
We decided to bring to what appeared likely to be our last meeting with New Zealand First a summary of the key matters we thought we had agreed across the negotiations. I drafted it with the help of Neale Jones, who had stayed on to work with Jacinda. Winston seemed quite positive when he got the document. He had not asked for it, so it was a risk giving it to him, but he said he would take it away and they would work through it.
The days that followed were random. Every now and then there would be a follow-up to something that was in the document. One of the ideas that had been discussed early on was giving a portion of GST back to the regions for regional development purposes. I was not keen on the idea. I felt that once we started mucking around with GST and its collection, we would lose considerable control of our spending. I also had very limited confidence in some of the local authorities which would end up with a fair amount of cash. We countered with the idea of a significant Regional Development Fund. Shane Jones, now a New Zealand First MP, having left Parliament and Labour in 2014, wanted an amount that would be equivalent to the returned GST, which had been estimated to be around $3 billion a year. There was no way we could do that, but a $3 billion fund across the term of Parliament we could (just) make work. It would be funded by stretching out our debt profile a bit, and by repurposing some other infrastructure funding.
Probably the biggest policy sticking point was immigration. New Zealand First wanted a cap, and changes to various categories. Winston had raised these issues early in the negotiations. Jacinda had held her ground in the room, saying that we were not prepared to set numerical caps. New Zealand First via Shane Jones, who still had friends in the Labour Caucus, pushed and said that this could be a deal breaker. Jacinda would not budge. She was, and is, an internationalist, and this kind of nationalistic politics she judged to be not in line with Labour values. Her resolve was impressive and scary all at once.
Having got some kind of acknowledgement of the policy list from New Zealand First, we could at last go into discussions with the Greens with more intensity. We had a lot more common ground with them, of course, but we were wary of some big-ticket items and some social policy areas that New Zealand First would not back. These would need to be negotiated separately when the time came. One of these was marijuana law reform. The Greens had been thinking about this too, foreseen there might be a problem, and so put forward the idea of a referendum on the issue. They acknowledged this would be a challenge to get through. We nodded sagely – knowing that only a day or two earlier New Zealand First had said that the furthest they could go was a referendum on the issue. Sometimes the strange game of three-handed poker worked well!
Having witnessed just how much distance Winston wanted from the Greens, we became stronger in our belief that rather than trying for a three-way coalition, we would be better off having a confidence and supply agreement with the Greens. This would also give them more freedom to disagree and manage their internal battles. We were clear that there would be ministerial roles for them, and policy agreements, but the formalities of a coalition could be dispensed with. We were grateful that after some consideration the Greens took this view too.
Meantime, Jacinda also met privately with Winston to discuss personnel issues. We had deliberately kept these to the last. As we later learned, National had somewhat crassly put ministerial roles and appointments on the table in the first few days of their discussions. Jacinda came back from those meetings frustrated but resolute. Winston had suggested that all nine of his MPs, including some who had just arrived in Parliament, should get Executive roles. She pushed back, eventually agreeing to four ministerial roles. This was eventually added to with an under-secretary position. We mirrored this in our discussions with the Greens, suggesting three ministerial roles and one under-secretary. Towards the end of the discussions, as we wondered what else to do, we offered Winston the role of Deputy Prime Minister. We knew the risk, and I mused that he might not want to take it up.
The New Zealand First Board began discussing the possible agreements on 16 October, some 23 days after the election. Three days later, word emerged that a decision was imminent. That day we did not hear at all from New Zealand First. We assumed the worst. Surely they would have been in contact to get more details about policies or particular roles? We waited much of the day in our offices. Jacinda fretted that she had been too stubborn. Then sometime after 6pm, TV news coverage switched to footage of Winston making his way to the Beehive Theatrette. We gathered in Jacinda’s office.
Winston began by talking about the need for change in the economy – the very same speech he had started with in our discussions. Jacinda and I shot each other a glance. Could he be about to go with us? Winston meandered for a bit – and then finally announced that the government would be a coalition between New Zealand First and... New Zealand Labour.
We erupted with ecstatic relief. All the hard times of nine long years of Opposition, the disastrous Cunliffe saga, the Hail Mary of Jacinda taking over, came pouring out in the form of tears of joy. We still had the Greens’ Special General Meeting to approve our agreement with them, but their co-leader James Shaw was confident his party would not give up a shot at government.
We had done it.
Now the coast is clear and the case has been won
And we lost our fear that it couldn’t be done
All we needed to find was a like-minded someone
Who had no idea that it couldn’t be done
Extracted from Anything Could Happen: A memoir by Grant Robertson (Allen & Unwin Aotearoa New Zealand, RRP $39.9)
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