Labour Campaign Chair Says Left-Right Vote Splitting Strategies ‘Completely Different’

Labour’s campaign chair Kieran McAnulty says his
preference for governing arrangements is to have as few
parties as possible.

He was speaking to Morning
Report after Tuesday
night’s 1News-Verian poll, which had the two major
parties in the high 20s.

“Absolutely, a three-party
coalition I think would be most New Zealanders’ preference
in the current environment, but look there’s no doubt that
Opportunity have dropped from previous polls but there’s
nothing to suggest that they’re not going to get back in,”
he said.

If it did, Opportunity would make history as
the first party to enter Parliament without having won an
electorate or having candidates who have been the House
before.

But that presumes it collects over 5 percent
of the party vote – and having dropped one point to 6
percent in the poll, its chances of doing so are under
threat.

McAnulty said despite things moving around in
the poll, “not much actually changed”.

With Te Pāti
Māori and some right-leaning voters backing campaigns to
engineer an overhang, McAnulty said “I’m not sure many
people would be overly stoked about it on either side” of
politics if that was to determine the election
outcome.

“But at the end of the day, those are the
rules that we’ve got and people are trying to use them to
their advantage. But let’s be really clear the only reason
there … appears to be a reasonably well funded campaign on
the right is because they’re worried they’re going to lose
the government and they should be.”

He suggested that
was different to the left bloc.

“Māori Party doing it
by themselves without any funding is a completely different
story. We don’t support that. We’re not supporting an
overhang, we’re not campaigning for it, we don’t have big
funders trying to convince them, Māori Party are asking for
a particular type of voting – that’s completely different to
these massive websites and billboards and advertisers that
we’re seeing from the right.”

Although big funders
have proposed a candidate-only strategy, National has
explicitly rejected the strategy and consistently called for
“two ticks blue”.

That’s the case even in Epsom where
ACT leader David Seymour has previously enjoyed a
“cup-of-tea” deal where National has urged voters to pick
him as their electorate MP – but with his own job on the
line, National frontbencher Paul Goldsmith is urging voters
not to do so this time.

Both ACT and NZ First – which
would reap increased party votes from the one-tick strategy,
at National list MPs’ expense – have endorsed the
idea.

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