On 7 November, New Zealanders will be asked to choose who manages a crisis that none of the major contestants intend to resolve. For three decades, New Zealand capitalism has been run on a strategy of cheap growth, resting on four things: rising land and house prices, low-paid imported labour, deregulated resource extraction and primary industries, and a relatively small, non-interventionist state to oversee it all. That model of cheap growth is now failing, and neither the National-led government coalition nor the Labour-led opposition has anything new to offer.
The New Zealand economy has always grown by adding people, opening up land and borrowing money more than by raising the productivity of existing firms. Economists would call it an economy based on “extensive” growth, meaning adding inputs, rather than doing more with existing inputs (intensive growth). Low wages remove the pressure to invest in better means of production, and rising land values pay better than investing in production. The result is a country where roughly two-thirds of household wealth sits in housing and land, and where productivity grew just 0.2 percent a year in 2019–24, against a still-minuscule 1.3 percent in 2000–08. But extensive growth works only while people and credit keep flowing. Both have dried up. Net migration has fallen from about 134,000 at its 2023 peak to around 20,000, and the average interest on mortgages rose from 2.83 percent in 2021 to 6.33 percent in 2024, taking with it the cheap credit that fed rising house prices. The usual path out of such an economy involves industrial capital making use of the state to keep both rents and wages low through a period of transition, but in New Zealand this never eventuated, and currently seems unlikely.
When an economy based on cheap inputs stalls, and no alternative seems viable, someone has to pay to restart the engine. In the past, coalitions led by both National and Labour have looked to working people to meet the cost, and the result is clear: unemployment is now at 5.6 percent, with 13.8 percent of the labour force unable to get the work it wants and prices up 4.1 percent in the year to June. Prolonged unemployment and under-utilisation of skilled labour will eventually reduce wage costs, and both National and Labour accept this as simple necessity. Both aim to balance the state’s books by 2028/29, mostly through throwing yet more public servants into the pool of the unemployed. Both accept a central bank that disciplines wages through encouraging the same in the private sector. Both protect the massive rents and property values on which the rest of the strategy rests. They differ on how hard, and how fast, to impose further austerity on the working class.
The two parties take turns to form governing coalitions. National takes a hard line against working people and resentments rise, allowing Labour to take over, only to lock in whatever National has done, merely sanding off the roughest edges so as to gain the acquiescence of the unions. Soon enough, fed by the various hypocrisies that beset a Labour-led government, the right gathers the numbers to retake the reins. And so it goes. As we argued last time round, “Support for Labour today means votes for National tomorrow” (“Rearranging the Deckchairs”, 1917 No.48).
New Zealand’s Greens can barely be considered a distinct political force. There are no options open to them other than entering a coalition with Labour, so whatever they “demand” has little significance. The Greens’ apparent leftward turn makes perfect sense when we consider that their current role in the division of labour between the parties is to make sure that even the activist left consents to the cycle of austerity and relief. Waiting in the wings is NZ First, rebuilt on the model of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, offering the only real alternative to the extensive growth strategy: a deeply reactionary one. Given the absence of any party willing to fight for the independent power of the working class, we call for a deliberately spoilt ballot, for a break from Labour and the Greens, and for the building of a revolutionary workers’ party.
National’s Achievements
The National–ACT–New Zealand First government’s record is not just a list of unrelated cruelties, imposed for their own sake. Its programme represents the hard-headed effort of the New Zealand capitalist class to restart the engine of cheap, extensive growth, though pursuing it with such reckless abandon risks provoking a rise in working-class militancy and industrial chaos. Labour appeals to those capitalist donors more aware of the dangers of a pendulum swinging too far, and its job is to present minor adjustments to that programme in terms that are more likely to be accepted by the working class.
Before turning to Labour’s offering, though, we should reflect on just how successful National’s radicalism has been at achieving its goals.
Its first goal was to make the existing pool of labour cheaper. The coalition stripped full employment from the Reserve Bank’s mandate, freeing it to put tackling inflation ahead of jobs. In September, facing the Iran War oil shock, the Bank raised rates again while admitting that high unemployment had already reduced “workers’ bargaining power” (RBNZ, September 2026), making sure the shock was paid for out of wages. Fair Pay Agreements were repealed, 90-day trials extended to every employer and partial-strike deductions restored. Every unsettled pay-equity claim was extinguished under urgency, freeing $12.8 billion for a budget built around a tax break for business investment. Some 64,000 more people are on unemployment benefits than in March 2023, under a sanctions regime designed to push claimants into any job at any wage, while citizens leaving for Australia have been replaced by more than 94,000 migrants on visas that tie them to a single employer.
National’s second goal was to expand the privileges of property owners, and to open up new land and resources for exploitation. Landlords recovered their full tax deduction on mortgage interest, worth an estimated $855 million this year, and the bright-line test on property speculation was cut to two years. The Fast-track Approvals Act lets favoured mines, quarries and developments bypass ordinary processes, the Regulatory Standards Act makes respect for property rights a test that new laws are measured against, and farmers were spared emissions pricing altogether. Meanwhile the state was cut back, from public-service jobs to the subsidised rents of social-housing tenants.
The government certainly succeeded in making working people pay. Real wages, not profits, absorbed the oil shock, the pool of unemployed and cheap labour grew, and landlords got their tax break back. Resistance won only sectional concessions: senior doctors bargained back the dismissal rights that statute had taken from them, while care workers, whose claims were cancelled, had no such leverage. However, none of this has managed to kick-start economic growth, with overall output per person falling 3.2 percent between 2022 and 2025. That failure, and the potential to ignite militant resistance, is what makes a change of management attractive to a section of capital.
Labour’s Proposal
Labour promises to repeal the coalition’s employment law, restore Fair Pay Agreements and pay equity, and return full employment to the Reserve Bank’s mandate. What it will not reverse is more telling. It will keep the landlords’ interest deduction and leave the bright-line test, which taxes gains on homes resold quickly , at two years from purchase. It will cancel National’s tax breaks, but in order to fund its own programme inside National’s surplus target. Its fiscal plan shrinks government spending by 1.8 percent of GDP over four years, closer to ACT’s target than to the Greens’, and party leader Chris Hipkins has said Labour will not reverse the coalition’s restrictions on 18- and 19-year-olds claiming Jobseeker benefits. Pay-equity claims beyond care work are left to “future budgets”(labour.org.nz, 4 October 2026).
This is how Labour locks in the new normal. The last time round, six years of Labour government preserved National’s 2008–17 measures—GST at 15 percent, halving the government contribution to the KiwiSaver retirement scheme, the starting-out wage, the part-sale of the power companies. Labour reversed only what capital could spare: partial-strike deductions, some bargaining rules, charter schools. The one time it moved against property, in 2021, extending the bright-line test and phasing out landlords’ interest deductions, National restored both and Labour now accepts that. Workplace rights swing back and forth with each change of government; but the settlements that matter most to economic growth move only one way. Labour does not halt the rightward movement of New Zealand politics. It is the mechanism by which each turn becomes the starting point for the next—a ratchet that will keep moving ever closer to whatever new low is necessary to restore profitability.
It can play this role because, like other old parties of social democracy, it is a bourgeois workers’ party with a pro-capitalist political programme and leadership that nonetheless rests on the organised workers’ movement (see “Labour’s Bid to Run New Zealand Capitalism”, 1917 No.40). Affiliated unions cast a fifth of the vote for its leader, and in return big unions like E tū campaign for a Labour-led government. Were that all they got, more unions would be asking what affiliation is for. Labour’s flagship offer to them has been the last Labour government’s Fair Pay Agreements Act, which banned strikes over sector bargaining and sent disputes to the Employment Relations Authority. This gave union officials a seat at the table without having to organise the workplaces, and gave industrial peace to the employers. The “left” in both Labour and the unions argued that despite the limitations, FPAs represented a gain that would only be applied in under-unionised sectors unable to secure collective agreements or strike anyway. In practice, this was never put to the test. It was a process resting on statute rather than workers’ strength, and the incoming National-led government repealed it before a single agreement had been concluded. FPAs might well become a football tossed back and forth every election.
Only a party that workers trust can ask them for restraint. In office, Labour faced the first national nurses’ strike in three decades in 2018 and a year later the largest education strike in the country’s history, some 50,000 teachers, and held the line as employer. Out of office, it relies on the union leaderships to channel discontent into its election campaign: the strike wave of 2025, when more than 100,000 public-sector workers walked out on a single day, ended in sector-by-sector settlements and a drive to elect Labour. The same demand has been the be-all and end-all of most strike demonstrations we have attended for the last three years. This is the consent Labour brings to capital: a working class that waits for the next government instead of fighting the present one.
Māori Rights Impede Both Coalitions
Extensive growth in New Zealand has always started by taking land, and all land was first taken from Māori. The era of Treaty settlements did not reverse this. Land can still be appropriated from claimants by taking advantage of conflicting claims, regardless of government (see “Class & Mana at Ihumātao”, 1917 No.42). Where claims to land and authority cannot be ignored or split apart, they are converted into commercial redress held by iwi corporations and trusts, now part of a Māori asset base worth some $126 billion. As we noted in 2023, the settlement process thrust up a petty-bourgeois layer of iwi board members and enterprise managers, while most Māori remain in the working class, where the coalition’s offensive falls hardest (see “Rearranging the Deckchairs”).
Yet overall, the settlement era has led to some progress for many Māori, and Marxists defend any real gains made. A set of collective rights still constrains the use of land, water and resources: Treaty clauses in resource and conservation law, the Waitangi Tribunal, co-governance and Māori wards on the councils. But the National-led coalition has mounted a multi-pronged attack on Māori rights, such as its Fast-track Act. At Waihi, Ngāti Porou ki Hauraki asked for OceanaGold’s mine expansion to be declined; it was approved anyway. Amid a flurry of urgent Treaty claims before the Tribunal, NZ First now proposes abolishing the Tribunal outright.
Labour’s approach to Māori rights over resources and access to services has been to fund corporate bodies to oversee them, and in doing so compromise their defence. Its co-governance policy seated iwi institutions beside councils and boards, giving representatives of the Māori elite a role. This both kept Māori workers away from the democratic questions which affected them and meant that no one was there to push back when the thin layer of Māori bureaucrats was simply disestablished. The Māori health agency, Te Aka Whai Ora, was abolished by the National coalition with a simple Act of Parliament. In general, when the right attacks Māori rights, Labour retreats: the relatively radical He Puapua proposal was disowned after it was leaked, and Three Waters was rebranded around local control. Labour now says restoring Te Aka Whai Ora is not a priority. Each proposal and retreat tied Māori claims, in the public mind, to a Labour establishment resented for the moral hypocrisies inherent in presiding over austerity. This in turn taught ACT and NZ First that attacking the Treaty could be the most effective way of redirecting many Pākehā workers’ grievances into simple chauvinism.
Nor has the nationalist alternative offered Māori workers a way out. Te Pāti Māori (TPM) won six of the seven Māori seats in 2023, then spent the term tearing itself apart. Two MPs were expelled at a meeting held without them; the High Court found Mariameno Kapa-Kingi’s expulsion unlawful, but her reinstatement was in name only, and she has since launched her own party. Both sides of the feud speak for layers of the settlement leadership, and they fought it accordingly: through personal loyalties, closed meetings, accusations of coups and in the courts, while supporters were left to pick sides. The party that led the massive Hīkoi mō te Tiriti to Parliament in 2024 now polls between 1 and 2 percent, having lost most of the Māori working class, who could be about to hand back to Labour the seats that TPM took from it in 2023.
Māori rights are where the illusions in the present parliamentary offerings are weakest. Few seriously think that a Labour coalition will secure more than a partial reversal of the recent deep cuts into Māori rights, given that Chris Hipkins was brought in as leader largely to pull the Labour Māori caucus into line (see “Rearranging the Deckchairs”), and that the party is palpably terrified of issues of autonomy. The defence of Māori rights therefore must come from the street and the workplaces, not from Parliament. The 2024 hīkoi brought some 42,000 people to Parliament’s grounds and helped bury the anti-Māori Treaty Principles Bill, but its energy has been handed back to a TPM leadership consumed by its own quarrels. Māori rights to autonomy must be defended unconditionally against the current coalition and a new Labour coalition alike (see “Māori Rights Under Attack”, 1917 No.49). They can only be secured by a workers’ movement that takes them up as its own, independent of a nationalist leadership whose class interests lie in accommodation with the prevailing order.
Greens & TOP: Dependence & its Alternative
Many on the left who accept all this will vote Green, and on paper the Greens have moved left. Their May 2025 Alternative Budget proposed $24.7 billion in new taxes, including a wealth tax on assets above $2 million, a Guaranteed Minimum Income, 35,000 public homes and government spending of 36.7 percent of GDP—a clean break with the 30 percent ceiling that every party of government has treated as sacred, and that the Greens themselves signed up to in 2017. Eighteen months later, that programme is firmly in the bin. In their new offering, the wealth tax starts at $10 million, new revenue is less than a quarter of the 2025 figure, the Guaranteed Minimum Income is gone, not a dollar is set aside to reverse the coalition’s benefit sanctions, and the books return to surplus by 2029/30, a year later than National’s target. With health spending protected and most of the proposed taxes gone, it stands to reason that to achieve this goal, welfare and every other public service would have to shrink substantially as a share of the economy. The most left-wing party in Parliament is campaigning on austerity with a human face.
The retreat was not demanded by voters, who have lifted the Greens to record polling of 15–16 percent. It was made for Labour. A Green Party whose only route to office runs through a Labour-led coalition has to arrive at the table with a programme Labour can sign. So the Greens compromise in advance, before a vote is cast. Hipkins has dismissed their tax programme in any case: “If we’ve said that we won’t support them, we won’t support them”(LawNews, 1 October 2026). Having ruled out joining a coalition with National, the Greens have nothing to threaten him with. Nor have the Greens taken the opportunity to make any independent stand to the left of Labour. When the Labour-led government dropped the capital gains tax in 2019, the Greens stayed, though the coalition couldn’t have survived without them; in 2020 they signed a cooperation agreement without the wealth tax they had campaigned on. The leftward turn under Chlöe Swarbrick and Marama Davidson has changed the rhetoric, not the relationship.
Why could a popular and ambitious programme be dropped almost overnight? Because nobody outside the leadership could stop it. The Greens are a party of bourgeois humanitarianism: they call on the rich to do their part, and many of their politicians and donors sincerely want them to. But the party has no affiliated unions, no base in the workplace and no working-class organisation to which its MPs must answer. Labour at least has to manage the unions inside it. The Greens answer only to their funders, among them Harmoney shareholder Michael Lookman ($400,000 since 2023) and venture investor Robert Morgan (over $300,000), and to a layer of activists with no means of holding them to anything. A wealth tax that only starts at $10 million is far more likely to appear reasonable to potential donors and coalition partners. What remains is not a party with a programme but a pressure group attached to Labour, whose function in the cycle is to get activists on side for another austerity government. The Greens remain what we called them in 2023, “the graveyard of New Zealand radicalism” (“Rearranging the Deckchairs”).
The bourgeois-technocratic Opportunity Party (TOP) sells itself as the answer to Green dependence on Labour: a party that will deal with either side. Polling 7–8 percent after a sudden influx of donations and media attention, it may well have the power to decide which bloc governs. TOP donors overlap with everyone else’s, from Phillip Mills, who also funds the Greens and Labour, to Brian Cartmell, who has also funded National, ACT and NZ First. Its founding programme is based on increasing productive capital, with, for example, a levy on land to free investment from the drag of landed property, and a Citizen’s Income in place of the welfare system that would top up low wages from the public purse while doing little for those without work. This is the old programme of industrial capital against the landlord, and the only serious proposal in this election to tax the rents which are so integral to the debt-rent-migration model of contemporary New Zealand capitalism.
Yet TOP’s independence is a fiction. Luxon has ruled Opportunity out of a National-led coalition, so its only route to office runs through Hipkins, who has dismissed every new tax proposed by other parties. TOP leader Qiulae Wong has drawn the obvious conclusion and left the land levy off her bottom lines. Already to the right of the Greens, TOP has arrived where they already were: trimming its programme to fit Labour’s limits before a vote is cast.
New Zealand’s Best Attempt at a Hanson
The New Zealand First party of Winston Peters has risen from 6 percent in 2023 to as high as 12 percent this month. A member of both Labour and National governing coalitions in recent years, in this electoral cycle it has remade itself as a party of the culture war, modelled on the successes of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation in Australia or Reform UK. What makes it dangerous is not only Peters’ unerring ability to constitute the most reactionary part of any governing coalition, nor his renewed zeal in attacking trans people and Māori representation, but that it has also put out some policies which genuinely challenge parts of the debt-rent-migration growth model, positioning itself well if the mainstream parties fail in their efforts to revive it. NZ First promises to take on the Australian banks by buying back the Bank of New Zealand, to break up the supermarket duopoly and to end employer-tied migration, along with the “globalist stuff” that Peters tells “forgotten New Zealanders” they are sick of (1News, 16 February 2026). Thus the most reactionary instincts of “middle New Zealand” are tied to a real alternative vision of New Zealand capitalism: a state-owned bank, controlled migration, mining royalties kept in the regions and a 3 percent defence target. This is not the rose-tinted national-developmentalism that one sometimes hears from older social democrats (or the new Alliance party), but the much harder-nosed, reactionary version Peters learned in Robert Muldoon’s National Party.
It is precisely the most unsavoury parts of this vision that make it far more viable as a programme for a New Zealand capitalism beyond the debt-rent-migration economy than mere utopian yearning for the pre-1984 days or TOP’s more technocratic version. It attacks two pillars of the present model, foreign-owned finance and cheap imported labour, while doubling down on proposals to restart accumulation on a national basis through deregulation of primary industries and militarism within the US-led imperialist bloc. A hard national developmentalism also requires a disciplined workforce and a more homogeneous nation to hold it together in place of the old welfare compromise: one defined against Māori through promised abolition of the Waitangi Tribunal and a referendum on the Māori seats.
While this programme may well be taken up by more of the New Zealand ruling class as the present economic consensus fails, NZ First may not be the ultimate vehicle for it. At its campaign launch, the supermarket pledge drew polite applause while the promise to remove fluoride drew wild cheering. Its base comes for the culture war, not the economics. And Peters is far more concerned with getting into government or onto the news than following through with policy. Three years inside the coalition have produced neither a state bank nor a broken duopoly, and NZ First voted with the rest of the government to extinguish the pay-equity claims of care workers, as “forgotten” as any. Most tellingly, NZ First’s donor base is very much the same as that of the other right-wing parties, rather than constituting a distinct wing of capital: Graeme Hart’s Rank Group, which gave NZ First $50,000 last year, has given National $500,000 and ACT $200,000 this year, while Brian Cartmell gave around $200,000 each to all three in 2025. For now, capital treats NZ First as something to keep in its back pocket.
Beyond Parliament, Brian Tamaki’s Destiny network mobilises against migrants and the queer community. As we argued after Jacinda Ardern’s fall, the right is “born out of disillusionment with the gap between Labour’s promises and its results” (“Killing with Kindness”, 1917 No.47). Voting Labour to “oust the right” only delays its next advance. The right has to be met directly, by united action of the workers’ movement, Māori, migrants and the oppressed.
Spoil your Ballot, Break from Labour & the Greens
Suppose Labour wins and forms a government with or without Green/TPM/TOP support. Within a hundred days it will, if it keeps its promise, legislate to restore pay equity and Fair Pay Agreements, and care workers will get a $4-an-hour pay rise. Every other cancelled pay-equity claim will wait on “future Budgets”, inside a $2.4 billion operating allowance and a surplus target set by National. Nurses, teachers and tertiary staff will be told there is no money. When they strike, as nurses and teachers struck against Labour in 2018 and 2019, the left will be told that strikes only help National get back into power.
Meanwhile, the extensive growth consensus overseen by alternating coalitions will go on failing, until working-class wages and conditions are reduced enough for the engine to restart. A Labour-led government will not preside over a recovery but over the next round of austerity. Britain is showing where this leads: a Labour government elected to end Tory austerity instead administered it, and the main beneficiary has been Reform. The ratchet does not stop at National. A left that votes Labour in this election puts its name to the austerity that will discredit it, as Labour hands the next turn of the cycle to Peters, or worse.
The International Socialist Organisation (ISO) argues for voting for Labour, the Greens or TPM (as it does every three years) to secure better conditions for organising (iso.org.nz, 30 September 2026). But it is precisely the faith the working class places in Labour coalitions that can lead to worse conditions. The National-led coalition’s employment law stripped high earners of the right to challenge unjust dismissal; senior doctors won it back through their own collective agreement. Care workers, whose claims rested on a statute rather than on their own organisation, lost everything at the stroke of a pen. Labour’s offer to workers is of the second kind: rights granted by statute, removable by the next statute. Everything beyond that will have to be won the way the doctors won it.
The ballot in 2026 offers no workers’ alternative, even among the micro-groups to the left of the Greens. On paper, the reconstituted Alliance offers more than Labour or the Greens: a 35-hour week without loss of pay, works councils, and a wealth tax from $2 million (the threshold the Greens abandoned). But it breaks neither with Labour nor with capital. Its one affiliated union, the Maritime Union, is “not walking away from the Labour Party” (Spectre, 8 September 2026), and the party has not ruled out serving in a Labour-led government. Its economic programme is an alliance of workers with “productive” capital: industries bought back at fair value, subsidies for manufacturing, “worker directors” on capitalist boards. Corporatist reforms of this kind were how social democracy disarmed workers in the advanced countries ahead of neoliberalism, and capital has had no use for them for half a century. For now, the Alliance is a home for left union officials with political ambitions, and few workers look to it as anything more.
The Socialist Equality Group’s candidate in Hutt South, though further left, belongs to another small tendency whose positions against trade unions, and opposition to Māori “identity politics” (its phrase for both genuinely unhelpful identitarianism and the actual movement for Māori rights), give it neither the programme nor the social weight to be a real pole around which a workers’ opposition can form.
That is why the International Bolshevik Tendency calls for a deliberately spoilt ballot, as we did in prior elections faced with the same offering (see “Marxism & Bourgeois Elections”, 1917 No.42). This is a refusal to put the left’s name to the management of decline, made so that when the failure of the current capitalist managers’ economic consensus can no longer be hidden, the alternative on offer is not only that of Winston Peters. It is addressed to the workers who will have to fight whichever government emerges, and asks them to begin that fight uncompromised. The forces exist: the public-sector strikers of 2025, the hīkoi of 2024, the trans health movement that beat the coalition in court this month. What we lack is a political expression of our own: unions that don’t abandon fights in order to campaign for Labour, a workers’ movement that takes up Māori, migrant and trans liberation as its own, and a revolutionary party that aims not to manage New Zealand capitalism but to overthrow it.
Spoil your ballot. Then help build the alternative.