It is often said that Oppositions never win elections because governments lose them. In other words, if a government is unpopular enough it will lose an election, regardless of the calibre of the Opposition. 

That was certainly the case in 2023 when Labour was tossed out of office. The public mood then was far more that people had had enough of Labour and were keen to get rid of it, rather than a positive feeling for National. And as National's support has waned in recent months, and Labour's increased, it was beginning to look as though history might be set to repeat itself at this November's election. However, that may be about to change.

Until recently, Labour's policy of saying nothing and therefore keeping the focus squarely on the government and its perceived shortcomings looked to be working. It was not a new idea – it was the same approach Albanese's Labor Party successfully followed in Australia in the lead-up to its first election victory in 2022. To that extent, it was smart politics for Hipkins and New Zealand Labour to copy them.

And they have done so, almost to a fault. With only two exceptions – the Future Fund announced last October, and the capital gains tax hurriedly announced a couple of weeks later but only because some details had been leaked to the media – Labour has been a policy free zone since the last election. Its excuse has been that it is waiting for the government to release this year’s Budget so it can see the true state of the country's books before making policy commitments. However, given the likely dire government accounts, that simply means, if it is to be true to its word, that Labour's election policy offerings are likely to be very meagre and uninspiring indeed.

But it goes deeper than that. Labour will not even provide full details of the two policies it has announced so far. Earlier this week Labour admitted it cannot say until after the election which public assets could be transferred to the Future Fund, because it will not know until it assumes office which state owned enterprises may be subject to Treaty of Waitangi obligations. That argument simply does not wash – Labour has had all the months leading up to last October’s announcement, and the seven months since then, to find out the answers to those questions. Rubbing salt in the wound was Hipkins’ subsequent arrogant assertion that “I don’t think the public really care which companies are going to go in or not.”

And the obfuscatory explanations about how the annual three free doctors’ visits to be funded by the capital gains tax may work, let alone the technical details of the tax itself, show a similar disturbing unwillingness to fill in the policy details or let the public know how its policies might work.

In a similar vein, there is Labour’s muted response to the Finance Minister’s announcement that around 8,700 more public service jobs will go by 2029. It seems to have left most of the self-serving howling to its acolytes in the Public Service Association, which it is unlikely to do the cause much good. Perhaps it is because, deep down, although it could never say it, Labour knows that the public service bloat of the Ardern years was unsustainable and that substantial restructuring was necessary and overdue. It probably also senses that outside the public service citadel of Wellington, reducing the size of the public service strikes a positive chord with voters.

Labour’s problem in trying to appear responsible and realistic about its election policy commitments, unlike the naive optimism of its predecessor, is that it ends up looking insipid and unconvincing. Moreover, and perhaps more seriously, the vacuum of its silence has left the field open to its potential partners in government, the Greens and Te Pati Māori to fill with a raft of expensive and far less credible and responsible policies. Although they are neither Labour policies nor ones it would readily seek to implement, the risk for Labour is that, to its detriment, because of its silence, it becomes defined by the policies of the Greens and Te Pati Māori, and therefore probably less electable.

Commentators often say that around the world at present it is not a good time to be in government. That would tend to support the “Governments lose rather than Oppositions win” line of argument and would explain Labour sticking to its policy silence. It looks to have calculated that, faced with a government whose popularity is declining, its best policy is to promise as little as possible so as not to risk alienating potential support.

There are, however, two problems with maintaining that approach. First, despite the government’s waning popularity, all the opinion polls over the last two-and-a-half years, and particularly since late last year, have shown the Coalition with the numbers to win re-election, albeit with a narrow majority. Second, Labour’s two policy announcements to date have had little impact on its public standing and there is mounting frustration at its policy silence.

The risk it faces now is that if starts to release a plethora of policy in the wake of next week’s Budget it will not be taken seriously. On the other hand, continuing with the too clever by half approach of trying to present so small an electoral target as to be near invisible for as long as possible risks ending up backfiring spectacularly.

And voters may simply conclude that all this self-imagined clever strategy really means is that the party is bereft of, or afraid of new ideas, and ill-prepared to return to government.