Shopping for salvation

Voters are angry, so the government is turning to desperate measures to avoid the ignominy of being booted out after one term.

- Danyl McLauchlan

Political scientist Jennifer Lees-Marshment studies the impact of modern marketing on democratic politics, and she identifies a critical shift that took place in the 1990s and early 2000s.

It was when mainstream political parties evolved from using marketing techniques to communicate their policies to voters, towards using consumer research and brand management to generate their policy manifestos.

Now they offer whatever they think voters want rather than what the party might believe in, what the nation might need or what the government could credibly deliver.

We're living through the consequences of this mode of politics. In 2017, Labour promised to build 100,000 houses without any coherent scheme to deliver them.

In 2023, then prime minister Chris Hipkins and his finance minister Grant Robertson pledged to lower the cost of living by removing GST from fruit and vegetables - to near-unanimous criticism from economists that the supermarket duopoly would simply use its market power to capture all the value.

Christopher Luxon also campaigned on reducing the cost of living, and that, too, was marketing. His government has relied on monetary policy from the Reserve Bank to reduce inflation and then taken credit for the results.

But whereas Labour fell well short of its house-building target, inflation has come down under the National-led government (of course, it began to decline under Labour).

The official cash rate has fallen from 5.5% last July to 3.75% with the latest Reserve Bank's announcement. Mortgagees with hundreds of billions of dollars in floating or short-term fixed mortgages are set to refix at lower rates over the first half of this year.

SCEPTICAL AND UPSET