Act’s 2008 election campaign

Of all the minor parties, Act was the most ideally placed to gain from the centrist transformation of the National Party under John Key. National’s shift into the centre of the political spectrum meant that – unlike when Don Brash led National in 2005 – Act had a large potential market of voters on the right to win. Act did make use of that gap in the market, but was ambivalent and ambiguous about it orientation towards the popular centrist National Party, choosing sometimes to hug its rival and sometimes to bite it. In regards to this, I look at the party’s strategy in the section on the Act Party within my chapter entitled ‘Party Strategy and the 2008 Election’ which is part of the recently published book Informing Voters? Politics, Media and the New Zealand Election 2008 (edited by Chris Rudd, Janine Hayward and Geoff Craig). This blog post is the 11th of a series of explorations of the chapters from the new book, and it constitutes the original draft section about Act that I wrote for my chapter. Subsequently this draft was substantially reworked, edited, and condensed for the final book, so please see the published book for the final and ‘authoritative’ version. [Read more below]

Act’s orientation to National

In mid-October leader Rodney Hide declared his party’s strong commitment to helping National into power: ‘We are nailing our colours to the mast. We are going to support the next National-led government, whether they want us or not’. He stressed that he wanted ‘Act to play a pivotal part’ in a government of change.

Yet the Act leadership was still inclined to take potshots at National. For instance, Hide declared ‘I disagree a lot with Bill English because he is a conservative and so he never changes anything but just keeps it as it is. No-one can remember a decision that Bill has made’. Likewise, he also labeled the National Party as ‘socialist’, a line that list candidate and founder Roger Douglas was to frequently argue. Douglas lumped National as being on the ‘left’ with Labour and that the ‘socialist’ National Party needed reviving. Other scathing attacks during the campaign suggested that Act wished to show itself as the only real option for change.

But most of the time, Act put out a message that portrayed itself in a ‘supportive’ role for National – with Hide saying that only his party could put some ‘backbone’ into a National-led government. This was reminiscent of the Labour’s left-flank Alliance party’s 1999 campaign slogan that the Alliance would be the ‘heart of the new government’. The ‘backbone’ theme morphed into effective advertising (created by John Ansell), effectively replacing Act’s early slogan of ‘The Guts to Do What's Right’. Hide emphasized Act’s role in helping a National-led government produce change, and the difference that a new government would make. In one speech to supporters in Auckland Hide was reported as using the word ‘difference’ more than 20 times (Tahana, NZH, Oct 13, 2008).

Act contributed to John Key’s strong strategy of presenting National as having serious and harmonious coalition possibilities by also stressing Act’s enthusiasm for the Maori Party joining a National-led coalition government. Hide told one public meeting that ‘I've always enjoyed working with the Maori Party and we sit beside each other’, and ‘I think the Maori Party shares some of our concerns and issues and I've said to Tariana [Turia] they should get involved in the next government - I think it'd be great’ (quoted in Tahana, NZH, Oct 13, 2008).

Act's electoral moderation in 2008

Despite Act’s critiques of the National Party’s policy moderation, Act also moderated itself. Although former founding leader Roger Douglas was reintroduced as the party’s number three on the party list, even he was remarkably moderate on the campaign trail. His reputation for radicalism belied the reality that Douglas was now without the Rogernomics. His grand vision was mostly gone. He had obviously learned from Richard Prebble and Rodney Hide that the 'radical stuff has to go' and that under the new professionalized environment, politicians were not supposed to say anything too bold. Rather than representing anything from the 'old days' of big picture politics and grand ideological conflict, Douglas had quickly adapted to the new bland consensus politics of the 2000s.

Most surprising was Douglas' promise to increase government expenditure. While he stated that he did not want an Act government to increase spending as much as Labour had over the last nine years, he nonetheless wanted it increased. Act’s promise was to increase it by no more than the rate of inflation, although the party conceding that in some areas the expenditure would need to increase even faster than inflation - especially in health to reduce waiting lists, and on police to reduce crime. Other areas of taxation policy also appeared surprisingly un-neoliberal Whereas most neoliberals prefer to have a greater proportion of government revenue to be collected from sales taxes, Douglas actually suggested reducing GST and petrol tax.

In lieu of a concentration on its economic policy, Act pushed its perennial socially conservative message on law and order. Anti-crime policy and rhetoric had increasingly replaced neoliberalism in Act’s campaigning in every election since 1996. The problem, however, was that this was a strategy used by nearly all the parties, which made it difficult for Act to differentiate itself. In order to illustrate it’s hard line on law and order, the party recruited Sensible Sentencing Trust legal adviser David Garrett and put him in the number five slot on the party list.

Party makeover

Act essentially ran two separate election campaigns: one for leader Rodney Hide in Epsom, and one for Act nationally. These parallel campaigns reflected the historic schism in the party between the populist, and pragmatic high-visibility Hide, and the more ideologically-pure neoliberal party vote campaign represented by the Roger Douglas faction. Indeed Douglas was brought back into the party not only to revitatise its image and support, but as a policy-focused counterpoint to Hide’s more populist approach. However, Act kept Douglas in a relatively low profile.

Leader Rodney Hide experienced another physical makeover prior to the campaign, spending about $20,000 on cosmetic and restorative dentistry (Cook, 2008). This came after the previously 130kg Hide had lost about 30kg in conjunction with his appearance on the television programme Dancing with the Stars. In addition, Hide provided one of the enduring visual images of the campaign trail with his canary-yellow jacket, which generated a large number of column inches as well as a referral to police for supposedly breaching the Electoral Finance Act. One marketing expert suggested that ‘In contrast to these multi-million dollar campaigns, Scott points out that one of the best political advertising campaigns was devised by the Act party virtually for free… The dedication to it was incredible and showed the value of having the courage to stand out in the sea of blandness that is politics’ (Scott, 2008).

Although Act had a very policy-laden election campaign – the party produced a 20-point plan leaflets, distributed to 300,000 homes – the party continued to rely on campaign stunts to get its message across. Famous for its 1999 Treaty of Waitangi policy on the summit of One Tree Hill, Act once again repeated the basic formula. To get its anti-crime message across it lined up outside Mt Eden prison 77 coffin lids which were said to represent the 77 victims who would be alive if Act's ‘three strikes’ policy had been in existence. A less successful stunt involved a protest against the Emission Trade Scheme involving a $5 billion cheque made out to Russia being carted about in Auckland’s Cornwall Park by farmer being whipped by a witch. The party that used to stand for something radical outside the mushy ‘me-too’ centrist politics of Labour and National had now become more of a circus.

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Informing Voters? Politics, Media and the New Zealand Election 2008, edited by Chris

Rudd, Janine Hayward and Geoff Craig

Published by Pearson Education, 2009.

More information here.


Table Of Contents

1. Introduction: Mediated Politics - Geoffrey Craig, Janine Hayward, Chris Rudd
2. Party Strategy and the 2008 Election - Bryce Edwards
3. The Election Campaign on Television News - Margie Comrie
4. Leaders’ Debates and News Media Interviews - Geoffrey Craig
5. ‘Vote for me’: Political Advertising - Claire Robinson
6. Newspaper Coverage - Chris Rudd and Janine Hayward
7. The Maori Party and Newspaper Coverage - Ann Sullivan
8. Online Media - Peter John Chen
9. Conclusion: Don’t shoot the messenger? - Geoffrey Craig, Janine Hayward and Chris Rudd