People in the UK sometimes joke that New Zealand is Britain stuck in the 1950s. The reality is almost the opposite.
New Zealand has a fully integrated health system, with patient records accessible in hospitals across the country. It has used proportional representation for the past three decades, helping to deliver a parliament that better reflects the people it serves, with stronger representation for ethnic minorities and women. The introduction of proportional representation transformed female representation, with women winning almost half of all parliamentary seats in 2020 and remaining above 40% in 2023. It also completed its conversion to the metric system in the 1960s, whereas Britain has spent the past half-century conducting an extended public consultation on the matter.
Far from being Britain in the 1950s, New Zealand could be Britain in the 2050s, if we are lucky.
This week, the New Zealand Parliament has adjourned ahead of the general election on 7 November. The contest is shaping up to be one of the closest in decades, with neither major party expected to secure a clear majority.
If Labour prevails, it would mark a remarkable political comeback: the first time in modern New Zealand politics that the party has returned to government after just a single term in opposition, rather than the more customary three-term stint on the sidelines. Equally, it would represent an extraordinary setback for National, New Zealand’s equivalent of the Conservative Party, making it the first National government to lose office after only a single term.
The UK is home to one of the largest New Zealand communities overseas, while around a quarter of a million UK-born people live in New Zealand. The two countries are so closely connected that each hosts a sizeable expatriate population from the other, creating a small but politically significant trans-global electorate.
In 2017, overseas voters helped the Labour and Green parties gain an additional seat each in parliament, contributing to Jacinda Ardern becoming Prime Minister. As a result, the UK has become an important battleground in New Zealand elections, where younger and often more progressive Kiwi voters living abroad could once again prove decisive.
Having been an active Labour member in both New Zealand and the UK, I have long believed that the fortunes of the two parties are closely linked. New Zealand is often described as Britain’s closest cousin: a country that shares our language, parliamentary system and legal traditions. When Labour is in government in both countries, good ideas travel faster, lessons are learned more quickly, and progressive change becomes easier to deliver on both sides of the world.
Conversely, bad ideas travel just as easily as good ones. In the 1980s and 1990s, New Zealand embraced many of the free-market reforms associated with Thatcherism, often going even further and faster than Britain itself. The result was an economy exposed to the full force of global markets, with profound social and economic consequences.
More recently, New Zealand has begun to experience its own version of the post-truth populist politics that has emerged across parts of Britain, Europe and the wider Western world. Some members of the governing coalition have sought to wage culture wars over the rights of Māori, New Zealand’s indigenous people, and to roll back aspects of the country’s commitment to the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi.
While the details are specific to New Zealand, the tactics are strikingly familiar: exploiting division, stoking grievance and turning complex social issues into political battlegrounds. The language may differ, but the playbook is recognisably the same.
Labour leader and former Prime Minister Chris Hipkins currently holds a narrow lead as preferred Prime Minister, while Labour has generally been running slightly ahead of National in recent polling. However, the race has tightened considerably, leaving the centre-left and centre-right blocs effectively neck-and-neck.
The stakes in this election extend far beyond New Zealand. As recent years have shown, ideas, political trends and campaign tactics do not respect national borders. New Zealand and Britain remain deeply connected countries, sharing a language, institutions, legal traditions and many of the same challenges.
Whether the next New Zealand government chooses a path of unity and progress or one of division and culture-war politics will matter not just to New Zealanders, but to progressives across the wider English-speaking world.
