So New Zealand is about to spend $12 billion on our defence forces over the next four years – with $9 million of it being new money that is not being spent on pressing needs here at home. Somehow this lavish spend-up on Defence is “affordable,” says PM Christopher Luxon, even though public health and education are being starved of funds – because the government keeps on saying it doesn’t have the cash. But Defence? The magic money tree is suddenly in full bloom.

Among the many, many items on the NZDF wishlist that taxpayers will be expected to fund is this:

*accommodation, messing and dining modernisation

Hmm... so we cut the quality of the lunches that help thousands of school kids to learn, but spend the money instead on improving the dining experience available to our defence forces. Will the average cost of this“messing and dining” upgrade be allowed to exceed $3 a meal for lunch? More on the 2025 Defence Capability Plan later this week.

Update: Australia’s election

Since Australia is now our only dependable defence ally, maybe we should be paying attention to their upcoming election. Thanks entirely to Donald Trump, this is a very, very good time for those in power to be holding an election. In Canada and in Australia, Trump is the ugly external threat that’s uniting voters behind their current leadership. (When change = chaos, best stick with the devil you know.)

In Australia, the race is still tight and might yet deliver a minority government, but Labor PM Anthony Albanese has every reason to feel confident about the polling trends over the past fortnight. For now, it's worth looking at (a) the election timing (b) the Peter Dutton factor and (c) the female vote and the survival prospects of the “teal” independent women elected in 2022.

If nothing else, the recent signs of consolidation behind Albanese are a useful reminder that in non-election years, the opinion polls largely reflect the public’s grievances with the government. This makes the polls an unreliable indicator of what will happen come election time, once the alternative has come under sustained scrutiny.

Meaning: that old tagline with polls “if an election were held tomorrow” is deeply misleading. Election campaigns create a different lens. Aussies liked Dutton last year when he was savaging a government they didn’t like very much – but they don’t like Dutton much this year, once he seemed seriously likely to form the next government. In New Zealand, Labour should not make a similar mistake with the current polls, and assume that Chris Hipkins is electable.

The Timing

Dutton leads the conservative Liberal-led opposition. He has only limited time to turn things around. Election Day is Saturday May 3 but voters are likely to be distracted by (a) the Easter break and (b) by the autumn school holidays. These run from 7-22 April (Queensland, Victoria) 14-24 April (NSW) and 14-28 April in South Australia, Tasmania, and Western Australia. In Canberra, the school holidays end on the 29th April, virtually on the eve of polling day. Early voting is therefore likely to be heavy, which – on current trends – will work against Dutton and his coalition partners.

In fact, this is the last week that the Liberals will have a totally clear run at trying to change the momentum of the campaign.

The Dutton factor

That tight campaign timeframe has fed into the sense of panic now evident in the Opposition camp. Yesterday, Dutton scrapped his

compulsory return to work plan for public servants (a policy especially unpopular among women voters) and pulled back on his DOGE-like promises to sack 41,000 bureaucrats in the public service. Dutton is also reportedly re-evaluating his 25% reduced cap on international students at Australian universities, and his simultaneous plan to sharply raise the fees foreign students have to pay. These xenophobic, Trump-like policies have attracted waves of criticism from the tertiary sector, as doing damage to Australia’s long term interests in growth and innovation.

With Dutton being widely seen to be as much of a liability as an asset, the Liberal coalition is pinning some of its hopes this week on its release of lots of relatively inexpensive mini-policy promises pitched at the local electorate level.

One can (almost) feel sorry for Dutton. His political brand has been based on him being the tough talking mini-Trump that his wealthy backers (headed by the mining magnate Gina Rinehart) had expected him to be. In the past month however, an increasingly irritable Rinehart has been treating Dutton more like a faulty store-bought appliance on which she can’t get a refund.

Such a disappointment. Throughout 2024, Australia’s hard right had enthusiastically embraced Trumpism as the political model to emulate, and likely to deliver them massive tax cuts, workplace de-regulation, climate change denial, small government, and welfare cuts all in one hit, and all in one big bright populist package. If it worked for Trump, surely it could be made to work big time in Australia as well.

Belatedly however, Dutton has come to realise that the extreme right agenda being urged on him by his corporate sponsors is ballot box poison. On the campaign trail for instance, Dutton’s suggestion that Australia should use AUKUS and other US-linked defence commitments as a bargaining chip to gain relief from the Trump trade tariffs has gone down like a lead balloon.

Even John Howard had famously argued for the nation’s trade and defence/security interests to always be kept separate. Evidently, the Diggers/Anzac spirit still forms a key part of Australia’s self- image as a tough and independent nation. It is not something to be traded off by Dutton for the benefit of a few of his mates in the export sector.

Finally, Dutton’s signature gas policy that he was touting as a magic supply-side bullet to reduce energy prices (via mandatory boosts to the gas supply) is now being attacked by industry CEOs as more likely to do the reverse. Even if Dutton’s maths on gas prices were right, these executives are wailing, the price decline Dutton is touting would put many of them out of business. What a surprise. Trumplike populism may come with a CEO body count. Once again, Gina Rinehart is not amused.

Footnote: Apart from immediate friends and family no-one gets very excited by Anthony Albanese, but if you Google the term “friend of Peter Dutton” all that you get is an article entitled “Friends with benefits: Gina Rinehart and Peter Dutton’s ideological love-in.” Right now, Peter Dutton looks like he needs a friend.

The independents, teal and otherwise

This will be the first Australian election where millenials and Gen Z voters outnumber the baby boomers. Party fidelity is less and less of a given. The old breakdown between the two major blocs and the uncommitted (40/40/20) now looks more like 30/30/40 with floating voters now having a lot more scope to find a home with small parties and independent candidates.

Obviously, there are other independents (Helen Haines, Andrew Wilkie, David Pocock, Jacqui Lambie) besides the so-called “teal” independents who featured so prominently in Election 2022. How the former “teals” will fare this time around though, is both important and unpredictable. In 2022, their core supporters were tertiary educated advocates of a market economy, but with a progressive stance on individual human rights. As observers noted, teal voters were not partisans of trade unions, or of corporate interests. In short, they were fairly affluent middle-ground voters who felt alienated from the major parties. That feeling lingers. . But where will they go this time?

Keep in mind that in 2022, the “teals” were successful in the context of an incumbent conservative government headed by a deeply unpopular PM in Scott Morrison. Morrison had (a) strong ties to the religious right and (b) seemed in denial about the Britany Higgins sexual assault case that had crystallised a lot of the workplace fears and resentments felt by female voters. Several formerly safe Liberal seats went independent. Yet which way these same voters will go in the context of an incumbent Labor government is anyone’s guess.

To take a couple of high profile examples: for decades, the Kooyong seat in suburban Melbourne had been held by conservative icons like Robert Menzies and Andrew Peacock. It is now held by the independent MP, Dr Monique Ryan. Similarly, the Wentworth seat in East Sydney, once held by Malcolm Turnbull is now held by another independent, Allegra Spender. In both cases, boundary changes have marginally increased the independents’ chances of survival. As the ABC analysts recently summed up:

Kooyong has been radically changed by the redistribution, gaining around 26,000 voters from the abolished seat of Higgins. The areas added to Kooyong finished as a Labor-Liberal contest in 2022 election but it is expected that Ryan will poll well in the new areas. The new Independent margin for Kooyong against the Liberal Party is estimated to be 2.2%.

Spender’s Wentworth seat in Sydney’s eastern suburbs is slightly less of a cliff-hanger. It has a large Jewish community, and the local campaign has seen attacks made on Spender personally, and on the Labor government in general, for allegedly being insufficiently supportive of Israel’s actions in Gaza. Last Sunday, Gaza and the claims of anti-semitism reportedly dominated Sunday night’s initial debate between Spender and the Liberal candidate, Ro Knox. As the same ABC analysis sums up:

Wentworth's boundaries have been expanded by the redistribution, gaining Labor voting parts of Sydney and Kingsford Smith. This translates into a significant boost in Spender's margin from 4.2% to 6.8%.

Zoe Daniel in Goldsetin, a seat to the south-east of Melbourne is facing much the same odds as Spender. Obviously, if most of the naturally centre-right vote that defected in 2022 falls in behind the Liberal opposition this time, it would not take much to wipe out all of the teal independents this time, and make re-election suddenly that much harder for Albamese. Luckily, Dutton is almost as unattractive a prospect to former teal voters as Scott Morrison.

Even if the 2022 teal tide does recede, the independent MP from their ranks in the most danger is still probably Kate Chaney in the Curtin seat situated in the affluent western suburbs of Perth.

The gender divide

Throughout 2024, Peter Dutton pitched his campaigning all but exclusively at male voters. He promised tax cuts, a hard-line on fiscal discipline, plus anti-immigration policies and an anti- government stance on principle. This approach was epitomised by the now-jettisoned “back to work” imperative that all along, had been tone deaf to the support that the working from home option continues to hold among female voters. Every election, the Liberals’ pitch to female voters is the electoral equivalent of a guy plucking a bunch of flowers from the rack at the petrol station, on their wedding anniversary. Oops, nearly forgot.

In recent weeks, the Liberals have been “quietly hopeful” about the gender divide, given that their internal polling allegedly shows 52% of women voters now support the Liberals over Labor. This “trend” is not evident in the mainstream polling. It is worth keeping in mind that any improvement for the Liberals is coming off an exceptionally low base, of only 32% in 2022. Moreover even if there has been a sea change in the centre right stance towards women, very few female candidates have won selection in winnable Liberal seats.

Gisele Kapterian, the Liberal candidate in the north Sydney seat of Bradfield, might look like an exception. In January, she expressed confidence that the Liberals' stance on “housing, energy and anti-semitism” would see her home. Yet boundary changes and internal dissent over the choice of Kapterian as the Liberal candidate ahead of hidebound conservative Warren Mundine has raised the risk of Bradfield going independent. Bradfield was, after all, the only Liberal held seat to vote “Yes” in The Voice referendum on indigenous rights in 2023. Kapterian voted “No.”

At this point, Labor appears likely to win re-election. If that happens, some of the victory will be due to the fact that the centre-right of Australian politics still looks like hostile territory for female voters and candidates alike. Werewolf will have updates on the Aussie election closer to Election Day.

The Call of the Wild

Back in 2022, Severance star Britt Lower was a startling presence in the video for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs song “Wolf.” Here as well, she does a lot of running (outdoors) in a little domestic saga about a woman getting in touch with the beast within. Nice to see Karen O and Helly R in the same frame.

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