New Zealand’s crisis of confidence

On July 4, 1979 – America’s Independence Day – the President of the United States had disappeared.

As Americans queued for hours for petrol around the country in the midst of a national energy crisis and at the tail end of a decade of high inflation, Jimmy Carter was due to deliver an Independence Day address laying out his plans to respond. Instead, he fled to the presidential retreat at Camp David, where he spent 10 days meeting with union leaders, teachers, preachers, governors, mayors and industry representatives.

When he emerged on July 15, he told the nation that the energy crisis was only a subset of a larger predicament facing the United States. Carter diagnosed America and its citizens with a crisis of confidence.

“It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation,” he said.

“The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.”

A wave of political assassinations in the 1960s – the killings of John F Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr and others – and the loss of the Vietnam War, followed by the disgrace of the office of the President by the Watergate scandal had shaken American perceptions about their place in the world.

“These wounds are still very deep. They have never been healed. Looking for a way out of this crisis, our people have turned to the federal government and found it isolated from the mainstream of our nation’s life. Washington, D.C., has become an island,” Carter said.

“The gap between our citizens and our government has never been so wide. The people are looking for honest answers, not easy answers; clear leadership, not false claims and evasiveness and politics as usual.”

The world now finds itself in somewhat similar straights. The Covid-19 pandemic was an earth-shattering event, killing millions and prompting unprecedented government controls on our private lives. Then there was the cost-of-living crisis and – overseas at least – an energy crisis precipitated by the first major ground war in Europe since the fall of Berlin in May 1945.

All this against the backdrop of systemic crises like climate change and the rise of disinformation and democratic backsliding which eroded the human rights and civil liberties gains of the 1990s and early 2000s.

There is, globally, a crisis of confidence. And new polling from Ipsos NZ, released exclusively to Newsroom, shows New Zealand is not immune from this phenomenon.

A majority of respondents to the survey, carried out between February 20 and 29, agreed with the statement that New Zealand society is broken. Three fifths believe New Zealand is in decline.

These are shocking numbers, but they are not significantly different from what Ipsos found in identical surveys of 28 other countries in late November and early December last year.

Singapore was the only one where more people disagreed with the statements about their country being broken and in decline than agreed with it.

Paul Spoonley, the former director of centre of research excellence He Whenua Taurikura, said the findings align with the long-running Edelman Trust Barometer study, which doesn’t include New Zealand.

“What they’re recording internationally, which is repeated in this Ipsos survey, is a very rapid decline in trust, particularly in governments and in experts, and a decline in the level of social cohesion internationally,” he said.

“What you see repeated in both the Edelman Trust Barometer and the Ipsos survey is this dissatisfaction, but more than that, distrust of leaders, within government or out. Attached to that distrust is a post-Covid pessimism in the collective.”

The Ipsos NZ survey asked New Zealanders five questions it has asked internationally since 2016, which make up its “the system is broken index”. Several of these statements involved trust of the kind Spoonley spoke to.

A majority (55 percent) of New Zealand respondents agreed with the statement that “traditional parties and politicians don’t care about people like me” and a similar proportion said that “experts in this country don’t understand the lives of people like me”. These results were marginally lower than the global average but still clearly reflect the dominant sentiment.

A decline in trust was one of the symptoms of the crisis of confidence that Carter also pointed to, back in 1979.

“As you know, there is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions,” he said.

This distrust was not imagined but the result of repeated failures by many of these institutions. Alongside the Watergate scandal, the federal government had proven itself impotent in fighting the energy crisis.

“What you see too often in Washington and elsewhere around the country is a system of government that seems incapable of action. You see a Congress twisted and pulled in every direction by hundreds of well-financed and powerful special interests,” Carter argued.

“You see every extreme position defended to the last vote, almost to the last breath by one unyielding group or another. You often see a balanced and a fair approach that demands sacrifice, a little sacrifice from everyone, abandoned like an orphan without support and without friends.”

New Zealanders feel similarly about Wellington today. They feel (65 percent) that the economy is “rigged to advantage the rich and powerful”. They want (66 percent) “a strong leader to take the country back from the rich and powerful”. And that strong leader should, they say (54 percent), be “willing to break the rules” to do so.

Ipsos also asked about three statements the pollster has internationally associated with populist politics. A majority of New Zealanders agreed with all three of these, though by less than the global average.

They too reflect a prevailing sense of disenfranchisement. The egalitarian, progressive, future-looking New Zealand is a thing of the past, these results suggest.

Three in five respondents said the “main divide in our society is between ordinary citizens and the political and economic elite”. That same elite “don’t care about hard-working people”, a majority said.

Consistently, across both the populist and broken system statements, Māori, low-income workers and young people were significantly more likely to agree than other groups.

Spoonley says there’s a lot to learn from the American experience with Donald Trump. He points to the 2016 book Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, by his one-time colleague sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, as accurately identifying the sense of disillusionment that led to Trump’s electoral victory.

“What Arlie argues is that the last few years have reinforced how disconnected and the feeling of disenfranchisement some groups have. It is Māori, but it’s also people who feel fragile or anxious about both political and economic changes and developments,” he said.

“It hints at an underlying disconnect of some groups and some communities in our society, and the way in which they’re perceiving the political elite.”

This isn’t to suggest the attitudes reflected here are solely or mostly a right-wing phenomenon. In fact, the survey was carried out alongside Ipsos’ regular Issues Monitor which collects data on voting history.

Ipsos researchers divided the responses up among supporters of the parties now in Opposition (Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori) as the “left” and the supporters of the parties now in Government (National, Act and NZ First) as the “right”. While these aren’t perfect labels, they still do show broad trends.

Left-wing supporters were more likely to agree with most of the statements in the “system is broken index”, except for the desire for a strong leader to break the rules, which was preferred by right-wing voters. There was no difference, however, among party lines for those who agreed that New Zealand is broken and in decline. That belief was held strongly by all.

While this is the first time Ipsos has asked these questions in New Zealand, other research into attitudes around social cohesion issues has been carried out in the past.

Koi Tū: The Centre for Informed Futures at the University of Auckland has published three reports on social cohesion in recent years, with the first landing during the very early days of the Covid-19 response in May 2020.

“It showed very high levels of social cohesion and I think that social cohesion continued right the way through to the general election and you saw it in the election results,” Spoonley, who helped with that work, said.

“That unravelled, quite spectacularly, in 2021 and 2022. If we jump to the 2023 report, what we found is those high levels of social cohesion and I would suggest trust, particularly trust in government, had literally evaporated over the previous two years. The key indicator of that was the protests that were occurring around New Zealand, most notably in Wellington.”

Those protests were fuelled by what Spoonley terms “anti-elite arguments, combined with conspiratorial arguments, from the USA”, which have grown in prominence ever since the birth of the American QAnon conspiracy movement in 2017.

“I think that’s been a huge factor in terms of the shift and decline in trust and the decline in confidence.”

Spoonley is also interested in the results regarding desire for a “strong leader”.

“It would be interesting to know what they meant by a strong leader,” he said.

New Zealand doesn’t have a presidential system and while our heads of government are often prominent, they rarely embody the “strength” seen in some other countries. That both left and right want a strong leader, albeit to do different things (“take the country back from the rich and powerful” versus “break the rules”) suggests that the current political leadership in this country is lacking.

That’s backed up by the lacklustre views New Zealanders hold towards both Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Leader of the Opposition Chris Hipkins.

The latest Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll showed both men had negative net favourability – more people disapproved than approved of them. In a poll for corporate clients by Talbot Mills done for the Labour Party, Luxon and Hipkins failed to muster more than 50 percent of the preferred Prime Minister sentiment between the two of them. In other words, a majority of respondents would prefer someone other than Luxon or Hipkins to lead the country.

Internal polling for Labour, also by Talbot Mills, gave the words people most strongly associated with the two men. For Luxon, he had “business” and “leader” as his top two, but followed closely by “greedy”, “unsure” and “arrogant”. Hipkins got “weak” and “unsure”, with “good”, “nice” and “leader” bringing up the rear.

Neither seems, on the face of it, capable of the sort of empathetic and inspiring leadership that Jacinda Ardern brought to the March 15 terror attack and pandemic or John Key brought to the Christchurch earthquake response. People view them as out of touch, steeped in business-speak or Wellington bureaucracy and unable to relate to everyday people’s lives.

Hence the disillusionment in leaders and traditional political parties reflected in the survey.

What is the solution to this? In 1979, Carter called on Americans to reconnect with one another and their communities, to summon internal strength rather than relying on the White House for leadership and inspiration.

“First of all, we must face the truth, and then we can change our course. We simply must have faith in each other, faith in our ability to govern ourselves, and faith in the future of this nation. Restoring that faith and that confidence to America is now the most important task we face. It is a true challenge of this generation of Americans,” he said.

“We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I’ve warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.

“All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path, the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our nation and ourselves.”

It is worth noting, however, that while Carter had a clear vision of the problems and the ultimate solution, he was unable to actually bring the United States down the better path with him.

The speech was panned by commentators but adored by everyday Americans. Carter jumped 11 points in political polls basically overnight. But when the presidential election swung around the next year, he lost a resounding defeat to Ronald Reagan.

People did value that Carter identified the problem. He “faced the truth”, as he urged Americans to do.

To the Prime Minister’s credit, Luxon has attempted in a somewhat ham-fisted way to do the same: His comments during the campaign about New Zealand being “negative, wet, whiny” were a reflection of that crisis of confidence and his promise to get the country’s “mojo” back shows he too has a vision of a better destination.

The issue is that, as with Carter back then, there remains no clear path to that destination. The Ipsos results represent the country’s sentiment in February, after Luxon took office and well into his 100-day plan. Policy achievements alone will not change these perceptions.

There are no easy answers here. This is a problem plaguing much of the world, not just New Zealand. But it is a problem here too – recognising it is the first step to solving it.