NZ Politics

My impression was that Labour's overwhelming majority after 2020 has also been extremely fragile, largely made up from soft National voters who were disillusioned by National's leadership problems, and tightly connected to the Covid response.

This doesn't excuse not doing anything, but the dilemma for Labour from a political perspective was that as soon as it started addressing anything besides Covid people started to remember they had other options.

I like MMP a hell of a lot more than what we had before it, but one of the interesting things with FPP was that governments could still win with a minority of support if they had their tactics right, and this is a big part of why there was such a push to shift away from it. Muldoon's National came out of the 1978 election with 51 seats from 39.8% of votes compared with Labour's 40 seats from 40.4% and Social Credit's 1 seat from 16.1% of the vote. In 1981 he did it again, winning 47 from 38.8% to Labour's 43 from 39.0% and SC's 2 from 20.7%. This was the era of Think Big, with massive borrowing and spending on some huge but often very controversial government projects.

By comparison, MMP often devolves into two big parties scrapping over a handful of swing voters, who resist change, whilst taking their base for granted and hoping they don't lose too much of it to the parties more on the fringes, but even if they do they assume they can make a deal with those fringe parties. Parties are constantly watching the polls, and opposition leaders from both major parties are repeatedly getting rolled if they don't appear to be getting the popular support high enough. To-date since MMP began (with the exception of Helen Clark who remained in opposition after '96), no major party leader has remained leader to the following election after leading through an election loss. Some opposition leaders have even been rolled before having a chance to contest their first election. That's quite different from FPP, where it'd be common for a party to keep a consistent leader through several lost elections before sometimes finally winning an election. (MMP also makes leadership changes more possible because when you can simply go to #1 on the party list to be guaranteed re-election, any MP can be a candidate rather than only those holding a safe seat.)

Governments and oppositions under MMP are terrified of losing short term popular support because without it, they definitely can't win the next election, and significant change of nearly any kind tends to lead to loss of at least some support - at least amongst people who reliably vote.