National trumpets turning back the clock, as Labour ignores the recent past

Vernon Small is a former business and political journalist with more than two decades in the press gallery, who until recently was an advisor to attorney general David Parker.

OPINION: So, what’s it to be then? A past without a future or a future without a past?

It’s not much of a choice, I grant you, but allowing for a splash of columnist’s licence, that is increasingly the essence of what the two major parties are offering.

For its part, the prime minister’s team seems to have decided that the past is another country.

Sure, there is a mantric list of achievements that are ticked off in every question time, from poverty stats to house-building numbers, from extra cops and apprentices to favourable macroeconomic comparisons to the rest of the world.

But as far as campaigning on the Government’s total record goes – that is so last year. The Ardern-led Labour majority government, elected in 2020, is fast fading in the rearview mirror.

Education Minister Jan Tinetti’s press release of August 9, which celebrated the secondary teachers’ pay settlement, was blatant about the name change: “The Chris Hipkins Government values teachers.”

On the other side of the aisle, the reverse is the case. The leader is mostly incidental. The traditional post-election 100-day programme of shiny new reforms has given way to a list of things that must be nixed to “get the country back on track”.

Sure, National leader Christopher Luxon rattles off his own mantra; the number of policy announcements (27 or 28 at last brag) and the economic disaster that only National can reverse. But so far the nub of his campaign is a repeal-athon.

Things with an urgent target on their backs include resource management law reform, fair pay agreements and the reforms previously known as Three Waters.

For the chop on perhaps a longer timeframe are the Māori Health Authority, the top 39c tax rate, the Auckland regional fuel tax, light rail, the foreign house-buyers ban, the 10-year brightline test that triggers capital gains tax on residential house investments and – weirdest of all – a law that requires big banks and insurance companies to treat customers fairly.

So comprehensive is the un-reforming list, you must assume that from National’s point of view things were very much “on track” back in 2017, including in the housing market.

NZ First is on a similar kick, promising to “take back our country”. It is unclear just when the country was taken away, and by whom, but presumably it was not by the coalition formed in 2017.

Sarcasm aside, Labour’s campaign plan is to bet the House on Hipkins’ popularity, viz-a-viz Luxon. Their canvassers and door-knockers are reporting continued scepticism about Luxon among voters, who find the National leader “odd”.

However, a strategy that downplays the party’s record and talks up the boy from the Hutt next door is obviously vulnerable to a shift in the preferred prime minister stakes. Where the party vote goes, a favourable view of the leader can easily follow.

That is why the latest Curia poll, which had Hipkins and Luxon neck-and-neck, was more significant than just a widening gap in two-party support.

It was another reason for Labour to rush out news of the Talbot Mills survey, which showed a close party race, as well as a continued solid lead for Hipkins over Luxon.

The next round of polls will be pivotal. If Hipkins cannot maintain a significant lead, then Labour’s strategy will look threadbare and a defeat on October 14 will be all but baked in.

Against that background, Labour and Hipkins have ditched their earlier stance; that the need to govern crimped their ability to roll out policy and go on all-out attack ahead of the House rising at the end of August.

As if.

This week Hipkins has launched a suite of policies, and his senior MPs have engaged much more muscular language.

In particular, Finance Minister Grant Robertson has added a personal edge to his attacks, slamming Christopher Luxon as self-interested and repeatedly calling National’s finance spokesperson Nicola Willis a liar.

It has brought a distinct change of tone to debates and question time.

It has felt as if the weeks of phoney warfare have finally come to an end.

The valedictory speeches from outgoing MPs, especially former ministers Stuart Nash and David Clark, highlighted the clearing of the decks and provided a timely reminder of what the Hipkins government is trying to put behind it.

Nash was unrepentant in his view that ministers should be able to criticise judges, and in doing so waltz across the constitutional line separating their powers from those of the courts.

To his credit, Clark didn’t try to justify the transgressions that saw him quit as health minister after he broke Covid rules.

Nor has he ever complained about the decision to banish most ministers to their electorates, including deputy PM Winston Peters and Clark himself, during the height of the Covid crisis. That left Jacinda Ardern and fewer than a handful of senior Wellington-based ministers and health bureaucrats as the faces of the response.

It is Communications 101 to limit the number of people fronting during a crisis. But it was frankly bizarre – and dreadfully undermining of Peters’ and Clark’s mana – to keep them away from a role in the daily press conferences during the biggest health crisis since the 1918 flu epidemic.

That is a contributing factor in Peters’ current animus towards Labour.

Like the housing crisis under the last National government, the Ardern government’s mistakes during Covid cannot be erased, nor spun into an idealised past.