But Labour must have expected some poll boost from its leadership change, or else it wouldn’t have happened. Opposition strategists therefore take comfort that Labour’s five-point gain was nothing like the immediate 13-point boost when Ardern replaced Andrew Little or even National’s nine-point lift when Todd Muller first took over from Simon Bridges. They’ll hope it’s just a blip.
Yet Labour now leads National in both TV polls and the all-important narrative has changed from inevitable Labour defeat to dead-heat. Labour-Green needs only to pick up a point or two more and the story will become that Labour is on track to win.
Unlike a pre-election leadership change in Opposition, Labour has the resources of the Wellington bureaucracy to review and re-write policy — a process Ardern and Finance Minister Grant Robertson just happened to launch before Christmas. But unlike National’s managed change from John Key to Bill English, there is enough known difference between Ardern and Hipkins to make a policy reset credible.
Hipkins stood loyally beside Ardern from the podium of truth, even shamefully taking the lead in putting the boot into the pregnant Kiwi journalist denied entry home and forced to turn to the Taliban for refuge.
But Hipkins’ people were making it clear by October 2021 that he thought the long Auckland lockdown should be lifted faster and the borders opened for Christmas.
On Wednesday, when Robertson was asked why he had done a complete U-turn in extending until at least June the 25c petrol-tax cut and half-price public transport scheme that he insisted in December would end this month, the Finance Minister was blunt: “Because we’ve got a new Prime Minister”.
That’s quite something. Robertson is telling the crucial half-million voters who backed Labour in 2020, but then drifted back to National, that the Prime Minister they had fallen out of love with was stopping them getting $718 million more in tax relief, which the new Prime Minister has now decided to dole out.
The same brutal realpolitik saw Nanaia Mahuta not just stripped of her Local Government portfolio and booted seven spots down the hierarchy, but told by the Prime Minister that she is expected to spend most of the rest of the year overseas as Foreign Minister.
That confirms Three Waters in its current form is dead, with another scheme now needed to fund the estimated $120-$185 billion required to maintain and improve drinking water, wastewater and stormwater infrastructure over the next three decades.
New Local Government Minister Kieran McAnulty might find Aucklanders more supportive of the Government, rather than ratepayers, paying to fix their sewerage and stormwater systems after this week’s downpours left every beach from Omaha to Maraetai black-flagged due to the potential for wastewater contamination from public or private sewers.
The Māori caucus was compensated for Mahuta’s humiliation by both Willie Jackson and Kiritapu Allan being elevated to the front bench. A quarter of the Cabinet is now Māori, plus three on the reserve bench as ministers outside Cabinet.
Light rail in its current form also seems dead. Transport Minister Michael Wood — a big winner in the reshuffle, jumping nine spots and being rewarded with the new title Minister for Auckland — will now say only that fixing congestion and public transport, even if it isn’t light rail, are his priorities.
Labour was stuck with light rail since Ardern’s first promise as Labour leader was that the first stage — from the central city to the Mt Roskill electorate — would be finished by 2021 and the whole project to the airport would be complete by 2027. Prohibitive costs mean it hasn’t even started.
If Wood needs an answer when he scraps it, Robertson has given it: “Because we’ve got a new Prime Minister”. Taxpayers from Cape Reinga to the Bluff will be pleased they won’t have to pay the likely $30b-plus cost for a project Auckland doesn’t want, and Aucklanders delighted that the money can go to things they do want.
David Parker remaining both Environment and Revenue Minister suggests resource-management reforms and plans to sock it to the rich remain on Labour’s agenda, while Ardern’s departure means capital gains are back in the taxman’s sights.
Similarly, Jackson surviving as Broadcasting Minister gives him one last chance to convince his colleagues of the merits of his RNZ-TVNZ merger. Journalists are preoccupied with it but it’s difficult to believe the public much cares. It’ll determine very few votes one way or the other.
Stuart Nash has been reappointed Minister of Police to carry on Hipkins’ attempts to make Labour look a bit less sympathetic to criminals and a little more worried about people who get burgled, robbed, beaten up, raped or murdered.
In the social portfolios, Hipkins’ appointments are more traditionally Labour than Ardern’s. Deputy Prime Minister Carmel Sepuloni remains Minister for Social Development and Employment, former Alliance Party activist Megan Woods remains in charge of housing, former teachers’ union boss Jan Tinetti takes over education, while infectious-diseases physician and medical academic Ayesha Verrall is the new Minister of Health.
Expect teachers, nurses and doctors to mostly get whatever they ask for, at least until after the election. The changes to the health bureaucracy will rumble on. Not as many voters as the Opposition thinks care that, in addition to Te Whatu Ora — Health New Zealand, there’s another lot of bureaucrats rushing around Wellington with business cards saying they are from Te Aka Whai Ora — the Māori Health Authority. Both will turn out to be merely pointless and wasteful rather than effective or harmful.
Hipkins and — usually — National’s Christopher Luxon do a reasonable job speaking and emoting in front of the media, but neither is in Ardern’s or Key’s class. That’s good.
In the last week, even when dealing with the weather emergency, Hipkins has made at least that one clear policy announcement on petrol taxes and public-transport subsidies, and is promising more through the next month.
If Luxon joins him, we may have an election more focused on dealing with current challenges and taking up long-term opportunities than on which leader we like best. It’ll be a new experience for anyone born this century.
- Matthew Hooton is a political and public affairs strategist. His clients include the mayor of Auckland. These views, including those on Three Waters, resource management reform and light rail, are his own and may or may not reflect those of the Mayor.
