Mix in a cauldron the following: weak and falling business confidence, proposals to make a return to centralised wage bargaining possible, and a government under growing attack from its core constituency for doing too little.
It's now just over six months since Jim Bolger, who ushered in the union-busting Employment Contracts Act in 1991, delivered his Road to Damascus-style conversion to the need for at least some groups of workers to negotiate national, collectively agreed pay and conditions.
The press conference unveiling the Fair Pay Agreements Working Group report was memorable for Bolger's chiding a cautious Workplace Relations Minister Iain Lees-Galloway, saying "we don't want to see it sitting on the shelf."
However, the Cabinet has yet to consider next steps and the position of New Zealand First ministers is unknown. As champions of small business owners, the minor coalition party again holds some trump cards.
As a way to build consensus, a further round of consultation looks likely.
But it also risks punting a politically risky policy into election year. A discussion document issued in the next couple of months requires time for submissions, consideration, and decisions.
If that were all to happen by Christmas, the government would be doing well.
That means legislation next year, creating focus on an issue tailor-made for an Opposition determined to portray FPAs as "a return to compulsory unionism by stealth".
If this problematic timing looks familiar, that's because it's a replay of the timing the government would have faced, had it not abandoned capital gains tax legislation.
Bolger (left) and Workplace Relations Minister Iain Lees-Galloway at the announcement of a working group to make recommendations on a new Fair Pay collective bargaining system. Photo / File
Stirrings from both supporters and opponents of FPAs in the last few weeks suggest the issue will soon come back to the boil.
Citing research by Wellington economic consultancy, BERL, the Council of Trade Unions, E Tu and First unions argued an absence of international evidence to suggest that nationally negotiated collective pay agreements had any negative impact on a country's productivity.
However, this felt weak. The absence of economic harm is hardly grounds for green-lighting a policy unless it is very clearly going to fix another set of problems.
Its choice of three groups to be the first targets for FPAs - cleaners, security guards and supermarket workers – was more compelling. The union movement wants to focus on occupations that are short on leverage, often shift or part-time workers, and are generally low-paid.
This is not – yet – the charter for muscling into every small and medium enterprise with inflexible, nationally agreed pay and conditions.
For unions, FPAs would be just one lever for fixing the widely held perception that wages have been bid down in many low-paid sectors of the economy, and that wage restraint has caused a hollowing out of pay for middle income occupations.
However, this week's report from the business lobby, the New Zealand Initiative, dismantles both those assumptions while arguing that FPAs would not fix the problem at the heart of the country's low pay rates by OECD standards: poor productivity. That only gets better by working smarter and creating goods and services of higher value than we do now.
At the bottom end of the wage scale, the NZ Initiative also shows that a rising minimum wage has helped the lowest paid do better than those in the middle, while across the whole pay spectrum, wages have consistently outpaced inflation since the late 1990s.
What wages haven't outpaced, however, is the astronomical increase in the cost of housing – whether owned or rented. But the NZ Initiative suggests national collective wage bargaining is the wrong place to focus if the objective is to fix the housing market.
Likewise, New Zealand income inequality has been fairly stable after big gaps opened up in the decade through the mid-1990s, so the 'hollowing out' argument doesn't hold either, it says.
New Zealand's very labour market participation rates and low unemployment would, however, be at risk if FPAs were widely pursued, the NZ Initiative believes.
One-time union leader, now a professional director, Rob Campbell brings a healthy scepticism to both sides' claims.
Employers have made too little of the opportunities created by flexible labour market law to invest in their people and productivity, he says, but equally, "the old collective compulsory arbitrations system produced rigid relativities that worked against the low-paid".
In other words, there is a sweet spot in here somewhere that recognises some groups of vulnerable workers have too little power to negotiate powerfully on their own behalf, while there are plenty of industries where the flexibility to respond to events remains vital to their competitiveness.
In an area this contentious, however, the potential to debate that constructively at all, let alone in an election year, feels remote.
