Audrey Young: Leaders identify the strongest elements of their campaigns - hope vs a plan

Jacinda Ardern and Bill English have perfectly defined what they are offering in the last two weeks of the campaign - hope vs a plan.

She says she is offering hope. He says he is offering a plan.

While neither is mutually exclusive, both leaders chose to highlight those respective concepts last week as the essence of what they are offering voters, and both are pitched perfectly.

Ardern's message of hope can mean all things to all voters. It can be aspirational and inspirational.

It suits a party that decided earlier this term that there was no point coming up with screeds of policy like the 566-page manifesto of the 2014 election.

It has policy but much less of it and the most controversial issue of all, a capital gains tax, has been repackaged as an agenda item for a tax working group.

Ardern's promise of "hope" is intrinsically tied to her warm and sunny nature and that is why National has no show of successfully attacking it.

Ardern need make no changes to her campaign to put Labour in the box seat to form the next Government.

Labour is still in a pinch-me space - barely able to believe that Ardern has taken the party from hopelessness 42 days ago to the brink of Government in just under two weeks' time.

Labour's delight is reflected in inverse proportions to despair in National.
It never took a fourth term for granted.

But only two and a half months ago, following a successful Budget which featured a family incomes package worth $2 billion annually, National was polling close to 50 per cent.

There was no strong mood for change and those looking for a New Zealand equivalent of what happened in the US election and Britain's EU vote were frustrated.

National had made a pretty good fist of rejuvenating its front bench with the likes of Amy Adams, Simon Bridges in leading positions.

But Ardern's elevation makes those relatively young ministers look somewhat weathered.

English's campaign about "a plan" for New Zealand is intrinsically tied to his successful record as Finance Minister and having set targets to get the Government's books back in the black and done it.

It is tied to notions of security and setting new targets for a growing economy but nothing too dramatic.

English has rare moment of being inspiring. But he is almost never inspiring on television.

That's why the "plan" has to do the talking for National - roads, lots and lots of roads, tax cuts, law and order, sanctions for beneficiaries, help for home buyers but not too much help, in fact not a great deal of difference from the campaign fare of the past three elections that have been master-minded by Steven Joyce.

In the party as campaign chairman and in the Government as Finance Minister, Joyce is an all-powerful figure - too powerful it seems for anyone to have warned him that his cunning plan to attack Labour's fiscals last week could make him look like an ass.

But at least if National can't recover in the next two weeks, it has someone to blame other than English.