Claire Trevett: The PM takes on the farmers, crime and the Sisyphean task of getting a good week

OPINION:

The really gruelling time for Prime Ministers comes when the bad weeks start to outnumber the good weeks, and come one after the other instead of maintaining a respectful following distance.

At such times, not-great weeks are better than bad weeks.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern would have known her chances of a good week were slim when she scanned her diary: a visit to Fieldays, a visit to a byelection some are claiming will be the canary in the cage for Labour’s chances in 2023, and the fallout of the crime problem to contend with..

Ardern went to Fieldays for an afternoon to try to make her peace with farmers after the drubbings over Labour’s policies and reforms: or at least to state her case for those policies and reforms.

That was always going to be a Sisyphean task and Ardern knew it.

She delivered a range of announcements aimed at the rural sector – from research grants to broadband - and highlighted the one area in which her government cannot stand accused of letting farmers down: getting free trade deals over the line.

Her rival Christopher Luxon then turned up and announced absolutely nothing other than lines based on the general theme Labour is useless and he is the answer to everybody’s problems.

The PM’s efforts to convince farmers Labour was the way was only ever going to have a limited impact. By limited, read zero impact.

Act leader David Seymour and NZ First leader Winston Peters went and probably got more votes out of it than Labour – especially if those farmers believe Peters’ recent declaration that he would not go into government with Labour again.

Illustration / Guy Body

While winning over the farmers was always unlikely, the scramble on the crime front is a different matter altogether and one she cannot cede lightly.

Hers is not the first government to come under the pump on the issue of crime. It is almost impossible to combat and when there is success, the police get the credit not the government.

The general disquiet about crime was crystallised with the killing of Janak Patel during that burglary in Sandringham and what was already a big problem for Labour became a massive one.

It did not help it took a while for Ardern and Labour to realise that: Ardern was subsequently criticised for continuing with her normal schedule rather than at least making contact with the family – and going back to her electorate.

Ardern initially tried to point out that youth crime and retail crime were starting to drop again in recent months.

She learned the hard way that the crime that matters is the crime that people see happening - not the crime in numbers on official reports.

Simply defending your record is never enough.

Ardern had to be seen to do something that showed she was still in tune with the concerns of voters.

That something came in the form of more fog cannon funding and harsher penalties for those drivers who tried to outrun the police. It is better than nothing but will do little to arrest National’s push that Labour does not have the answers.

Both Fieldays and the crime issue were also spilling over into the Hamilton West byelection.

Ardern made her crime policy announcement there – including giving Hamilton $1 million of the $4 million funding package for local councils to try to tackle crime.

National Party leader Christopher Luxon joins candidate Tama Potaka on the Hamilton West byelection campaign. Photo / Mike Scott

Crime and the cost of living may well be the issues at play in that byelection – and those are both issues that Ardern is on the back foot over, and which are very tricky to do anything about quickly.

What might hearten her is the appetite for her rival does not seem that great either.

Despite both sides claiming to be underdogs in the byelection, the general hope National had was that it would see Labour given a thumping which would reinforce how the wider electorate had turned on it.

There will be polls on the contest released next week – and there are some murmurings polling has the Labour candidate Georgie Dansey and National’s Tama Potaka fairly close together.

That could explain why National has changed its campaign line: last week it started using the line “a vote for any other candidate is a vote for Labour.”

It is clearly worried the margin will be slim enough that votes which go to Act’s candidate James McDowall could starve it of victory in the seat.

The bigger problem might be getting people to vote at all. Early voting in the byelection is lagging well behind that of other byelections – and byelections always have a low turnout.

If there are any conclusions to be drawn from the byelection so far it may well be that people have had it up to their back teeth with politics – and that there is little to galvanise them from the pickings on offer.

In the meantime, Ardern has to wade her way through the two weeks left before Parliament winds up for the summer and she can have a break.

They will not necessarily be easy weeks. Labour wants as many prickly issues out of the way as possible before 2023 dawns. Among them is likely to be the question of whether the fuel tax cuts will continue past the current January expiry date.

So the next weeks will see a raft of announcements and decisions released as it tries to scratch the itches of the people it wants to vote for them.

She needn’t bother even trying with the farmers.

On the same day Ardern visited, Newshub’s Karen Rutherford did a straw poll of 200 people at Fieldays. Only five said they might vote for Labour.

Ardern’s response was to laugh and quip she was delighted to have the five given the way government measures had been taken by the farmers.

She’ll need that sense of humour next year.