Heather du Plessis-Allan: After Chris Hipkins’ policy bonfire, voters need to hear plans

Prime Minister Chris Hipkins will have to start telling voters what Labour will do. Photo / Mark Mitchell

OPINION:

Setting alight a bonfire of bad ideas is not as easy as Chris Hipkins made it look.

Just because most voters didn’t like the policies doesn’t mean Hipkins’ cabinet colleagues felt the same.

Quite a few in Cabinet must’ve liked the idea of merging RNZ with TVNZ enough to spend up to $23 million and nearly see it through its launch date, only three weeks away. The unemployment insurance scheme was Grant Robertson’s baby. Three Waters was Nanaia Mahuta’s.

So, it can’t have been altogether easy for Hipkins to convince Cabinet members to abandon their years of hard work and their private fantasies of one day being feted for seeing through their transformational vision.

That it isn’t easy might be the reason Three Waters is only under review rather than set on fire completely, which it so obviously needs to be. There is probably more than one bruised ego involved in those closed-door negotiations.

Hipkins is doing a reasonable job of selling the nonsense that burning these bad ideas will help alleviate the cost of living crisis. Of course it won’t. Killing off the merger won’t put food on your table. Saving the $330m it would cost is chump change in the Government’s annual budget.

The truth is, the bonfire just increases Hipkins’ chances at the next election. It means he doesn’t have to waste time and political capital constantly trying to convince voters that these bad ideas are good ideas. Listening to Ardern’s double-speak about all these policies was part of what led to her popularity falling in the end.

So far Hipkins is off to a good start, drawing a line under the distracted Ardern government and declaring that the five years of nonsense could well be over. The proof is in the polls. Voters like what he’s saying and doing. Labour is now neck-and-neck with National. Marginally ahead in some polls. Marginally behind in another.

But it is only a start. He’s only dealt with the easy stuff. Now comes the hard stuff.

Light rail. Plans to drop speed limits on all major highways. The actual decision on Three Waters. RMA reform.

Cutting Three Waters will probably be the biggest test of Hipkins’ political management skills. He needs to go far enough to convince voters to accept it, while convincing the Māori caucus to swallow that dead rat. Then he needs to unwind a law already passed.

Time is not on his side. He can’t dawdle so long that he loses the momentum of the current sense of change. Sooner is better so that he can stop looking backwards and start looking forwards.

And then the real puzzle. What will he replace all these bad ideas with?

Once he’s finished telling us what his Labour Government will not do, he’s going to have to start telling us what they will do.

The list of gripes voters have is long. Retail crime. Potholes. Falling house prices. Rising mortgage rates. Grocery bills. Warnings of winter power outages. Truancy in schools. Falling literacy and numeracy rates. Looming winter strain on a badly stretched health system. More kids sitting on the dole. Traffic congestion in major cities.

Somehow he’s going to have to sell his plan for fixing all of that, while convincing voters that this plan will actually fix those things, unlike Ardern’s plan that didn’t fix any of them.

And then he’ll have to bat away any fresh bad ideas his Cabinet colleagues dream up between now and the next election.

Heather du Plessis-Allan Drive, Newstalk ZB, 4pm-7pm, weekdays.