KEY POINTS:
The National Party is in the usual dilemma of a party that expects to win the next election. When the polls have been running one party's way for as long as they have been for National, the trend seems remorseless unless the party self-destructs. In these circumstances, policy commitments are avoided as far as possible, because they pose risks the party sees no need to take.
It risks alienating voters who may dislike the policy, it risks causing dissension in the caucus if the policy is contentious and, looking beyond the election, it risks binding the Government to a promise that may prove easier to make than to keep. National does not have to look back very far to find examples of policies it made in Opposition that it lived to regret. Abolition of the super surtax was one, a referendum on proportional representation was probably another.
National also has seen how Labour has prospered under Helen Clark's strategy to "under-promise and over-deliver". The under-promising part is certainly true. Labour, when it sensed its tide coming in, studiously avoided hard commitments and went to the 1999 election with a few promises it knew it could carry out.
Fortunately, it is impossible for the likely next Government to entirely avoid giving voters a sample of policies it is likely to follow. Its rival makes sure of that. Labour has begun demanding policies of National for the same reasons that National would prefer to avoid them. Labour's hopes of another term depend on National making some commitments that expose it to attack.
A few days ago the National caucus dared release a policy. It was an old policy which has always had superficial public appeal, and perhaps it was one of the few issues on which John Key's caucus can agree. It was "work for the dole". It deserves to be greeted with a collective groan.
The idea of occupying the unemployed with "community" work has been around since the 1970s and tried under various guises by most governments. It is more trouble than it is worth. It involves equipping and supervising work-seekers for tasks that are of little economic value or are being done by people economically employed.
National's latest version is modelled on an Australian Government scheme that requires beneficiaries to work two days a week for community organisations, preferably in an area that interests them. But there is no escaping the fact that any such scheme reduces the time the jobless spend looking for real work and is liable to destroy real unsubsidised jobs. Why would a community agency hire from a labour pool if it could use the unemployed at Government expense?
National knows this. The only reason it has dusted off this hoary old policy must be that it feels the need to produce something at this stage that sounds attractive and that the Government is unlikely to copy in the year or more remaining to the election. But it ought to be embarrassed to produce something so dated.
Unemployment is now so low that the economy suffers a labour shortage in some sectors. To divert the remaining dole recipients to projects of dubious value at public expense makes less sense now than it ever did. In fact, it is positively the last labour market policy any sentient party would adopt at present.
National would do better to apply its mind to the suspiciously high number on the sickness benefit these days, many of whom are probably able to work in some way.
Policies are important less for their promises, which are usually hedged, than for what they say about the state of the party. On the evidence of this foray, National has some hard work still to do before it can convince that it has some fresh thinking worthy of another lease of power.
