As inflation woes start to make Covid management look like a walk in the park, Labour needs to urgently reset its policy priorities. By Jane Clifton
Its popularity leaching, this reform-minded Government is now in the unhappiest of policy zones, wedged between two famed self-help books. Should it Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, or re-examine whether its policies spark joy, embrace The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and Marie Kondo some of them away?
Its mini-audit of the joyless produced a reduction of fuel tax and accelerated border openings. After a tedious parlour game with the press gallery, it also begrudgingly acknowledged the cost of living's spiral was, technically, "a crisis".
But there comes a point where it's hard to judge whether the damage from controversial proposals is reversible. Back in the day, Labour leader Mike Moore used to talk about voters having the "phone off the hook". The equivalent for the Government today is being "ghosted".
Backdowns risk the dreaded "government in disarray" motif. Some Labour MPs would happily Kondo away the Auckland light rail project – and dispense with the tidying guru's custom of respectfully thanking it for its service first. After so many years of fiscal and ideological bickering, this final blueprint to stiffen Auckland's transport spine has sparked precious little joy, even among true believers in trams as the holy grail.
But Jacinda Ardern super-glued herself to the project long before her prime ministership was even dreamt of. It's an article of faith among her tribes. Axing or even deferring it would shake the Labour-Green core supporters until their fillings rattled – although not to the point of driving them into National's arms.
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The latter is an important countervailing consideration. Capital gains tax (CGT) was no less a core icon, but the fan base got over its abandonment. Labour "felt the fear" and judged there to be insufficient political capital gain from it. The bonus was to remove a major opposition harping point.
At $14 billion – and growing dearer every day – light rail is the fattest of low-hanging fruit. As with CGT, there's no guarantee the tram-and-tunnel package will achieve what its proponents claim. Public unease centres not simply on the cost but on the volley of informed criticism that it's an olde worlde technology apt to be steamrolled by an anticipated onrush of new modes of energy and mass transit.
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Advertise with NZME.Bogged down
A deferral might, on balance, be popular. It would certainly rob National of a juicy election gargoyle with which to monster Labour. That wouldn't matter if Labour were still riding high, but its flight path this year has been like that of a Wellington kererū: an ungainly mid-air slump on take-off, and with biffing headwinds apt to deny it further altitude.
Then there's Three Waters. Peculiarly, most councils want to die in the soggy ditch of undermaintained drainage, sewerage and sanitation. Their headline reason for opposing the carve-off of water management is that being forcibly relieved of this expensive infrastructural liability is an asset grab. Their real beef is loss of power and, more particularly, being forced to share governance with Māori. They mask their baser objections with high-toned lamentation about loss of local democracy, as though voters have somehow always had the right to decide which pipe goes where and what the optimal faecal coliform limits should be.
Drill down and it'll still be engineers, scientists and accountants – as it should be – who decide this stuff, whoever "owns" these "assets", and however many Māori sit at the table. Still, the policy has been a mighty effective rallying point for a host of other parochial and general grievances against the Government, not least insidious superstition that Māori will end up "owning" water.
In a spooky coincidence, Three Waters' irreducibly gutsy architect, Local Government Minister Nanaia Mahuta, has renewed the controversial commissionership over Tauranga's dysfunctional council, just as Simon Bridges' resignation triggers a by-election in the blue-riband seat.
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As the scene is set for a month-long anti-Government carnival, now would be the time to dial Three Waters back. Allowing more than the four management districts and decreasing the unelected component might be enough to defuse the bomb.
It might, however, detonate another, in the form of a Māori caucus rebellion – the more so if it's accompanied, as many will be advising the government, by a clear exposition of the He Puapua doctrine.
The Government has never clarified the status of this well-intentioned roadmap to Māori co-governance throughout the economy.
It packs a nifty spot of Hogwarts wizardry, in that everyone who looks at it sees either their greatest fear or their giddiest aspiration.
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Advertise with NZME.If the Government really does want literal co-governance of all things, that should surely be subject to the ballot box, not done stealthily or incrementally for fear of startling the bigots.
Most voters' sense of biculturalism is rather more sophisticated and open-hearted than in the days when "Iwi/Kiwi" was politics' most effective fright mask. They could handle the truth of Labour's intentions. As things stand, Labour is ludicrously letting its opponents tell voters what He Puapua means.
Seismic challenges
Just as National is finally getting its caucus unified, the Labour and Green leadership need their own tough team talks, not least to squelch the notion that now Covid's nearly over, it's time to pick up where the Government was before it was so rudely interrupted.
It's not just a matter of traditional poll-tracking pragmatism, as in, "If National wins because people hate our light rail or unemployment insurance, they won't happen anyway".
As of this year, every policy demands urgent reprioritisation. There really is a crisis with the cost of living, and it's so tangle-rooted in post-pandemic shock and vaultingly belligerent geopolitics as to make Covid management look a breeze.
National's inevitable tax-cut prescription and the sundry opposition cries of "GST off fruit and veg" and "give back carbon credits" show the opposition, for all its new poll points, is no better clued into the seismic trials ahead than Labour's pet-project-hugging ministers.
Even before the Ukraine war, this export-dependent economy saw freight cost rises going from 5 per cent to a persistent 40 per cent. Inflation's flight path is that of a kārearea with an indefinite tail wind.
That all parties persist with the conceit that they can fix inflation rather than, at best, triaging its crueller effects suggests Three Waters' reform should start with eliminating hallucinogens from the catchment that supplies Parliament.
It's time Labour's opening declaration, "Let's Do This", gave way to "Let's Get Real".
