Claire Trevett: All aboard Labour's red bus of big ideas

Cartoon / Rod Emmerson

A fortnight's break from Parliament and Labour's MPs have a big red bus and places to go. Auckland, Ngaruawahia, Hamilton, Cambridge, Tirau.

The bus is bright Labour-red and those travelling on it carry Labour-red signs and Labour-red balloons all saying "Axe the Tax".

If you pulled out a magnifying glass you could just see the parliamentary crest signifying the taxpayer had magnanimously paid for this tsunami of red.

That's considered OK because the taxpayers are paying for the bus now so they won't have to pay for higher food prices later.

The hope is the bus will stop the Government raising GST to 15 per cent and giving all the money to the rich in tax cuts.

On the first day of the Axe the Tax tour, Stuart Nash wrote, with the optimism of a first-term MP, that the bus trip would work.

"I actually believe that we have a real chance of forcing a National back-down on a GST increase," he wrote on Labour MPs' Red Alert blog.

The people were flocking to moan and Labour was listening.

"Can you hear them?" he asked of Mr Key. Could anyone? Breakfast host Paul Henry couldn't. On Wednesday morning, he got Mr Goff on just before the bus left for Rotorua, Tokoroa and Te Kuiti. Henry wanted to know if Mr Goff would reverse the GST increase, given Labour was so opposed to it.

Mr Goff spoke of scrambling eggs and how difficult it was to unscramble them. He was the Opposition and his job was to oppose, not to go round promising to separate yolks and whites at some future point when the economic position might make it impossible.

He added, with the optimism of a first-term MP, that he was confident the bus tour would force the Government to back down. It was as confusing as the Whanau Ora policy.

Other issues came and went. The Government laid out its infrastructure plans, full of shiny new roads for future bus trips to roll along. The driving age was to go up, the "give way" rules were to change. The Labour MPs on the bus celebrated - for so long now, the left had given way to the right. Finally, the left would have supremacy.

At the other end of the political spectrum there were rednecks.

Act MP David Garrett proposed sterilising child abusers with a $5000 sweetener. "No compulsion," Mr Garrett wrote, and then added it must be all right because India did it in the 1970s and the pay-off that time was only a transistor radio. His proposal was far more generous. "I don't recall why it was abandoned," he added.

The bus trundled on. New Plymouth, Stratford, Hawera, Wanganui, Bulls. They feel a song coming on. The feeling is nipped in the bud when they remember the mockery that followed previous Labour Party singalongs.

Other Labour MPs were otherwise occupied. Brendon Burns was still trying to save Radio NZ from funding freezes.

Trevor Mallard had other bus trips to be on. He challenged Education Minister Anne Tolley to join him on the teacher union NZEI bus trip around the nation opposing national standards in schools.

Mrs Tolley was too busy on her own one-woman bus trip promoting them. Napier, Taupo, Auckland.

She missed the red bus, too - it was down country halfway through its journey heading towards Feilding, Foxton, Shannon, Levin, Otaki.