KEY POINTS:
Stop the campaign bus. Labour wants to get off.
Or so it might have seemed yesterday on initial reading of the Prime Minister's annual statement to Parliament setting out her Government's priorities for the next 12 months.
In fact, Labour is very much on board the bus. But
it wants to be in the driver's seat, rather than being a helpless passenger hostage to John Key's election agenda.
The political year is barely three weeks old. It has quickly become a de facto election campaign focused on the gladiatorial battle between National's leader and Helen Clark.
In her statement, Clark seemed to be expressing frustration with this, saying New Zealand's electoral cycle was too short for the Government to shut up shop and do nothing but campaign.
So mundane were the contents of Clark's statement to Parliament that it might have been interpreted as her protest at the constant electioneering.
But Labour is as much party to the de facto election campaign as everyone else. This has to be.
Witness Michael Cullen's announcement of a phased programme of personal tax cuts last week, with the unveiling of a big road-building project in the shape of Auckland's Waterview Connection.
What Clark is really trying to do with her statement is to get out of Key's shadow and avoid being placed in situations where she is measured against him.
Her problem is getting big political bangs for the big bucks she is committing.
Yesterday's policy announcements seemed lacking in political oomph. However, dig deeper and they are much bigger in import than they first look - the case with Clark's two-week-old plan to keep teenagers in school or training until they are 18.
The proposal to free vacant Crown land for housing to increase the supply of new homes and the separate decision to give funding certainty for voluntary organisations running projects for at-risk youth, parenting programmes, women's refuge services and so forth fit Labour's policy focus on the "Kiwi family".
The freeing of land is also part of Labour's wider "housing affordability" policy thrust. It is no quick fix. But housing affordability is an issue of major concern beyond just low and modest income voters.
On Friday, Clark will announce a fresh initiative aimed at curbing tagging. Put that together with the effective raising of the school leaving age, the "B4 School checks" for four to five year olds and the 100 per cent funding of voluntary organisations helping families and you start to see a pattern.
It is what Clark means when she says by election time Labour will have rolled out the "big policies". Labour will campaign on the substance - on policies delivered and policies to come. For Labour - looking for a means to counter John Key's National - "substance" has become the buzzword.
Clark is effectively saying "we have it and they don't".
The absence of flashy, populist measures from yesterday's statement is typical of Clark's "slow and steady does it" build-up to the real election campaign later in the year.
While Key grabs the limelight, Clark is holding her nerve. She hopes to be the tortoise to Key's hare. The question is whether she starts from too far behind. And, more importantly, whether she and Labour are successfully communicating the bigger picture they are trying to create with new policy.
However, yesterday's Roy Morgan poll showing the gap between National and Labour halving to 9 percentage points give some vindication for her strategy.
