Poll delivers a bitter pill for PM Christopher Luxon, a morale boost for Labour and Chris Hipkins - Claire Trevett

OPINION

As NZ First leader Winston Peters said about his party’s sub-5 per cent result in the latest 1News-Verian poll, it is far too early to give a “rats’ derriere” about a poll result.

However, it will be disappointing for Prime Minister Christopher Luxon to discover National has slipped in support, and that parties on the left were doing better than the coalition just six months after the handover of the Beehive.

It would be fair if Luxon was baffled by that. There has been no major catastrophe. At times, the characters of the coalition parties have rattled their canastas at each other but there has been no great conflagration.

The government has been moving at a cracking pace as Luxon tries to deliver on his promise, which was to deliver.

He has been relentness. But all those 100-day plans and three-month action plans appear to have got him precisely nowhere in the polls.

Instead, Labour has managed to claw back up to 30 per cent and National has dropped slightly to 36. Its support partner Act has dropped and NZ First has dropped below the mark it would need to return to Parliament at all (which Luxon may see as a mixed blessing).

Labour’s rise was not easy, given the Green Party had also climbed by two points.

It will have come as quite a morale boost for Labour’s ranks. It has gone through some monumental changes, including the departure of senior figures such as Grant Robertson. It has battled voter fatigue.

Just a month ago, leader Chris Hipkins was being asked if he would resign following a slump in his ratings.

There’s nothing like a bit of good news in the polls to keep energy – and discipline – up.

Luxon’s preferred Prime Minister rankings have dropped back to 23 per cent. He is still ahead of Hipkins on 16 per cent.

However, it is far from the honeymoon Luxon might have wanted as a reward for his cracking pace, and as the voters got used to him.

That honeymoon has proved elusive.

Part of the answer may be in the poll: the sharp spike in those who now feel pessimistic about the economy, up to 26 per cent.

It could be worse: 36 per cent were optimistic. However, it does drive home the ongoing strain on households, despite the easing in inflation.

It is far too early for panic stations yet.

It does turn the Budget into more of a high-stakes event.

National will be hoping it will go some way to setting off a least a mini-honeymoon.

It is setting up its tax cuts as the centre-piece of that Budget, even as Finance Minister Nicola Willis talks about the headwinds in the economy and the pain that lies ahead.

It will need the public to have an appetite for the tax cuts on offer, enough to quell scepticism about whether tax cuts are indeed the best use for the limited amount of moolah on offer.

At the moment a fair chunk of the attention is on the price those tax cuts come at - the most visible one being the job cuts in the public sector.

Beyond that is the apparent scepticism about whether the government can offer everything it is promising. That is a challenging and apparently contradictory combination of tax cuts, cutting government spending while also investing more into frontline services, easing inflation, easing debt, paying for roads and big projects, and eventually finding a surplus again.

Even if it does pull all that off, it is a foolish government that looks to tax cuts as the primary remedy for what ails it.

Claire Trevett is the NZ Herald’s political editor, based at Parliament in Wellington. She started at the NZ Herald in 2003 and joined the Press Gallery team in 2007. She is a life member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery.