Weekend Herald editorial: Labour's late change has made this a great race

Editorial

Already many are saying this is the most interesting election they can remember. The reason is not hard to see. No election in living memory has seen a last-minute change of leader precisely like the one Labour made at the beginning of this month. It was a desperate move and conventional wisdom would have said it was a disastrous one. How could a party expect to have any credibility as a prospective government if its leadership was so unstable?

The last time Labour did something similar, replacing Geoffrey Palmer with Mike Moore eight weeks out from the 1990 election, it was in government and its leadership had proven far from stable. It was facing certain defeat and the change did not make an appreciable difference to the outcome. Conventional wisdom was right then but it is wrong now. Jacinda Ardern has brought fresh life not just to the Labour Party but to the election. Labour is back to where it should be in the polls and National, still ahead, is far from defeated.

Labour has shown - or rather discovered, since it was Andrew Little who took the daring decision - that last minute changes of leader can work if the party is in opposition. It has worked for Labour, worked for public interest in the election and in a way it has worked for National too.

Normally the tide turns against a government in its third term. The public grows tired of the same faces and if the main opposition party has new and appealing leadership, the pendulum begins to swing its way a year or two before the election. That last year or two becomes a torrid time for the incumbent government, when it finds nothing it says or does is going to save. National has been spared that fate. It has remained so far ahead in the polls throughout its third term that until this month it looked certain to win the election. The only interest lay in whether it would need the support of Winston Peters in a fourth term.

Now, suddenly, it is in race to finish first. Labour is coming up fast and National has some tactical decisions to make. Can it rely on its economic record to get it to the winning post or does it need a new burst of energy? And what form could that energy be? A new idea to capture the public imagination? It needs to be careful. After nine years a new idea could trip it up as easily as propel it forward. Any good idea it offers now will beg the question, why did you not do this long ago?

So National, which holds its campaign launch tomorrow, needs to rely on its record. Thanks largely to its economic management it is going into the election better placed than any previous third-term government, even Sir Keith Holyoake's. That government had suffered an economic downturn and won a fourth term against the odds.

National's use of the pre-election economic and fiscal update this week was interesting. Finance Minister Steven Joyce drew attention to the slight drop in projected Budget surpluses rather than the bigger picture. It was as though he was encouraging Labour to commit itself to raising the top rate of income tax. Wisely, Ardern did not take the bait.

So far she is displaying a sure-footed political sense that is likely to take Labour higher in the polls. National needs to do more than hope that she trips. It is shaping up to be the most fascinating contest in memory.