Nearly halfway through the term, parties start to stake out territory – Stuff

OPINION: Its 18 months in and, as we near the likely halfway point for this majority Labour Government, the issues of the election are tentatively taking shape as parties begin to jostle for position.

The Government has now almost cleared the decks of its major Covid-19 policies. Mondays announcement that the traffic light settings would remain in red seemed a bit out-of-step with where the country was at. You can argue over whether the settings should already have changed, but the likelihood is that they will near the end of the coming week.

Besides, a mixture of the big sick and self-imposed restrictions are hitting business activity. Ask anyone in a central city.

Ministerial staffers who previously spent their days doing Covid-related work are now finding that, all of a sudden, they are back to doing what they were previously getting on with work that their bosses are actually in charge of. This as director-general of health Ashley Bloomfield announced that he was leaving.

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David Seymours ACT is pushing National from the right, claiming to have been the more effective opposition party over the past year.

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One of the more interesting dynamics playing out now is the relationship between the two major parties and their smaller, more ideologically pure, fellow travellers.

So, while Labour was busy making diesel vehicles cheaper to run this week by reducing road-user charges following on from petrol tax cuts a couple of weeks ago the Greens have been aggressively accusing Labour of subsidising fossil fuels, something on which it spent a fair bit of its Apec agenda trying to reach a deal.

Of course, reducing road-user charges isnt a subsidy for diesel, but it does make the fossil fuel cheaper.

Similarly, the Greens are also now pushing hard on rent controls. Its a good retail politics issue for the Greens: superficially, rent controls look like a good idea especially to those paying through the nose for often dank accommodation.

Under co-leaders Marama Davidson and James Shaw, the Greens hit a remarkable political achievement in 2020 increasing the partys vote at the same time that Labour massively increased its. The centre-left vote was grown, rather than Labour or the Greens cannibalising each other for the same votes.

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Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern stops to answer questions from reporters in the halls of Parliament.

But now the Greens see renewed opportunity. Despite being sort of in government with Labour, providing two ministers in Shaw and Davidson, they are chafing against what they view as Labour arrogance and high-handedness.

Jacinda Ardern came to power promising that she was going to sort housing, poverty, inequality and climate change. The issues remain decidedly unsorted. For those on the left who would like to see Labour crank out a fiscal cannon and spray the joint with money, the Government has been a disappointment. There have been big increases in spending, but not the sorts of direct intervention in the economy the Greens favour. Next election, you would expect the far-left party to pick off some of Labours vote.

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Greens co-leader Marama Davidson is pushing the Government hard from the left about rent controls, while the party is also accusing it of subsidising fossil fuels.

Meanwhile, on the right, a quite different thing is going on. In the House this week, National shifted from talking about the cost of living to lack of delivery. The party thinks there is fertile ground here, in the same way that the cost of living crisis seemed little more than just a repetitive and slightly quixotic campaign before inflation ticked up and it really took off.

National figures reckon that this will become a weak point for Labour, because of its tendency to present inputs (money) as an outcome or achievement. On this basis, National thinks it will be able to identify a lot of waste where the Government has announced money for something that doesn't seem to have delivered much by way of outcomes. Mental health is a good example: despite more money being announced, little has been achieved and, in some cases, there is little evidence the money has even been spent.

Time will tell.

National is also firmly getting back into law and order, specifically crime in Auckland. Police Minister Poto Williams is certainly a weak link in the Governments front bench, and National is honing in on her. Crime is an issue, like inflation, where politics usually follows real life: if there is a problem with crime, voters know it they also know if there isnt. Gangs are a slightly different issue, but law and order is potent.

ACT, meanwhile, is doing its best to hold up its vote by putting daylight between itself and National on key issues. Climate and co-governance are two on which it is trying to win votes by having a clearer, more free-market and less costly position than National. Its policy on co-governance is simple: it is against it.

The party released a poll it conducted in Tauranga, showing that half of all voters think ACT, not National, has been the most effective opposition party over the past year. For ACT, retaining its vote in the 8 per cent to 10 per cent range into the next election is about cementing itself as a consistent and credible party to the right of National.

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The Budget is fast approaching.

The Government keeps on. A Budget is fast approaching on May 19, when we will get a sense of what is coming over the next few months. It will be what sets Labour up for next year and reveals how politically bold it is including on climate change.

There are a bunch of changes still to come this term: fair pay agreements, the new Three Waters legislation and reform, the emissions reduction plan, centralising the health system, and possibly reforming the Resource Management Act.

Whether a National/ACT government would repeal some, all, or any of these changes is an open question. When it comes to Three Waters, just about every opposition party professes to be into localism before it gets into government.

Balancing the politics of the now, while successfully clearing the decks of the big changes, will be crucial to Labours re-election chances.

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Nearly halfway through the term, parties start to stake out territory - Stuff