Business as usual for PM

So, it’s back to business for Jacinda Ardern. At the Prime Minister’s first major press conference since her return from maternity leave it was like she had never been away – though it’s clearly going to take her some time to adjust to the new surround sound system in the Beehive theatrette.

Ardern kept starting as the newly installed sound system fired questions at her from speakers positioned behind, beside and above her, and she tried to get a fix on who was speaking.

With the press gallery in full cry it must have felt like she was encircled. In the end, it seemed easier for people to throw their hands in the air so she could identify where the questions were coming from.

Otherwise it was business as usual, the questions picking up from where we all left off six weeks ago with Ardern, drilling into the widening rift between the Government and the business sector.

If plummeting business confidence was the thorn in Labour’s side before Ardern went on leave, it’s now a knife that keeps being twisted a little deeper each day.

Treasury is the latest to feel the knife’s edge. Its latest report on the economy admits rosy growth forecasts in the May Budget might have to be revised downward due to the drop in business confidence and a cooling housing market. But Treasury is arriving at this party late. Nearly every bank economist has already come to the same conclusion that falling business confidence may have some very concrete effects.

Ardern’s return offered an opportunity for a reset – a gesture to business that the Government has been listening and is willing to try to meet them, if not halfway, then some of the way.

That, after all, is the trick of incremental change that served the Clark-Cullen and KeyEnglish governments so well. Whenever it looked like their governments were getting speed wobbles, they slowed down.

But there was no olive branch from Ardern – just push back on the disconnect between business confidence and New Zealand’s economic performance.

Expect more of that from Finance Minister Grant Robertson in a speech to an Auckland business audience this week, in which Ardern says he will reiterate the Government’s plan to ‘‘transition away from the settings of the past’’ and the reliance on population growth and housing speculation for economic growth.

Business probably won’t take issue with that message – but these aren’t the reasons for business being spooked. It’s the Government’s industrial relations agenda that has them on the defensive, and the latest polls show why that is such a difficult balancing act for Ardern.

Sunday’s One News-Colmar Brunton poll suggests Left and Right voters are still largely split down the same lines as they were on election night, and Ardern is still the preferred prime minister by a sizeable margin.

This means Ardern’s support still largely rests on the hope her leadership offered to those who had felt marginalised and left out of the economic boom times over the past decade.

And that means lifting wages, and lifting the lot of the ‘‘squeezed middle’’ – and following through on the ‘‘change agenda’’ that Ardern’s leadership promised.

It’s that change agenda that business is balking at.

Treasury is the latest to feel the knife’s edge. Its latest report on the economy admits rosy growth forecasts in the May Budget might have to be revised downward.