Covid fire cools, but too slowly for Nats
Covid-19 has been a political furnace. Around the world the cold metal of so-called ‘‘political reality’’ has melted away, remoulded into gigantic spending programmes built on an almost sovereign Federal Reserve, and restrictions on personal movement unimaginable in January.
But this week things started to shape back into what felt like normality in New Zealand politics.
Parliament returned. Winston Peters took over a few news cycles. Labour announced an external review of a policy that hadn’t been going perfectly. National MPs shook their fists over a perceived insult of small businesses by the prime minister.
Then yesterday a poll leaked and reminded us all that politics could stay strange for a while yet.
One has to be cautious about private polls. They lack the full accountability that public polls have, because it’s much harder to compare their records against election results, or against other polls, given we generally only see glimpses of them when it suits someone.
But it was hard to ignore a private poll this striking, and several outlets – including Stuff – managed to confirm it was a real poll, not just some fantasy numbers dreamed up by a partisan.
The poll was conducted by Labour’s pollster UMR over April 21-28 for the pollster’s corporate clients and showed Labour at 55 per cent, National at 29 per cent, NZ First at 6 per cent, the Greens at 5 per cent, and ACT at 3 per cent.
These are extraordinary figures. It’s not for nothing that the pollster decided to include a note below the polling telling readers to treat them with extreme caution.
No-one really believes these numbers will hold through until election day, when the health crisis is (hopefully) in the rear-view mirror and the dreary economic picture is dominating the conversation.
But the numbers are still jawdropping. They wouldn’t just see
Jacinda Ardern returned as prime minister, they would see Labour comfortably governing alone, with National’s mid-bench decimated, several promising careers cut completely short.
One poll can be shaken off by the leadership as inaccurate, but public polling will be returning soon, and might not show a pretty picture for the National Party. (The party’s own internal polling hasn’t been shared with the caucus for months.)
Things will tighten up before election day. But there is still some serious politics to get through before then. And the furnace of political reality has not died down.
Two milestones await the Government the week after next.
First, on Monday, May 11, Cabinet will make a call on whether to leave level 3 or not. Level 2, if we get to it, will not be normal life, but it will be a lot closer to it than other people in industrialised countries are enjoying right now.
It could also be a big risk: the Government is popular at present because it looks like it is doing everything it possibly can to kill this virus, and a hasty exit from lockdown that results in more clusters could harm that seriously.
Thursday next week could well be the bigger test, however, as the Government unveils its Budget.
Usually election-year Budgets are lolly scrambles of voter-friendly policies. But it doesn’t look as if the Government is about to unveil free dental or an income tax cut this year. Indeed, Ardern has been playing down the importance of the Budget in recent interviews, noting it is just ‘‘one step’’ in the economic recovery.
This management of expectations could well proceed a Budget that is quite tightly focused on Covid-19 economic lifelines, rather than the strident fiscal policy many on the left are pushing for.
Finance Minister Grant Robertson has spent $10 billion on just the wage subsidy so far, which is more operational spending than he would usually get to play with in an entire Budget, and remains conscious of the debt this spending had entailed.
While this crisis has seen the Budget Responsibility Rules evaporate into dust, he remains a fiscal hawk. None of the mood music the Government has been playing indicates, for example, that another increase in benefit rates is on the table.
Instead Labour seems quite keen to shore up the centre with even more infrastructure spending and schemes to help businesses get through, like the small business loan scheme it accidentally passed into law on Thursday. Climate change will be talked about and given some token amount, but won’t be at the centre of things.
Education, on the other hand, could get quite interesting. Labour’s fees-free scheme has not increased the number of people enrolling in tertiary institutions at all, but it’s had a pretty good excuse for that so far in that the job market has been good enough to keep people from wanting to study.
Now the job market is heading south a lot of people will want to retrain. An expansion of fees-free could make a lot more sense than it did a few months ago.
The problem for National through all this will be impotency. As ever governments get to do things, the opposition gets to talk about things. No matter how centrist the Budget is, the Opposition is basically duty-bound to vote against it, which will give the Government plenty of good lines to use about National voting against ‘‘insert-popular-measure’’. And it will simply be hard to get much oxygen doing anything but reacting.
What will get National back in the spotlight and up in the polls would be some big bold policy ideas. Not discussion documents, not trifling little meme ideas like prosecuting cyclists for not using cycle-lanes: a solid plan for what it would do differently if elected that is costed and feels ready to go.
Now is not the time to unveil such a thing – after the Budget is – but the party’s supporters should hope that plan is already in the works.
This furnace won’t last forever. But there remains plenty of time to get burnt.