Kiwis trust Ardern on economy
Just three months before the next election, New Zealanders are showing symptoms of resurgent Jacindamania, according to a new poll.
Meanwhile National’s hoped-for Mullermentum has become Muller‘meh’-tum, with new leader Todd Muller failing to register significant support.
The poll, by Horizon Research, asked voters who was best placed to manage the pandemic response.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was ahead on 66 per cent, well in front of Muller, who polled 14 per cent.
ACT leader David Seymour came next, polling 4 per cent. Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters scored 3 per cent, while Green coleaders James Shaw and Marama Davidson each scored 1 per cent.
Even when the focus shifted to the economy, a historic weak point for Labour among voters, Ardern was well ahead of her rivals.
When asked who was the best leader for the economic recovery,
53 per cent of respondents picked Ardern, compared to 24 per cent who backed Muller.
Peters came in on 4 per cent, with Seymour polling 3 per cent.
Shaw and Davidson were equal on 2 per cent.
When broken down, all demographics except those with a household income above $200,000 and those who gave their party vote to the Conservative Party in 2017 rated Ardern as the best leader to manage the response.
The survey of 1636 adults weighted its results on age, gender, highest education level, personal income, employment status and 2017 party vote. The margin of error was
2.5 per cent.
The survey was conduced between June 10 and 14, so it did not take in the period after two positive
Covid-19 cases left mandatory selfisolation, sparking a flurry of investigation into lax quarantine measures at the border.
At a large meeting in recent weeks, Health Minister David Clark gave a bunch of orders to assembled officials from his ministry.
They hesitated for a moment, until Clark’s top public servant, Ashley Bloomfield, gave them what looked to be a nod, and they started enacting the orders, Stuff understands.
Clark is a particularly weak minister with a particularly powerful head of his ministry. But such scenes are far from unheard of. Ministers are temporary; their ministries are not.
The difference between what a minister says should happen and what actually happens on the ground were brought into sharp relief this week when two women left managed isolation without getting a Covid-19 test. In a spot of terrible luck, they happened to be the first positive cases we had seen in almost a month.
It wasn’t just ordinary citizens asking how exactly this had happened. The policy had recently changed so that all returning Kiwis should have been tested on days 3 and 12, and definitely before leaving on compassionate leave. These two somehow hadn’t. The policy wasn’t the problem, but the delivery of it was.
This played perfectly into National’s hands. After a lacklustre start to his leadership Todd Muller finally had an issue to run with, and an issue that worked into the wider theme he is trying to set for this election: that the issue people should vote for is not values or policy, but competency.
It’s hardly a critique Muller came up with on his own, but after stripping away some of the more virulent attacks on ideology that the right of his caucus would like to make, it’s the attack line he’s left with: that the Labour Party is good at press releases but not at delivering what it promises.
The fact that this campaign makes sense relies on the truth that, on many issues, Labour and National sit on slightly differing sides of the centre.
Partisans on both sides see this differently. For the left, Labour has basically given in to neo-liberalism and has lost the ability to truly fight for an economic system that gives workers a bigger share of the pie, or a proper cradle-to-grave welfare state.
The right’s perspective on this is best summed up by an old joke of David Seymour’s: if Labour campaigned on full communism, National would campaign on managing it better. (After all, John Key called Working For Families ‘‘communism by stealth’’, and then extended it in office.)
Any analysis this simple misses things. There are still crucial differences in the way each party wants to manage the country, which are blindingly obvious when looking at things like tenancy or minimum wage laws.
But on immediate Covid-19 response, the daylight between them isn’t particularly large: both say we should borrow a lot of money to cushion the blow, concentrate spending on keeping people in work, and intervene dramatically in the economy with measures such as lockdowns and border closures to keep the virus at bay.
Because of this closeness of actual policy, a ‘‘competency’’ argument makes sense. It allows you to remind voters of high-profile failures like KiwiBuild, and it lets you exploit the situations like the one this week to maximum effect. It also allows National to attack individual ministers, but not the uber-popular Ardern herself, something Muller is trying with his ‘‘17 empty chairs’’ line.
There are risks. For one, the argument has to make sense, and it often doesn’t. This Cabinet certainly has some underperforming ministers, but there is no way it has 17 of them. National strongly disagrees with the reform programme of ministers like David Parker and Chris Hipkins, but it’s hard to describe them as incompetent.
Then there are the merits of the wider competency argument when applied to Covid-19. The bungle this week was hugely embarrassing, but at the time of writing the follow-up process has stopped any chance of community transmission. It’s messy, but if your test is still ‘‘Is Covid-19 at large in the community?’’, the answer is still ‘‘No.’’ Indeed, we continue to have fewer restrictions than almost anyone else, and this did not happen by accident.
Things are made more complex when you remember that the bungle this week was not the result of a bad policy but of that policy not being applied. The National Party argument is that, when it was in government, its ministers were much more across the detail, auditing every detail to make sure there were no screwups.
This is how the party can defend its policy of allowing international students back into the country and allowing universities to manage their isolation, as long as several tests are carried out to make sure they are Covid-free. Unlike what happened this week, a National Party minister will supposedly just not allow a policy to not be followed.
The problem is that ministers are still just 20 or so people on top of a writhing mass of 40,000 public servants. The Ministry of Health is going to look exactly the same on September 20 as it did on September 19.
This competency argument relies on an image of the National Party that Muller is betting lies dormant in the minds of voters, ready to be reactivated. This image is of the party when last in government and dominant in the polls, with John Key and Bill English in charge. (Labour is aware of this image being a risk for them, which is why Ardern keeps saying National ‘‘isn’t the party of Key and English any more’’.)
It’s not a terrible bet: National was at the mid-to-high 40s in the polls as recently as January, even with a leader the public didn’t like. And even though Muller was never actually a minister in the KeyEnglish government, he has enough of them around him to build up a bit of the aura.
But the bet that the stuttering economy will save National is looking more and more heroic these days. A Horizon poll that Stuff is publishing today shows 53 per cent of people trust Ardern to lead the economic recovery, compared with 24 per cent for Muller.
There are many weapons Ardern and Labour have to fight the competency argument, or change the field of argument altogether. The simplest one is the power of being in office already. Ardern can say she is a much better leader than Muller because she’s now led the country through two major crises, something Muller has not done and cannot do from opposition.
Indeed, his office had trouble this week opening a safe. Competency arguments can swing both ways.