The elephant is still in the room

Duck meet water. Winston Peters has enjoyed the job of acting prime minister so much he joked this week he might ask Jacinda Ardern for an extension. But he has clearly settled into the role. His presence has even given everyone a chance for a breather.

Labour MPs have visibly relaxed back into their chairs in the parliamentary debating chamber to watch the ‘‘Winston show’’. No-one knows the cut and thrust of political debate like Peters. It doesn’t count for a lot outside Parliament. But within Parliament’s walls it means something.

The weeks before Ardern’s departure on maternity leave had felt increasingly frenetic and frantic, like a machine stuck in constant high gear.

Labour seemed to be constantly over compensating for its label as an accidental government by refusing to leave any void unfilled.

The sense of newness and unfamiliarity of a new Government and new prime minister, meanwhile, meant everyone was having to get to grips with what it meant, including business.

But Peters is our most recognisable politician; more familiar than an old pair of slippers, as predictable as the Rover Return’s opening hours on

Coronation Street.

The pace of politics has noticeably slowed. Labour could have done with the Peters effect offering a similar breather with business.

Before her maternity leave, Ardern acknowledged that business confidence was the elephant in the room while addressing a large business audience.

She and Finance Minister Grant Robertson visited boardrooms and corporate New Zealand to show their door was open. Robertson has continued the charm offensive with a series of meetings at local chamber of commerce and business group level. But the elephant is refusing to leave the room. Survey after survey paints a grim picture of business confidence and its downward spiral. The Government’s frustration is starting to show. Workplace Relations Minister Iain Lees-Galloway accused business and National of a deliberate scare campaign. Robertson was more diplomatic about business, but did not mince his words about National, accusing it of talking down the economy.

As Robertson points out, the fundamentals are still sound. Economic growth is still in the black, the Government is running a healthy surplus and unemployment is low, at 4 per cent.

There is dispute over some of the projections, with Treasury’s seen as being on the rosier side of the books. But as National’s finance spokesman Amy Adams acknowledged, even National is not arguing that we are in a recession, or even close.

But the backlash from business has been mostly focused on the Government’s industrial relations changes which they see as creating uncertainty and potentially putting a handbrake on their own investment decisions. You don’t have to spend long on Facebook to see that National and business groups have been running an aggressive campaign against those changes and their warnings of a return to 1970s-style union heavy-ing.

As Adams noted, the Opposition wouldn’t be doing its job if it didn’t highlight Government policies it considers damaging to the economy.

In an interview with Stuff, for instance, Adams referred to the loss of our ‘‘best and brightest to Australia’’, harking back to the brain drain in the early 2000s, when tens of thousands of Kiwis flocked across the ditch.

One swallow does not – yet – a summer make. But the danger is that the business confidence surveys become a self-fulfilling prophecy if business put the brakes on spending, or hiring, and that feeds the sense of economic uncertainty. And that in turn could accelerate departures across the Tasman – and a host of flow on effects.

Which is why Robertson won’t go to war with business – even if some of his colleagues are starting to bare their teeth.

Survey after survey paints a grim picture of business confidence and its downward spiral.