How Labour’s Budget story is designed as an epic trilogy

Reading a great trilogy is a delight. There’s continuity and change, but the characters and story that first gripped you only grow in your imagination. Labour will be hoping for a similar effect from voters after writing the first of what its author labels a Budget trilogy.

Labour’s political narrative is now well-established and its leading character is wildly popular. Freed from its origin story or prequel, being selected to form a government in 2017, Labour is now establishing its own distinctive narrative.

Well mostly, because Budget 2021 did include two items carried over from the coalition prequel: Continuing rail investment and the Scott Base redevelopment.

Be that as it may, one can detect two narrative arcs from the trilogy’s initial offering. The first is to firmly shore up its base to reinforce to these voters that this is a traditional Labour Government, closer in intent to the First than the heretical Fourth.

The minister of finance even set his Budget against the darkest days of yore, when a villainous Ruth Richardson unleashed a fiscal austerity plague upon workers and beneficiaries and scarred our previously fair lands.

With a villain identified, raising benefit levels assumed the greatest prominence in the early retelling. ‘‘At last, a Labour Government,’’ breathed Leftleaning supporters, relieved after rising unease about not doing enough to address inequality.

There was a muted response from centre-Right voters, many of whom kept their jobs through the wage subsidy, so think it’s ‘‘fair enough’’ that others less fortunate also get their reward from our shared sacrifice.

And that’s the second metanarrative that will dominate the trilogy: Covid-19. The ‘‘Team of Five Million’’ is hanging together because of the pandemic even as the Budget carved the team up in politically orthodox ways.

Labour’s significant innovation is the immigration reset as both intended ends and programme means are set to change. Even social insurance is a more instrumental adaptation than innovation because, while the programme means will change, the desired ends – providing temporary relief to those losing employment – have not.

Ministers not invited to make Budget bids face two-and-a-half years of arguing progress while armed with only a sinking lid to effect change.

The only political clouds Labour faces is when one of its plotlines confounds the metanarrative of Covid recovery.

Thus, the biggest storm followed Labour’s pay freeze announcement because nurses, teachers and police were viewed as heroes. Labour quickly began melting the freeze after recognising their plot device’s mistake.

The plot development in second and third instalments of the trilogy will try to skilfully position Labour ever closer to the median voter, so will shift Rightward.

The next chapter will elevate climate change for there were scant words in the Budget, despite a declared climate emergency in the shire.

Money is provided for a form of ‘‘Feebate’’ scheme but, one suspects, Labour is finding the devil is in the policy detail.

The version(s) presented during the prequel coalition had two problems, inequity, with one official’s line still vivid; it (the feebate scheme) provided a ‘‘double benefit’’ for urban carowners and a ‘‘double burden’’ for everyone else. The scheme was more graduated than that, to be fair, but the carbon burden did disproportionally impact the poor.

The second problem was that rural and some trade vehicleowners had little to no choice in replacing their existing purposebuilt vehicles. Those twin headaches make policy design tricky.

Plotlines around housing affordability, climate change, and reducing child poverty will weave through the second and third parts of Labour’s wellbeing trilogy.

The other we’ll hear is ‘‘balance’’. It was repeated ad nauseam on Budget Day and by 2023 it will be the dominant trope. By then a clamour for fasterpaced change will be back, giving the gloriously impotent Greens a chance to win leverage.

National and ACT will employ some variation of the road to hell being paved with (the PM’s) good intentions (but her government’s non-delivery), but it’s hell nonetheless.

Labour will be confident it will still command the centre – and provide balance against extremes – by asking voters for a further strong mandate to make progress towards its wellbeing objectives.

Its chief risk before 2023 is if the meta-narrative – Covid recovery – changes for the worse. Stripped of that power, counternarratives will have more fertile ground to take hold, and with several issues bubbling close to the surface, sudden plot twists can’t be ruled out before the trilogy is complete.

There was a muted response from centreRight voters, many of whom kept their jobs through the wage subsidy.