Secret Santa Ardern ends year delivering the dosh
Jacinda Ardern needed to do two things at the Labour Party conference this weekend: help to repair rifts in the party and help the public to forget that rifts exist.
She succeeded on the second count with a surprise $400 million Christmas bonus for virtually every state school in the country — those built before 2015 — which will receive between $50,000 and $400,000 to spend on school property.
If it were election year, it would be called an election bribe.
If you were on the right of politics, you would complain that it is not targeted spending, that it is determined only by the number of pupils, not the condition the school is in. But is not one that you would complain too hard about without sounding like Scrooge.
She might not be delivering what everyone wants, but she is ending the year delivering the dosh.
It will provide a boost for small businesses, assuming that schools hire local painters, builders, plumbers and other tradies.
Most of the work has already been identified in the 10-year plans that schools are required to produce for property.
And seeing as most commentators, including the one at the top of the Reserve Bank, have made it clear that the Government should be doing more to stimulate the economy in the face of advancing headwinds, it could be called listening and acting.
When Ardern made the announcement in her final speech at the Labour conference, she brought the house down at the Whanganui Opera House. Behind her was a billboard highlighting the slogan “We’re doing this”.
Equally well received was the news that the Government would extend living wage pay offers to all non-teaching staff in schools, including the cleaners and caretakers.
Ardern’s fiance Clarke Gayford and new party president Claire Szabo were in the front row and the first to embrace Ardern afterwards.
Still suffering from slight swelling in her right jaw after a wisdom tooth extraction, Ardern had reason to be pleased with the speech which, as is her practice, she penned herself.
She is no longer feeling her way like an experimental prime minister. She is in command.
It is too soon to say whether the divisions within the party over the handling of sexual assault complaints have been healed.
But at least they have been contained, and that will be a blessing for Ardern and Szabo as they embark on a new partnership to modernise the party.
There is nothing so off-putting to a voter as a party that appears to be consumed by its woes.
And they were well and truly forgotten in Whanganui’s opera house.