Labour's signature policies are atrophying as the Government focuses on the Covid-19 pandemic and recovery. Peter Dunne asks if managing the virus will be enough to get Labour re-elected in two years.
For over a year now Covid-19 has dominated virtually every aspect of our lives. No other single event outside wartime has had such a pervasive influence on national activity and individual freedom. Virtually everything we do has had to be viewed through and determined by the Covid-19 prism.
While there might be a slowly developing public sense that the worst could be over, with an emerging hope of better days to come, for the Government the task is still all-encompassing and constantly changing. However, the glory days of last year are now well and truly behind it. Even though the problems are as substantial as ever, their resolution has become more intractable.
It was speculated at the time that the first national lockdown which ended in May last year might have been the easy bit, given the challenges a recovery was likely to pose. And so it has proved to be. The establishment of the trans-Tasman travel bubble and the yet to happen Pacific Islands bubble have taken far longer than they should have.
The Managed Isolation and Quarantine system is obviously a shambles and the early signs are that the vaccination programme will go the same chaotic way as the measles and last year's flu vaccination programmes. (Both of these were also managed by the Ministry of Health that then, as now, insisted it and no-one else could be relied on to do what was required).
The smooth assurance that characterised the early response has been replaced by hesitancy, obfuscation, and even a year on, a sense that things are being made up as they go along.
In such circumstances the Government might therefore be forgiven were it to wish that Covid19 would vanish overnight. That would allow it to get on with dealing with the real issues Labour governments like to think matter to them and they are good at resolving – health, housing and poverty.
The problem is, though, that in each of these critical areas the Government is failing so far – and the electoral clock’s ticking, though currently quiet, is steadily becoming louder. Although the next election is still two and a half years away, the stark reality is the Government probably has little more than 18 months to show it has turned things around, if it is to get any political dividend from doing so.
Housing has long been singled out as a potential Achilles’ heel. House prices that were already rising are now soaring out of control, with the highest rate of increase in almost two decades. The Government’s main response has been an awkwardly cobbled together set of tax changes that tax experts were neither consulted about before they were announced, nor are confident will actually work. On the supply aside, the logjam remains with insufficient land being made available, either through greenfields developments or intensification, for building new affordable homes.
The Government’s attempt to enter this market through its then vaunted Kiwibuild programme was a disaster. Meanwhile, housing demand at the residential and emergency levels continues to climb with no immediate signs of specific plans to alleviate the pressure any time soon.
Before coming to office, the Labour Party made much of what it saw as unacceptable levels of child poverty. Today, the position of the most vulnerable children in our society is not substantially better than it was three years ago. Indeed, in many cases it has deteriorated, although the impact of the economic insecurity brought on by Covid-19 must be acknowledged as a contributing factor. Nevertheless, the relative position of the least well-off households is getting worse, with levels of dependency rising.
Recent reports that the Ministry of Social Development has up to $2 billion in emergency assistance loan repayments outstanding from 560,000 New Zealanders indicates the dramatic scale of the problem, and the size of the task of making rapid or significant change over the next couple of years.
Health was another area where Labour promoted big aspirations before becoming the Government. Now, over three years later, it has received a report on a potential major reorganisation of the public health system but has yet to announce any decisions arising from it, although these are promised imminently. Even so, they will take years to implement, let alone show some positive effect, meaning the best the Government will be able to offer by the time of the next election is a blueprint for the future.
In the associated and critical area of mental health, decisive action was promised. A report on the state of mental health was commissioned early in the Government’s term; then there was a report on the report, and eventually some indicative funding decisions were announced. But, beyond that, nothing substantive seems to have happened. A recently released government report on mental health achievements was heavily redacted.
Covid-19 has claimed another victim, with Labour now effectively its captive.
To date, the Government has been able to explain away its lack of progress in these key areas as an understandable consequence of having to focus so much of its effort on Covid-19.
While that is undoubtedly true, the problem that now creates for the government is that it has effectively become dependent on Covid-19 for its ongoing political survival.
Last year’s election was a dramatic endorsement of the Government’s handling of the pandemic, rather than its performance in any other key areas. Indeed, until Covid-19 came along and paid its political dividend, Labour was beginning to trail National consistently in public opinion polls.
This means Labour’s success will continue to be defined by its handling of Covid-19, especially since time is beginning to press on its ability to make impressive and substantive policy change in its other key areas before the next election. To that extent, Covid-19 has claimed another victim, with Labour now effectively its captive. That means that not only must the Government ensure the ongoing success of its pandemic response, but it must also hope that it can be dragged out until close to the next election because it has few other big cards to play.
And that raises some other intriguing questions. For example, how much of the current vagueness about the reopening of borders once a sufficient proportion of our population has been vaccinated is really a calculation that traditional Labour voters, less likely to be worried about or focused upon international travel, are probably in no particular hurry to see the borders reopened and are quite happy to see things stay as they are for a while yet?
Or, is the “priority of time to deal with Covid-19” argument now being carefully but deliberately used to buy time on dealing with the other issues Labour says are important to it? The questions become more pertinent as other countries, far more savagely ravaged by Covid-19 than our isolated island nation ever could be, start to release definitive timetables for a return to normality, while our Government has no such plan.
Covid-19 and their handling of it has turned out to be a coincidental political boon for governments around the world. Our government benefited hugely from this at last year’s election. Has it already calculated that, deftly enough managed, it can look to the Covid-19 response having a similar impact again in 2023?
