Christopher Luxon's ruling out any possibility of National working with the Opportunity Party after the election is not nearly as emphatic as it sounds.

This time three years ago Luxon was saying his party's strong preference was not to have to work with New Zealand First after the 2023 election, only to end up going into coalition together a couple of months later. In a similar vein, ACT's David Seymour originally specifically ruled out ever sitting around the Cabinet table with New Zealand First Ministers, only to join the post-election coalition because of the perceived greater good of keeping Labour out of office.

Luxon's seemingly unequivocal comments notwithstanding, there is absolutely no doubt National would turn to the Opportunity Party if it needed its numbers to form a government after the election. But there is still a long way to go before that prospect becomes a serious issue.

The Opportunity Party still must get elected to Parliament for a start. Although recent polls show it close to crossing the 5% party vote threshold, it is not there yet. Polls over the next few weeks will show whether the Party's momentum is strengthening on the back of recent publicity, or whether it has peaked and will fall back as there is more scrutiny of its policies and plans. Its most challenging time has yet to come.

It is a high stakes, all or nothing game for the Opportunity Party. If it fails to cross the 5% threshold and does not win an electorate seat (talk about its winning Mount Albert seem fancifully optimistic at this stage) all party votes cast for it will be discarded and therefore essentially wasted.  

This is also the real point behind Luxon's comments this week. Polls show that the biggest chunk – about one quarter – of new supporters for the Opportunity Party are people who voted National at the last election. They may think they are doing National a favour by supporting the Opportunity Party, giving it a potentially more reliable coalition partner than New Zealand First. But they are also voters National desperately needs to entice back into its column. Warning them that their votes will not help the re-election of a National-led government is an important tactic in this regard.

National fears that those voters hold the key to whether the centre-left bloc can get the numbers to form a Labour/Greens/Opportunity coalition that may not therefore need the support of Te Pāti Māori. It also knows that if the Opportunity Party fails to cross the 5% threshold all its votes – including those of previous National supporters – will fall into the electoral waste bin and be ignored.

The former National supporters now favouring the Opportunity Party could add up to 2 percentage points to National's current polling levels, were they to return home. With National polling on average just over 30% in current polls – down from the 39% of the party vote it received at the 2023 election – and the coalition running only marginally of the Opposition bloc in most polls, an uplift of up to 2% in National's fortunes could have a significant impact on the election outcome.

Moreover, if National can reclaim the bulk of those former supporters and the Opportunity Party falls below the 5% threshold, the support it has attracted from former Labour and Green Party supporters will fall into the same electoral waste bin, to the detriment of those parties’ election chances. That is why attempting to engineer this type of electoral outcome was the real reason behind Luxon's comments this week.

But this highlights an important aspect of MMP – that politicians and political parties do not have the control over the system they had previously. Everything they now say or do is constrained by the parties they are working with or seek to work with in government. There are no political absolutes anymore. So, when the Prime Minister said this week that the most important decision at the coming election was which party could manage the economy best, it was a far less absolute statement than when previous Prime Ministers have made similar statements in the days of the First-Past-the-Post system. 

Appearing to rule out working with the Opportunity Party is in a similar vein. It sounds emphatic and clear but is really at best conditional. If the coalition's options after the election are forming an albeit cumbersome governing arrangement with the Opportunity Party or going into Opposition, the outcome will be a no-brainer.

And Luxon's current coalition partners will expect to have just as much say as him in making that decision.

 

New Zealanders have an often-contradictory view about what they expect in their politicians.

At one level, they are frequently dismissive of those they regard as "career" politicians with no real life-experience. They barely tolerate the way they do things because they are just the "games politicians play." They deride all politicians for their perceived caution and tendency to see most situations through their own particular political prisms.

They say they yearn for leaders who will simply get on with the job, and deal with the things that matter to people, rather than keep pursuing their own political agendas. So, when Christopher Luxon came along, with no real political experience, but a solid business background and no apparent desire to morph into a political figure the way his mentor Sir John Key did, he was seen as a breath of fresh air, precisely because he was avowedly "not a politician".

However, despite the superficial appeal of a non-politician experienced business leader running the country, people still expected Luxon to quickly get to grips with the political game and how to play to it, in just the same way they expect players bursting into the All Blacks to immediately know how to play international rugby. Much of the criticism Luxon has faced as Prime Minister is because he has not adapted to his changed circumstances and continues to look, often curiously defiantly, like a political fish out of water.

Yet there remains a public view, despite the Luxon experience, that it takes no special skills to be a successful politician, and that virtually anyone can do the job, regardless of their background. It is the same sort of thinking that lies behind the ACT Party's recruitment of high-profile broadcaster Paul Henry as a candidate.

Without deriding Henry's broadcasting capabilities, it is worth noting that few people with impressive external backgrounds have made the transition to become successful politicians. Key and Steven Joyce would be the obvious examples of recent years, but others are few and far between. 

Henry's selection invites comparison with that of another high-profile broadcaster, Pam Corkery, who was elected to Parliament in 1996 as an Alliance MP. She quit after just one term, saying she found Parliamentary life frustrating and less rewarding than she had expected. Within minutes of his announcement as a candidate Henry was dismissing Parliament as "full of twats", suggesting that he too will quickly feel the same frustrations as Corkery did.

The point external stars recruited to Parliamentary parties often fail to grasp is that Parliament, and by extension government, is an environment unlike any other. It is unforgiving and constant, and its essentially collaborative processes leave little room or tolerance for excessive displays of individualism. That is because Parliament is basically a forum for the expression of diverse opinions, often to the point of tedium, but nevertheless critical to a functioning democracy. The real work of government occurs elsewhere – in Cabinet, its committees and select committees – where once again collaboration and compromise, sometimes accompanied by long and thankless hours of debate, are the order of the day, rather than flashy displays of self-proclaimed individual brilliance.

It could be argued that Winston Peters is the counter-factual to that point. After all, he has successfully carried off flashiness and shameless self-promotion like no other since the 1970s. However, that been less the explanation of his success than his deep understanding and application of how politics works.

And here is where New Zealanders’ contradictory views of politicians come together. They may not like Peters or what he stands for, but they acknowledge him as a skilled political operator. By contrast, in Luxon’s case, while his business background is known, he is not seen as a skilled politician, hence the criticism of him as Prime Minister. Unlike Peters, he is not behaving the way they think a politician should behave.

Corkery and Luxon expected Parliament to bend to their wills because of their backgrounds. Key, on the other hand, quickly worked out that while his impressive background was a significant asset, it had to be tailored to fit the Parliamentary environment, if he was to be successful.

Paul Henry may well to be an attractive vote-catcher for the ACT Party, at least in the run-up to the election, which is presumably why he has been selected. However, experience suggests that of itself is no automatic guarantor that a successful or substantial political career is about to follow.

The rock and the hard place that has defined New Zealand’s foreign policy for the last decade or so is getting ever sharper and more uncomfortable.

Since the thaw in relations with the United States after the 1980s nuclear row, New Zealand has been a reluctant friend. Consistent with what it holds to be an independent foreign policy, New Zealand has supported the United States on some issues and opposed it on others. For example, it provided significant military and operational support to the United States-led Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan in the early 2000s but opposed the invasion of Iraq in 2003 because it had not had the approval of the United Nations.

More recently, New Zealand opposed the United States’ intervention in Venezuela as not in accordance with international law. And although it had forthrightly condemned the recent actions of the Iranian government, New Zealand stopped short of explicitly supporting the United States-led attacks on Iran earlier this year.

While this nuanced ambivalence has served New Zealand’s interests well in recent years, it is easy to see how the United States, especially the current idiosyncratic Administration, might feel that New Zealand is at best a “fair-weather” friend. In this context, the recent comments by the War Secretary Hegseth that New Zealand was “freeloading” off the United States by not more significantly increasing its defence spending, and the new United States’ Ambassador’s expressed “disappointment” at the continuation of our long-standing anti-nuclear policy are not just idle comments. They clearly reflect a deeper United States’ frustration at New Zealand’s continued broadly friendly, but carefully distanced and wary approach to the bilateral relationship.

There are many reasons for this, beyond the anti-nuclear policy, which although still a sore point for the United States is largely a red herring, given the infrequence of nuclear ship visits here prior to the 1987 ban being enacted. For example, promoting two-way trade has long been an issue – from the time then Finance Minister Walter Nash unsuccessfully proposed a “reciprocal trade treaty” during talks in Washington in 1939, through to the more concerted, but equally unsuccessful, attempts from the early 2000s to secure a free trade agreement. Against that backdrop, President Trump’s imposition of “Liberation Day” tariffs on New Zealand’s exports to the United States was a doubly bitter pill for New Zealand to swallow.

Meanwhile, New Zealand’s relations with China have been slowly expanding since the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1972. Improved political, cultural and economic links over the years led to a free trade agreement – China’s first ever – being concluded between the two countries in 2008 and ever closer political ties. The free trade agreement has been an outstanding success, so much so that China is now New Zealand’s major trading partner.

But at the same time New Zealand seems to have been none too bothered about being drawn ever more closely into China’s expanding political web, to the extent that successive governments have been almost pathologically scared stiff of saying anything that might upset China and threaten our economic security. And consequently, China, while occasionally making warm noises about how much it values its links with New Zealand, largely does as it wishes in this region, and places little value on anything New Zealand has to say. Whenever New Zealand dares pluck up the courage to offer even the mildest criticisms of Chinese policy, it is firmly rebuked by Beijing for interfering in China’s domestic affairs.

This year alone China has conducted unannounced naval exercises in the Tasman Sea, close to Australian territorial waters, and conducted a live missile firing test in the Pacific with only the briefest advance warning to New Zealand. On both occasions all New Zealand could do was stand by meekly and watch.

The sad, unintended outcome of our foreign policy is that at a time of heightened global and regional instability we are not trusted as reliable or committed by the United States and are being walked all over by China. Even our one true ally, Australia, has its frustrations with what it considers New Zealand’s less than full commitment to regional security.

As an independent nation, New Zealand has every right to pursue an independent foreign policy and should not abandon that ambition lightly. But at the same time, it must appreciate that it is not operating in a vacuum, and that there will be consequences, whatever options it chooses. The combination of an increasingly unpredictable and volatile United States, and a more activist China playing out their quest for global supremacy in our part of the world creates new pressures for countries like New Zealand.

That is why the challenges confronting our current foreign policy have become more pronounced. On the one hand, New Zealand cannot afford to become seen as too closely aligned with either of the superpower rivals, despite its economic reliance on China, and likely increasing pressure from the United States to modify its stance. But on the other hand, it cannot allow itself to be seen by either as irrelevant, or unreliable.

As the rock and the hard place become ever more uncomfortable, New Zealand needs to strike a new balance between upholding its independent foreign policy and being taken seriously as a regional player by the superpowers. Achieving that balance and protecting our national integrity will require our politicians and diplomats to exercise even more skilful diplomacy and careful leadership over the next few years than they have already done.

Yet it remains a goal worth striving for.

 

Since 1996 no new party has entered Parliament without either a sitting or former MP leading it. The Conservative Party in 2014 came close to doing so, scoring about 4% of the party vote, but ultimately failed and never attained that level of support again.

With some opinion polls currently suggesting the Opportunity Party is inching closer to the cusp of the 5% threshold that sobering reality remains a daunting challenge. As with the Conservative Party and other small parties before them, potential voters will have to be persuaded that the Opportunity Party can make a difference, and that therefore a vote for it would not be wasted.

That raises the broader position of the Party's positioning. The Opportunity Party has correctly positioned itself as a centrist Party, able to work with either the right or the left blocs. But voters like to know which side of the ledger the Party they support is really on.

Saying that a Party can work with either side of politics can confuse voters – believe me. When UnitedFuture's leader, I was often asked whose side I was "really" on – National’s or Labour's. When I replied neither, because I was on UnitedFuture's side, and our support for either a National- or Labour-led government was based solely on any policy agreements we could reach with them, I was accused of being an unprincipled opportunist.

One often hears a similar sentiment expressed in respect of New Zealand First today. And yet people say they quite like the idea of a party that can bridge gap between National and Labour. But despite MMP having been in place for thirty years now, many people still view politics through the old National/Labour prism.

In part this is due to both the major parties remaining too tribal to fully trust a smaller party that says it can work with either side in government. I was acutely aware of this when working as part of Labour- and National-led governments between 2002 and 2017. The reactions of both National and Labour to New Zealand First today show that sentiment remains a powerful part of contemporary politics.

That factor will be even more relevant in the event the Opportunity Party makes it to Parliament, especially given its lack of prior Parliamentary experience. Luxon's dismissal this week of the Opportunity Party as really a vote for Labour and the Green Party shows that nothing has changed in this regard. And sowing voter doubt about the Opportunity Party's "true" alignment in turn raises the question for voters of whether a vote for the Party can be risked.

So far, the Opportunity Party has had a relatively easy ride, because neither of the major parties has taken seriously the possibility it may win seats in Parliament. However, that may be changing now. The Party's rising poll results mean it will become subject to far more attacks from all the other parties as a potential risk to their support levels. How it responds will have a major influence on how voters perceive its credibility and whether it is worth voting for.

Its recent decision to change tack to focus on winning the Mount Albert electorate is a sensible one. After all, if it wins an electorate seat it will be deemed to have crossed the party vote threshold and every party vote it receives will count towards numbers of seats in Parliament. That would immediately reduce the wasted vote argument the other parties will throw at it because it would have crossed the party vote threshold without having to reach the 5% figure. But winning the Mount Albert seat – held by Labour the last eighty years – will be an uphill battle and cannot be assumed.

This will be the Opportunity Party’s fourth election. To date, it has provided novelty value, and until now has not threatened to gain representation. But this year may be its best chance to break through and do so. In the wake of political uncertainty the world over, it may benefit from being a party of fresh faces and new ideas that has come along at just the right time. But equally this election could also be its last chance.

However, even if it succeeds, the Opportunity Party will be in for a rude shock. It says nobly and admirably it wants to refocus the election campaign and politics generally to be about the best policy options for the future. But none of the other parties has such a grand vision – for them, elections are much more about doing all they can to win and retain political power. They are unlikely to welcome the well-meaning newcomer with open arms.

Therefore, should it cross the threshold, it will have to quickly adjust to the real political world where power and its retention are what matters to long-term Parliamentary parties, not earnest, lofty policy debates. What concessions it gains will be at best grudging, and only because its numbers might be needed to form a government. And if not, the Opportunity Party could face three unforgiving years of irrelevance – in Parliament but with few chances to achieve much.

For better or worse, the cruel reality remains that although many new and well-motivated parties have tried to get into Parliament over the years, few have succeeded. Persuading enough voters that it can break the mould and succeed where others have not, and so change the nature of politics, as it promises, is still a mighty hurdle for the Opportunity Party to overcome.

But this year is potentially its best prospect of doing so.

Our system of government has been built on the partnership between Ministers and their public service officials to implement the government’s policies. Inevitably, that requires a high level of mutual confidence and trust.

The system further assumes that officials, whatever their personal political allegiances, will work impartially with Ministers to achieve those goals. Ministers have the right to expect the professional loyalty and genuine effort of their officials, and officials should expect to receive the support of their Ministers in return.

By and large, the system works as intended, but every now and then things go awry, sometimes seriously. Recent revelations about some Immigration Service officials deliberately pulling the wool over the eyes of both the current and previous governments over a $33 million biometrics technology upgrade that ultimately produced nothing, provoking the understandable “fury” of Immigration Minister Erica Stanford, is perhaps the most dramatic example.

That is presently the subject of an inquiry by the Public Service Commissioner, so making pronouncements, let alone threats of imprisonment, about what should happen next is not only premature but also extremely unwise. Nevertheless, confirmation of Stanford’s complaints by her Labour predecessor, Andrew Little, highlights the seriousness of the situation.

However, officials pursuing their own agendas and keeping Ministers in the dark has been going on in the public service, usually at much lower levels, for years. Indeed, the internationally successful comedy series “Yes Minister” and “Yes Prime Minister” were predicated on the notion that public servants regularly outwitted Ministers and thwarted their efforts to introduce policies the officials disapproved of. Many politicians, in New Zealand and elsewhere, considered the   series to be documentaries rather than comedies.

I began my working career as a junior official in the old Department of Trade and Industry, in the days when import licensing was still in place. To regulate imports and protect both the balance of payments and domestic manufacturing, the government produced an annual Import Licensing Schedule, setting out which specific consumer and other items and to which extent could be imported. The system was cumbersome, and open to much potential abuse.

Officials regularly ignored the Schedule when dealing with licensing applications from favoured  importers and ran the system according to their own instincts and experiences. Indeed, I recall on more than one occasion being at meetings where officials debated “what would Walter have done” to resolve a particular application, rather than following that year’s Import Licensing Schedule. The “Walter” they were referring to was Walter Nash, who had set up the import licensing system in 1936, decades earlier!

Years later, when a Minister, I recall being told by officials that regulations I was seeking were “just a couple of weeks” away, only to discover soon after that no work had been done on drafting the regulations because officials were unsure how to make them work and did not want to tell me so. On another occasion, I recall two officials appearing before a Cabinet committee to discuss a particular government programme. When the Prime Minister asked how this fitted in with current government policy, they bluntly replied that it did not because it was a programme established by a previous government which they were still administering, regardless of the then current government’s policy.

While these are smaller examples than the current Immigration Service scandal, they are symptomatic of a wider issue. Public servants often become so engrossed in what they are working on that they end up viewing it more as their “life’s work” than the government of the day’s policy. Because they tend to outlast Ministers in their roles, it is easy to see how they come to regard their political masters as transitory interruptions, interfering with the work they have been immersed in for so many years.  

And in many cases, they will be right – as public servants working on an issue over several years and different governments, they will often know more about the details (and the problems) than the Minister to whom they are reporting. But while this may provide an explanation of such behaviour, it does not justify it. It does, however, underscore the challenge facing the Public Service Commissioner in trying to get to the bottom of Minister Stanford’s concerns and the wider systemic issues underlying the behaviour she is so furious about.

But unless they are resolved in a way that enables Ministers – in this government or any future government – to regain confidence in the commitment and professionalism of the public service, the very structure and integrity of our system will be severely shaken. That in turn will impact on public trust – especially if it leads to people no longer having confidence that the government they have elected will be able to implement the policies they voted for.

As the esteemed British philosopher AC Grayling notes, democracy is not self-sustaining. It requires informed citizens, trusted institutions, and a political culture that values reasoned debate and compromise. He argues that when those conditions deteriorate, democracies become vulnerable to polarization, populism, and authoritarian tendencies.

In “Yes Minister” Sir Humphrey Appleby once famously said, “Politicians come and go, but the Civil Service remains … Politicians are there to make the decisions. Civil servants are there to make sure they make the right decisions.” A more balanced view might be that although modern government requires expertise and continuity, the ultimate authority and accountability for making decisions must rest with democratically elected politicians, whatever their limitations, rather than be usurped by public servants, their expertise and experience notwithstanding.

Given the rise of crude populism across the world at present, re-asserting Grayling’s point is becoming a vital step towards sustaining democracy as we know it.

Labour’s recently released party list is a job half-done.

A positive aspect is that it has introduced a small pool of new talent that would be beneficial to Labour’s ranks. However, it has also not only retained, but in some cases, promoted too many of the old guard that contributed so much to Labour’s failure when last in office. While the list ranking process has culled out some of Labour’s deadwood, it has not gone nearly far enough to suggest a future Labour-led government would look significantly different from the one that was so decisively defeated at the last election.

Current polling suggests Labour could win at least 40 to 42 seats at this year’s election. On the assumption Labour holds all its current electorate seats and wins up to 5 additional electorate seats, it could bring in up to 22 MPs from the party list. Yet of that potential 22 list MPs, only 6 would be newcomers to Parliament. And they rank well below many sitting MPs.

For example, controversial but impressive Police Superintendent Rakesh Naidoo – who seems certain to be elected – has been ranked well behind deadwood former Ministers Willie Jackson, Willow Jean Prime and Jan Tinetti, and veteran Megan Woods, who, while more capable, has only switched to the list because of doubts about the security of her heavily redrawn electorate in Christchurch. Yet there is little doubt that Naidoo is likely to make a greater contribution to Labour’s future than all that group ahead of him on the list combined.

Similarly, former School Strike 4 Climate NZ founder and co-ordinator, and possible but outside prospect to win the new Kapiti electorate, Sophie Handford has been ranked number 26 on the list. While she is still likely to be elected from this position, she sits below former Ministers Jo Luxton, Priyanca Radhakrishnan, and Damien O’Connor, whose best years look to be behind them.

Further down the list and on the cusp of being elected is Warrick Cleine, the current chair and chief executive officer of the international accounting firm KPMG, in Cambodia and Vietnam. His presence in the Labour Caucus would almost certainly bolster Labour’s economic credibility, alongside finance spokesperson, Barbara Edmonds. In a party heavily bereft of economic and business talent, he ought to have been much more highly ranked.

Former Fulbright Scholar and Stanford University graduate, Te Pūoho Kātene, sits a few places further down the list and will probably need to defeat Te Pāti Māori co-leader, Debbie Ngarewa-Packer in the Te Tai Hauāuru electorate to be sure of a place in Parliament. He would likely be a strong asset to Parliament, but thanks to Labour’s conservative and internally protective approach to list ranking, he may not get the chance.

Overall, Labour’s line-up still contains too many plodders in senior positions to suggest that a real process of renewal is underway within the party. The list ranking process should have been the opportunity to move aside those drains on Labour’s appeal in favour of talent likely to be the face of Labour over the decade ahead. It has failed to do so. While the plodders remain and dominate, the risk for Labour is that the new talent becomes frustrated, and gives up waiting, so chooses to pursue opportunities elsewhere.

This cautious and conservative approach is likely to also be reflected in Labour’s forthcoming policy announcements. The public transport fare cap policy ($20 a week in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch and $10 a week elsewhere) announced this week is a good example. On the face of it, it sounds an attractive policy, although the devil will lie in the detail. Because its application will be limited it will hardly provide the “real cost-of-living relief” and “public transport system that works for everyone” that Labour claims. The fare cap is another job half-done, more a gesture than a major policy, and likely to be viewed by voters as such.

A feature of Labour’s announcements to date has been that they have not gone quite to plan. The capital gains tax policy was hurriedly announced last year after details had been leaked to the media; the list announcement was side-tracked about whether and when Naidoo had informed the Police leadership of his intentions, and earlier this week a Labour candidate almost pre-empted the fare cap policy announcement by suggesting a tax-relief policy announcement was imminent.

Given the modest nature of both its list and policy offerings to date, Labour can hardly afford to have its future announcements disrupted this way. To be taken seriously as a potential government-in-waiting, it first needs to look like one.

Presenting a party list that looks more like clinging to the relics of the past than facing the challenges of the future is unlikely to help to achieve that goal.

 

Parliament rose late last Saturday evening after a marathon period of Urgency passing legislation relating to last week's Budget and other matters. This was not unusual – Parliament usually goes into Urgency for a couple of days after a Budget.

Nor is it unusual for Parliament to begin a three-week recess, as it has done now, once the post-Budget Urgency has finished. This annual recess is normally the time when Ministers get out and around the country to promote the Budget, and when the Opposition sets out its response. It is often also the time when major problems with some of the Budget policies come to light, and when governments are forced into hurried amendments or even backdowns.

What is perhaps a little unusual following this year’s Budget is the low level of public and political reaction to it. Aside from Hipkins' initial response of "more cuts, more pain, and higher costs", there has been no more substantive critique from the Labour Party. The same goes for the Green Party that quickly labelled the Budget a "trashfire" and Te Pati Māori who said, "it was the worst Budget they've seen". Beyond those initial reactions, the Opposition bloc has so far had little to say about the Budget. The public response has been similarly muted, with Dame Lynda Topp's comments against the increase in defence spending being the most vocal.

And aside from the clarification about new mothers and postnatal hospital stays, which related to a post-Budget social media post rather than the Budget announcement itself, there have been no obvious Budget oversights revealed so far that Ministers have had to hurriedly tidy up.

The government will of course argue that this overall lack-lustre response to the Budget was because it has largely got the balance right, and that people understand that in challenging times, as we have now, there are no magic wands to be waved or money-trees to be shaken. Ministers will interpret the comparative quiet following the Budget positively as they approach the rest of the year and the election campaign ahead. They may be right, but the next round of opinion polls will confirm whether that is the case, or, more ominously for the government, whether people have simply switched off what it has to say.

The biggest post-Budget, although still relatively low-key, talking point is when will the Labour Party get around to releasing some policy of its own. For some months now Labour has been saying it will not release policy until after the Budget when it has had the chance to assess the Budget numbers. The not unreasonable point is that it does want to promote election policy that is either unachievable or unaffordable, prudent constraints that never troubled the previous Labour-led government.

However, while no-one expected a torrent of Labour policy releases immediately after the Budget, few would have expected Hipkins’ admission earlier this week that that the Labour caucus has not yet sat down as a team to review the Budget in detail. He says Labour has “yet to decide which bits of it we're going to keep and which bits are going to stay the same." Nevertheless, he says, somewhat contradictorily, that voters “can expect to see quite a bit from us in the near future.”

The eventual release of Labour policy, whenever it occurs, may sharpen debate between the two main political blocs in a way the Budget did not. But, because of the fiscal constraints the Budget has imposed, its impact may also fall just as flat.

By deferring its major policy announcements for so long, Labour has created a potential problem for itself. On the one hand, given its acknowledgment of the need for affordable and achievable policies and its need to be guided by the Budget numbers, Labour’s eventual offering may simply be too bland to convince wavering voters it presents a real alternative to National. Yet, on the other hand, too bold and expensive a set of promises may persuade sufficient voters it would be too profligate in office and so tip the balance back the government’s way.

All in all, the likely upshot of the government’s no-frills, no excitement approach and Labour’s desperation to be seen as responsible stewards, unlike the last time in office, looks set to lead to a very stolid and unexciting few months through until the election.

And that may confirm for many struggling with ongoing cost-of-living pressures that conventional politics no longer works for them, and that it may be time to look to more radical options. Mirroring the trend now appearing with the rise of the Reform Party in Britain and One Nation in Australia, those voters may well turn to the fringes.

In that respect ACT, New Zealand First, the Greens and Te Pati Māori stand more than ready and willing to accommodate them, although none is likely to plumb the depths of extremism the way Reform and One Nation are.