Govt moves to change narrative

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

Opinion

First up on Sunday morning, Nanaia Mahuta admitted mistakes over her controversial Three Waters reforms. Yesterday Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern reframed much more empathetically her denials the previous week of a cost of living crisis, on her regular Monday morning slot on TV Three's The AM Show. She also signalled a major move to alleviate those cost pressures — which came later in the day with a 25c cut to fuel taxes and road user charges, and a halving of public transport fares — and said a timeline for reopening the border to tourism was imminent.

There's nothing like a mid-term slump in the polls to have a Government reassess its priorities and try to soften some of the hard edges that are turning off voters.

Mahuta told Jack Tame on Q+A that she underestimated two areas of the three waters reform programme — how much the public already knew about water management and the trade-offs in council spending decisions, and the “high level of sensitivity from local government” over a $3.5m advertising campaign that depicted a range of water failures, and laid the blame on councils.

The Minister of Local Government acknowledged decades of underinvestment in water infrastructure and said “. . . perhaps the advertising campaign wasn't the best way to tell the message”.

Speculation remains that the role might change hands, with a new Minister seeking more consensus from the sector on what everyone agrees is an area that needs reform.

Ardern meanwhile has changed her tune on the cost of living crisis, while maintaining that the drivers of inflation are coming from abroad and are not her Government's fault.

Her performance last week recalled John Key's denials of a housing crisis, a position he maintained throughout his prime ministership — and the country has seen our housing situation develop into a real crisis since, leaving many households with little room in their budgets for the inflation of today.

The Government will continue to seek levers to help it regain support, and also try to ensure the economic cycle is working in its favour in the lead-up to next year's election.

The pandemic situation is starting to stabilise, with Auckland past its peak of cases and the rest of the country thought to be close to a peak — so hospitalisations should stop rising in another week or two. This will help the Government move further soon on easing restrictions; particularly around mandates, which the public has been souring on.