On the last day of stage four lockdown, PM Jacinda Ardern spoke about her decisions and the approach for the rocky road ahead.
COMMENT:
When Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was asked what liberties she would be indulging in at level 3, she replied that she would be supporting the small local businesses down the road from her.
The subtext of this was that people should do that ahead of going to the multi-nationalfast-food giants, despite all the hype around the return of the drive-thru.
Some took that as a judgment on their food choices. It was not that - Ardern's comment was intended to rebut the claims mounted by her rivals that she did not understand just how hard hit those small businesses were.
It was something of a black-and-white call: local business good, big global giants bad.
Nothing is as black and white as that. The grey is that Maccas' fries and beef patties were not produced from spuds and meat grown in some uber-global magical Maccas farm. It had come from "small local businesses" – the potato growers and the beef farmers of New Zealand.
And we are now in a whole world of greys.
The near-consensus of political parties in Parliament in averting a potential health crisis from Covid-19 is now drawing to a close.
In Parliament this week, National and Labour both presented slogans for what came next have popped up.
For Labour it was Keep New Zealand Working.
For National it was Let's Get NZ Working Again.
Both parties have also presented "three stages" for handing the economic crisis.
Labour's three phrases are cushioning the impact, recovery and kickstarting the economy, followed by the reset and rebuild into the future.
Jacinda Ardern wants Kiwis to get out and support small, local businesses. Photo / Dean Purcell
National's were voiced by Simon Bridges yesterday. They consisted of getting out of lockdown as soon as it was safe, the medium-term job of stimulating our economy and "operating in a 2m world" and the long-term job of positioning the country to succeed in the world after Covid-19.
So the two parties have similar slogans, and similar views of the job that lies ahead. The differences will come in how that job should be done, the details and the timing.
There has been some bickering about the actual meaning of the word, but overall the elimination strategy has been lauded.
It has also left political leaders with an almost impossible problem. They have to work out either how to get the economy thriving without opening the borders for the next 12-18 months until a vaccine comes along.
Or they have to work out how to operate alongside some level of the virus.
On Tuesday night, Sir John Key popped up on television.
On Newshub's Rebuilding Paradise, he did not criticise Ardern but he turned on its head Ardern's system of alert levels with prescriptive rules about what people could and could not do.
He said the levels had been useful – but much of the focus was on what people could not do.
He said the Government should be waking up every day and working out what people could do – in particular, how and which businesses could re-open sooner.
He pointed to the Christchurch earthquakes, saying it had shown that the longer a business had to stay closed, the lower the chances it would survive.
He was saying pretty much what Bridges had been saying: allow more businesses to open safely and sooner, or risk losing them.
Key's comments should be more of a concern to Ardern than Bridges' comments.
That is because, like Ardern, people tend to trust what Key says - and he has done Ardern's job before.
When those comments were put to Ardern on The Country, she rebuffed them by replying that it wrongly assumed she wasn't thinking about exactly that: how to get some semblance of normality back as soon as possible.
National's job is to put on the pressure, but for the time being Ardern's job is to resist it.
The example of Key can be some use, however.
Key was renowned as a pragmatist: he called on people far and wide and operated under a "whatever works" mentality – something that often saw him accused of lacking principle, but that could also be useful in a crisis.
The problems the country is now facing do not lend themselves to ideology, or in-house thinking.
Ardern has so far insisted Labour's existing agenda was just the ticket for the economic stimulus that would be needed. She has shown little stomach for bending that, or relying too much on outside help, including from the private sector. She has not spoken to her predecessors Key, or Sir Bill English.
Bridges, too, will have to be careful about getting bogged down in ideology. He has dismissed Labour's apparent likely approach so far as "a committee in Wellington with politicians, a union rep, iwi, and Business New Zealand."
He called for private sector to be more deeply involved in it.
In the short term, the Government has the advantage.
It can start to put some of its ideas into practice, including in the Budget. But come the election, people will be voting on what they want to see in the next Budget.
National too has been working on its more detailed plan and expects to start to release it in the near future.
The election will be a referendum on what each party offers beyond that – and on how convincingly they can be sold to the public.
