Heather du-Plessis Allan: Labour has the shortest honeymoon ever

Five days to go. If you are counting down to the Christmas break, spare a thought for the Government.

It has been slogging its guts out for weeks, but it hasn't paid off.

The first poll since taking office will likely have been gutting for Labour. The party's support now sits at 38 per cent, up only 2 per cent from election day. Worse still, the party kicked out of power has gone up, too. National's now on 46 per cent, up from 44 per cent.

You'd have expected a bigger bump for Labour. You'd have expected voters who didn't like the idea of change to realise change isn't that bad.

Maybe voters might've rewarded Labour for cracking down on foreign purchases of land and houses. Or delivering a year of free tertiary study. Or ditching National Standards. Or giving Australia the finger over the Manus Island refugees.

But any approval of all that work — and it is a lot of work — hasn't translated into "Yes I'll vote for you next time".

Which is a surprise, because the last two new Governments — John Key's and Helen Clark's — had much bigger jumps in support after their first election wins.

It feels like Labour's honeymoon is over. In fact, it probably didn't have one. It probably used up its honeymoon during the election campaign. That sucks for Labour. John Key's went on for years.

You can bet this is not what Labour wants voters talking about over beers and the barbecue at the bach this summer.

Summer chats are like thousands of little ad campaigns for a Government.

If it nails things just before summer, the voters tell their mates how great the world is.

Fail to nail, get slagged off instead.

When you end a year on a bum note, there's only one thing do to: come in hot the next year.

So, when you're cracking open your champagne on New Year's Eve, spare a thought for the Government again, because they really should be back at their desks not long after, despite the hangover still stomping around behind their eyes.

To turn these poll numbers around, Labour can't afford much of a holiday. The best thing it can do is get back to work, sort out what was going wrong, and start getting stuff right.

The stuff that was going wrong was the past few weeks' constant trickle of little mistakes: Kelvin Davis floundering as Acting PM, Shane Jones surprising the actual PM with his Work for the Dole idea, Stuart Nash messing up his first speech on his first Government bill in Parliament, Chris Hipkins messing up his first vote in Parliament. It's a lot of oops in a short time.

The stuff to get right starts with the year of free study.

Arguably, this is Labour's first real test of a major policy roll out, and with that many students and providers involved, a lot can go wrong.

There'll be plenty of face-to-face meetings, plenty of phone calls and plenty of "quick question" type emails before the students get to class next year.

Then there are a billion trees to plant, 100,000 kids to lift out of poverty and 100,000 houses to build. No pressure. Those are a lot of very precise goals that will be held like tape measures against the outcomes.

There's a good chance Labour can turn around its fortunes. It's no easy task launching straight into Government, even harder when your leader is brand new to the job and harder still when you possibly didn't expect to be here.

A few weeks of catch-up work while the rest of us are distracted may be all that's required.