Mike Hosking: Election delay the right call but will hurt Jacinda Ardern's chances

COMMENT

It was, of course, the only call to make.

I have been astonished over the past week or so to hear at least two so-called political experts from universities arguing there was no need to delay the election. Frighteningly, these are the people who fill young minds with what, in this case, is almost party political broadcast material.

The Prime Minister clearly wasn't overly keen on an extension either. But to seriously contemplate, as our political wonks at universities were, simply to carry on as though nothing had happened is to undermine the entire political process, not to mention tradition and simple fairness.

The Opposition hasn't even launched its campaign.

We look on at Belarus with questions. What do you think the world would make of a country where the Government's major party launched their campaign, then locked a solid chunk of the country down, made freedom of movement tricky for the rest of it, and had the official Opposition with no launch at all?

So a delay was a given.

I had, as you may have heard yesterday, predicted October 17 as the date.

Mike Hosking. Photo / Michael Craig

I had that without having to ask the myriad of people the Prime Minister waded through.

Fairness was the simple guiding light. Given, once you'd decided you had to delay you could pick any date and if it was only dates you were weighing up in isolation, any date would do. So October 17 is the first Saturday past the school holidays. Easy.

Now, does it help or hinder? The reluctance from the Prime Minister to move the date is because it hinders her, and she knows it. Every day beyond September 19 is a day the Government has to explain this current mess. The border breach, the lack of testing, the very reason we are here is because it has failed to deliver what it said it had.

Up until last week it made much of the 100 days Covid-free. It called this the Covid Election, there would be barely any policy because it had eliminated the virus.

Sadly, that whole platform is blown to bits. Another two weeks of the country's biggest economy locked down, the flow-on effects for the rest of the country, and a billion-dollar-plus bill from the diminishing pile of borrowed money. It is not a good look, and a world away from what it thought it was campaigning on.

It's good for National, which gets a launch, and a platform to argue alternatives. And it's good for New Zealand First, which gets time to save itself.

It was always going to be closer than many of the Labour acolytes thought. But now with another month, and yet more bungles to spin, the tide on a government that's messed it up and failed to deliver is going out.