Urgent safety issues to be revealed in final report on the sinking of the Enchanter, could Winston Peters be heading back to Parliament? And tourists fly to space for the first time. Video / NZ Herald / Getty / AP Video / Virgin Galactic
This is a transcript of Audrey Young’s weekly subscriber-only Premium Politics newsletter. To sign up, click on your profile at nzherald.co.nz and select ‘Newsletters’. For a step-by-step guide, click here.
OPINION
Welcome to the Premium Politics Briefing, a week in which Chris Hipkins’ election strategy became clear -to campaign as Prime Minister rather than Labour leader.
Presumably, the aim is to elevate Hipkins above the fray of an election campaign. It may, however, have come too late.
As political editor Claire Trevett points out, Thursday’s Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll sees Labour’s vote decline by four points to 27 per cent, putting it at risk of collapse. With the Greens getting a lift by three points, she suggests it was Hipkins’ decision to rule out a wealth tax under his leadership.
But it has been an appalling couple of months for Hipkins, with internal dissent over the wealth tax and the resignation of Justice Minister Kiri Allan after her arrest no doubt contributing as well.
Such is Labour’s sorry state of affairs that, just as it finally gets around to launching its tax policy (tipped to come on Sunday), it is fending off questions about Hipkins’ leadership - which is not under threat.
National leader Christopher Luxon has had a very good week with no obvious missteps and set the political agenda with the policy to ban cellphones from classrooms. He is looking fighting fit on the hustings and his popularity as preferred Prime Minister is rising.
Following on from my piece last week on what a National-Act Cabinet would like, this week I looked at what a Labour-Greens-Māori Party government would look like. The conclusion was that most of the immediate renewal would come from the Greens and that Labour would have a major reshuffle a year or so in when it would be likely that Finance Minister Grant Robertson would retire, among others.
Brickbat
Act leader David Seymour. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Goes to Act leader David Seymour for suggesting he got the better of an interviewer on Newshub because the journalist must have smoked cannabis the night before. Not okay, even when joking. Set some boundaries, Seymour.
Bouquet
Taieri MP Ingrid Leary. Photo / Peter McIntosh
Goes to Taieri MP Ingrid Leary for owning her mistake of queue-jumping in her car on the Otago Bridge and is a reminder to all MPs that nothing you do is private, at least not when you drive a car with your name and face plastered over it.
Audrey Young is the New Zealand Herald’s senior political correspondent. She was named Political Journalist of the Year at the Voyager Media Awards in 2023, 2020 and 2018.
For more political news and views, listen to On the Tiles, the Herald’s politics podcast.
