OPINION
In the process of ripping up and rewriting Labour’s game plan to try to win an election, Prime Minister Chris Hipkins also ripped up the game plans of NZ First and National.
The voters appear to have adjusted to the change from Jacinda Ardern to Hipkins a lot more quickly than those political parties have – and have so far approved.
Hipkins’ shift of messaging to focus on the cost of living, and attempt to neutralise controversial issues with his policy bonfire also removed some of their ammunition.
It makes it harder to fight on the issues of 2022. Last year, it seemed all Christopher Luxon had to do was talk convincingly about the economy and the election was his. That has changed.
This week, National showed that after a flat-footed start, it was now also changing and manoeuvring to try to cut Hipkins off.
That has taken the form of announcing easily digestible policy – combined with a slightly passive-aggressive attack on Hipkins’ record.
Luxon took a trip into enemy territory - to Hipkins’ Remutaka electorate to announce policy in one of Hipkins’ specialist areas: education.
None of that was by accident. The choice of Upper Hutt and education was to highlight Hipkins’ role as Minister of Education from 2017 until early 2023 when he became PM – and to highlight the statistics on the achievement of children under his watch.
Luxon’s announcement that the curriculum would be pared back to focus more on the basics of education carried the implicit accusation that Hipkins’ curriculum review had been more about virtue-signalling than setting a good base for children’s education.
To further highlight that, Luxon even purloined one of Hipkins’ own catchlines for it: his “teaching the basics” echoes Hipkins’ “back to basics” line.
Casting shade on Hipkins’ record was not the only goal.
The real aim of National’s education policy was to appeal to the parents of those school children.
It centred on what primary school students should be taught. It was simple and easy to understand: an hour a day on the three Rs, checks to make sure kids are at the level they should be – and reports to parents on the results. Luxon had pegged education as his focus area very early, and delivered the speech well.
There was much noise afterwards about whether it was a return to National Standards, and whether National was insulting teachers.
National won’t mind that: it has judged most teachers are likely to vote Labour anyway and is clearly not planning to waste time with a futile bid to win over people who are never going to vote for it.
It did not ignore teachers totally: one good step in its policy is to remove teacher registration fees. The argument that teachers should not have to pay to teach is hard to argue with. Some teachers will also secretly applaud a decluttering of the curriculum.
But the policy was aimed squarely at the ears of parents rather than teachers. Parents vote - and in great numbers.
Many of those parents (and grandparents) were raised in an era when the basics – the three Rs - were the focus of the curriculum.
National is betting those parents will be thinking that it served them well enough, so why complicate it too much? Luxon even harked back to the comparatively higher achievement rates in the days those parents were students.
The policy was hot on the tail of announcing childcare tax rebates – also aimed at parents. Next up will come secondary school policy.
In between policy announcements, Luxon has also been careful to try to remind people about the problems that are still there, which Hipkins can’t simply scrap with a stroke of the pen: the cost of living crisis and crime chief among them.
NZ First leader Winston Peters has also now given a glimpse of what he might do to try to counter Hipkins - and the answer appears to be more of the same stuff he’s been doing for four decades.
Since Hipkins came on board, NZ First has slipped from the 4 per cent mark in polls back to between 2 and 3 per cent.
Peters is back to the starting gates again – and faces the very real prospect that this time he might not be able to rise again.
His state of the nation speech on Friday showed no sign he had worked out a way to get around that – or else had decided that what he was already doing would still do the job.
He assessed the state of the nation without Winston there as bleak, and cycled through his usual subject matters, railing about Government failures and promising to address all the things that were “woke and virtue-signalling”.
For old times’ sake, there was a last ungracious jab at Jacinda Ardern for saying she had nothing left in the tank: “Can you imagine Helen Clark saying that? Or Peter Fraser saying that?”
He used his decades-old joke about those who thought manual labour was the president of Mexico (to be fair to him, it still gets a laugh from his audience each time).
As it turned out, the joke was the freshest thing in his speech.
The only sign he might be trying to change his usual formula to win an election was the absence of any digs at the media – for perhaps the first time in history.
Even that didn’t last: in the questions and answers at the end, he lambasted the media for being “bought out” by Government funding and then added he was “supposed to be smiling and looking after the media for the next six months. It’s going to be very difficult”.
The smile in question is presumably modelled on the big bad wolf in Red Riding Hood.
Meanwhile, for Hipkins the last week has been as much about style as substance, as he seeks to cement the positive view of him in the polls. In doing so, he seems to have taken tips from an old political enemy: Sir John Key.
In one week, he broke Helen Clark’s cardinal rule (do not be filmed eating, especially a pie straight out of a pie warmer) and Jacinda Ardern’s cardinal rule (do not be filmed dancing).
He made self-deprecating jokes about his own shortcomings - at a school he admitted maths had not been his forte: “as we are now establishing on a weekly basis”.
All of those things are textbook John Key. They are done partly for relatability – and for the politicians to be seen as able to laugh at themselves. It is not all contrived - it takes a certain personality type to get away with it without looking like a try-hard.
Key will tell him that it only gets you so far.
Next week, Hipkins is expected to have further announcements to hand - but it’s fairly clear now that Luxon is also more than willing to roll out policy to contest it.
It follows concerns about use-of-force powers being given to staff.