Claire Trevett: Labour’s superannuation war with National exactly what it wanted

Labour leader Chris Hipkins and Carmel Sepuloni at the Labour Party Congress at Te Papa. Photo / Getty

As far as campaign policies go, Labour’s announcement it will keep the super age at 65 was the most underwhelming in some time – but it got them exactly what they wanted, and that is a war with National over super.

The main announcement from Carmel Sepuloni at the party’s Congress in Wellington was an announcement of things Labour won’t do rather than what it will.

None of them was surprising. The superannuation age would stay at 65, the Winter Energy Payment would stay, and …. wait for it …. Government contributions to the NZ Super Fund would also stay.

The aim was not so much to show off Labour’s policies – but to advertise National’s and Act’s, both of whom want to lift the super age to 67 and have halted Super Fund contributions in the past.

It worked a treat. Within an hour, a thundering press release came from National’s Nicola Willis accusing Labour of “trying to score some cheap political points by hypocritical scaremongering”.

She then accused Labour of being fiscally irresponsible for holding it at 65 – which coincidentally is exactly what Labour says of National’s tax cuts.

It will be a bit of a test of just how politically toxic it still is to talk about raising the age of super. It used to be a death knell policy. It is never going to be one of the policies a party advertises on its billboards.

The risk is why National’s policy won’t start to kick in until 2044.* It was initially going to start in 2037 - and leader Christopher Luxon was still talking about 2037 late last year. However, yesterday it “updated” the policy to 2044, saying it was sticking to the principle of giving people 20 years to prepare, rather than the 2037 date of the original policy.

It is clearly hoping voters will see that as far away in the never-never so ignore it.

However, it means that anyone currently under the age of 44 will be affected by it. That is a large group of voters – and Labour is keen to remind people that Act could use its leverage to bring forward the date at which it kicks in.

Sunday is shaping up as another showdown. National is pulling a classic spoiler manoeuvre by deciding to announce an expected shift to its policy on housing intensification (breaking a bipartisan accord on the issue) tomorrow morning.

Leader Christopher Luxon will speak about it at the exact same time Labour’s leader Chris Hipkins is due to give his speech – and a small announcement - to Congress in the early afternoon.

Willis also asked why Labour was announcing non-policies on super instead of announcing bold, new measures to address the cost of living.

For now, Labour is happy to let the measures it took in the recent Budget do the talking on that front. It’s bigger-ticket policies will come closer to the election – as indeed will National’s.

So instead, much of day one of its conference was dedicated to talking more about National and Act than about Labour. National and Act were also the inspiration for most of the jokes, in particular National’s use of AI for its social media advertising.

Grant Robertson: “Every bad idea that National has ever had was put into Chat GTP and it spat out their leader.”

In case some people missed the point of all this, it was pointed out in direct terms.

Nuance and subtlety were not on the programme. “Trust is everything,” Sepuloni said. “National and Act are lining up once again to mess with people’s super. They have form in this area, and it doesn’t end well.”

“Everything is at stake,” deputy leader of the Labour Party, Kelvin Davis, said. “That’s what we are up against, and that’s what we need to protect New Zealanders from,” Robertson said.

The Labour members loved the slug-fest, in the same way National’s audience lap it up when their leaders bang on about Labour.

The aim of it was to try to galvanise those members by ramming home just how tight it will be, and how hard they will have to fight to get the third term.

The volunteers will be crucial to an election campaign in which Labour is up against a well-funded National Party – and the impact of the change from Ardern to Hipkins is still uncertain. They will need to shift to get out those voters who might have “voted for Jacinda” rather than voting “for Labour”.

It sets the scene for an election which pits National against the Greens and Te Pāti Māori more than Labour – and pits Labour against Act more than National.

The smaller party is considered the real bogey man: and the question of the price they will extract around the post-election negotiating tables.

The smaller parties are set to be the targets rather than the larger ones. For both Labour and National, their smaller cousins are lined up to have a much stronger role than at any time in the past. Neither Act nor the Greens have been in Cabinet before. Now Act is telling its supporters it expects Cabinet seats proportionate with their vote – at the moment it expects at least a quarter of the seats. And that means the policies too.

It will serve to put more pressure than normal on the leaders of both National and Labour to say in advance just what they will and won’t adopt from their governing partners. And because that’s hard to do, it gives their rivals more room to scaremonger.

The elephant in the room at the Congress was not in the room at all. That was Jacinda Ardern. Ardern was not at the conference and deliberately so. The party has not yet had a chance to farewell and thank her as a group.

It will presumably do so, at some point. But that will not be before the election.

It had been four months since Ardern quit – enough time for the members to have digested it and accepted it. That showed. There was acknowledgement of her, as there should have been.

She also inadvertently helped with fundraising: a limited-edition framed photo of her got $1600 in an impromptu auction, conducted by Kieran McAnulty: “It’s a great deal, only $1300 more than you would have paid for it on the website.”

But the acknowledgements were fairly low key and the response to it was also low-key, warm applause rather than standing ovations.

The goal was very much trying to keep the eye on the now and on October 14 – and so, on Hipkins.

That meant a multitude of anecdotes about Hipkins, a lot of them taking the mickey. Sepuloni called him “the ginga from the Hutt”. Robertson sledged his tinned spaghetti toasties and fashion sense. Davis told of a woman in Flaxmere who inspected him and said “oh, you’re actually quite good-looking”.

Their first chance to hear him speak as the leader instead of plain old Chippy comes today.

* This column has been updated to clarify a change in the National Party’s policy that it included in a press release yesterday.