An emotional Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern explores her 'childhood hero' Ernest Shackleton's hut and speaks on the duty of care Aotearoa has to the preservation. Video / Mike Scott
Opinion by Claire Trevett
Claire Trevett is the New Zealand Herald’s Political Editor, based at Parliament in Wellington.
As Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern gazed around Shackleton's hut in Antarctic on Thursday and reflected on Ernest Shackleton's leadership style, she quipped: "I don't think I can quite compare government with the hardship and endurance of Antarctic exploration. But some days ..."
It was only half a joke.
Onthe same day Ardern was reflecting on her childhood hero, Shackleton, the man who poses the greatest risk to ending those days in government was reflecting on his own apparent childhood hero – Ronald McDonald.
National's leader, Christopher Luxon, popped into the Merivale McDonald's where he had worked at a school student.
National leader Christopher Luxon takes an order at McDonalds. Photo / Pierre Nixon
After slapping mustard onto some buns and pouring a soft-serve, he waxed lyrical about the value of a first job at McDonalds and what it had taught him.
Luxon's photo op at Maccas was derided by Labour politicians. It was a day after Labour passed the Fair Pay Agreements law, and the law's usher, Workplace Relations Minister Michael Wood, noted he had met with McDonalds workers himself, who celebrated the law. Acting Prime Minister Grant Robertson put on a show of bravado, noting he wasn't surprised Luxon was keeping his career options open. Former MP and unionist Darien Fenton calculated Luxon was paid $142 for the hour spent at Maccas – the workers were earning $22-$28.
None of this fazed National at all. The point of the Maccas visit was to highlight to people that Luxon came from humble-ish beginnings and worked his way up from when he was 15.
Not for him everything on a plate. It was his equivalent of Key going back to visit the state house he grew up in.
Nor could Labour mock it as a shallow, cynical photo op, since in 2017 – soon after she became leader - Ardern herself went back to visit the Morrinsville fish and chip shop she had worked in as a school student.
And the bobsy-die about the fair pay agreements for McDonalds workers from Labour only served to highlight to National's core supporters that it opposed the move. Both Labour and National were speaking to their base.
The law would allow the negotiation of minimum standards of employment and wages to apply across an entire sector of workers – such as bus drivers, cleaners and supermarket workers - rather than smaller collective agreements being negotiated employer by employer.
It is a law National has loudly opposed as "ideological overreach", claiming it is aimed solely at giving the unions more muscle, and will take things back to the 1970s and an inflexible labour market. It has pledged to repeal it as soon as it can.
Illustration / Guy Body
The policy is a stark example of one area in which Labour and National are on completely different sides: employment relations is one of the longest-standing political battle fronts in politics. It is why the unions are Labour's biggest donors and business are National's.
However, the law was just the tonic needed for the Labour faithful ahead of the party's annual conference next weekend – assuring the party members Labour has not forgotten its roots amidst the morass of governing and Covid and inflation.
It was also a relief for those stalwarts who feared that Labour might have bottled out as its polling bottomed out – and it gives them something to point to on the delivery front as it faces criticism for its pace and the extent of delivery in a raft of other policy areas.
It will ensure Workplace Relations Minister Michael Wood of a hero's reception at that conference.
It delivered straight to Labour's traditional base – the union movement and so-called blue collar workers – and was delivered by a Wood who was triumphant in Parliament and completely unrepentant about it.
Unless Labour can hold on to the government seats in 2023, the fair pay agreements may not become an actual reality or at least not for many sectors.
In the meantime, it allows Labour's caucus to turn up with some good news at a conference in which good news could be in short supply.
It will be the first conference since 2017 at which Labour is at threat from National in the polls.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and partner Clarke Gayford in Sir Robert Falcon Scott's hut at Cape Evans in Antarctica. Photo / Mike Scott
The previous years have been jubilant, triumphant affairs, Ardern at the centre of them. At last year's she was the Covid-slayer. National was in chaos. The Covid support had ensured people were not feeling an economic pinch, inflation was relatively low and the war in Ukraine had not begun.
Things have changed immensely since then and the party is facing its own year of reckoning as National piles on the pressure and the Government struggles to implement reforms smoothly in areas such as health.
As a result, it may well be a more subdued conference, and Labour's faithful may be well advised to see the fair pay agreements as the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down.
Pleasing the base is one thing, pleasing the wider voter base is another.
The elections in 2011 and 2020 highlighted to both National and Labour that their bedrock base of supporters was around the 25 per cent mark – those who vote for them come hell or high water.
An extra 10-15 per cent at least is needed to have a chance to govern.
When Ardern returns from the ice this morning she will have to confront how to try to ensure those days in government might continue, whether hard or not.
That will include coming up with a Happy Meal Labour can offer the voters at home, and shedding some other reforms that mainly appeal to the base may achieve that - or she risks being as ice-bound as Shackleton’s ship, Endurance.
