KEY POINTS:
There can be no quibbling. The Prime Minister has delivered. No question. Today's speech announcing that every teenager will have to stay in school or some other form of education or training until they are 18 will prove to be a quantum leap in terms of upskilling the workforce.
Helen Clark had to come up with something big as a riposte to John Key's rival state of the nation address yesterday. She has shown Labour is still capable of coming up with the "big ideas" that she sees as an essential component in the party's re-election campaign.
Like a lot of Labour's ideas, the new policy bears a striking resemblance to what Gordon Brown's British NewLabour is doing. Clark is unapologetic about that. If the policy works, borrow it. And anyway New Zealand Labour has long harboured intentions of going down that track.
Whether the Prime Minister has trumped Key is another matter entirely.
Clark clearly envisaged the content of her first major speech of the year would prove to be a victory for substance over style when placed alongside the populist line Key was expected to pursue in his.
So there must have been a sharp intake of breath in the Beehive when Labour read Key's speech and discovered he was canvassing the very same subject matter and floating a similar-sounding policy.
Key seemed to have gazumped Clark, neutralising the major thrust of her speech before focussing on youth crime as the major strand of his.
The conspiracy theorists have had a field day, one paper reporting that there are fears a National Party mole is operating in the Labour camp.
Such talk is being rubbished in the Beehive. It is more likely the coincidence reflects the comparative absence of fresh policy areas where the two major parties have not already trampled.
Clark and her advisers would anyway have relaxed somewhat when they realised Labour's policy, through being compulsory, is more encompassing and more adventurous than Key's which will merely enable 16 and 17-year-olds to get free access to training courses or further study if they leave school.
That would have left Clark sitting pretty had Key not also laid out how National plans to tackle youth crime - a subject more topical and more politically sexy than job training and apprenticeships.
That forced Labour to mount a rearguard action. Its tactic has been to say those of Key's suggestions which are practical are already Labour policy and those that aren't have simply been proven to be ineffective.
Clark herself has said little about Key's speech - deliberately. Her speech today argues early intervention is the answer to stopping youngsters becoming violent offenders. She also gives National a flick by blaming Ruth Richardson's 1991 "Mother of all Budgets" for creating the broken and deprived families from which today's violent young criminals spring.
She would not have wanted to say too much about Key's speech for fear that might end up overshadowing her own announcement.
As for that policy, as they say, the devil will be in the detail. But yesterday was about demonstrating Labour, after eight years in power, is still a party with vision. The task for Clark is to make that vision a compelling one.
