KEY POINTS:
Prime Minister Helen Clark blames Labour's support for the anti-smacking bill as the main factor behind its dive in the polls and tax cuts to a lesser extent.
But she said she would not have done anything differently.
She described the slump as "mid-term blues", was confident the party could recover but said she and her Labour colleagues would "look in the mirror" to see how they could improve, including herself.
"I can't work harder. Perhaps I could work smarter."
Less than two weeks after the enhanced-KiwiSaver Budget, the Herald's DigiPoll survey put National's support 17 percentage points ahead of Labour, and the One News Colmar Brunton poll 25 points ahead. National polled more than 50 per cent in both polls.
Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Michael Cullen said yesterday: "The important thing is not to lose your nerve at that stage. One thing in politics you learn is the more you resemble rabbits running around the more you are likely to get shot."
He made the comments at the launch yesterday of a $7.5 million advertising campaign for the centrepiece of the Budget, the KiwiSaver scheme, which has refuelled debate over personal cuts.
Helen Clark said the tax cuts issue had been "hammered pretty relentlessly" and had been a factor to some extent, but the issue that drove the public was the debate around "section 59".
The bill abolished the section 59 defence of reasonable force against children and bans physical punishment of children.
"I know that the Government standing very firm on the spirit of the changes to section 59 undoubtedly hurt us," Helen Clark said, "but in all conscience there was no way that I could have led a party that didn't support that change."
She had been motivated by the appalling rate of death and injury to children "and when you have the opportunity to do something about it, you can either take that opportunity or curse yourself for the rest of your life that you didn't act.
"At the end of the day you have to be true to yourself in what you think might make a difference for children and families and that's what we did."
Asked what Labour would do about the slump, she said: "I think everybody looks in the mirror and says 'how could I do better?' That applies to me as it applies to everybody else and we will work our way through those issues."
There are two other periods in which the Government was consistently behind National. A year after it took office in 1999 it suffered a so-called "winter of discontent", attributed at the time to a backlash against its Closing the Gaps flagship policies and its fractious relationship with the business community.
It also fell behind National after the Orewa speech on racial separatism by former National leader Don Brash.
Support for the two main parties see-sawed in the lead-up to the 2005 election in a campaign that was dominated by the issue of personal tax.
Dr Cullen said yesterday that he was not sure how much the Budget had contributed to the poll results.
"Labour had polled between 14 per cent and 62 per cent so polling somewhere in the low 30s, particularly in an MMP environment, is a long way off throwing in the towel."