By Eric Frykberg
The fifth week of election campaigning began with Chippy suddenly feeling not so chipper, thanks to an attack by the ever-opportunistic Covid virus.
Tragically, he took down some of his media team with him, which might explain a sudden lapse by the Fourth Estate.
It took to assessing which of the leaders is better dressed. This is incapable of being newsworthy, because Winston Peters won that contest several eons ago.
Mind you, wearing a sharp suit doesn't even get as far as skin deep, so it is just as well the NZ First leader had some policies up his perfectly tailored sleeve. The only trouble is, he didn't get to articulate them because of “lazy journalism” and a “corrupt” media.
While all this was going on, Green Party leaders were busy hiring Infometrics to prove they are not starry eyed dreamers but know the value of a dollar.
So, Infometrics set about adding up the cost of Green Party spending plans and comparing them with the value of Green Party taxing programmes, and found the country would be $5 billion in the black.
The Infometrics report supported this conclusion with comforting graphs showing lots of coloured lines all going the right way.
But there was a sting in the tail: revenue forecasts from higher taxes might be a “high-end estimate” by the Green Party, due to a long-standing tradition of Kiwis finding a way to keep their tax bill as low as they can.
The Greens meanwhile reiterated their plans to make the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) pay for sickness as well as accidents, and to use its $45 billion investment portfolio to meet the first year's costs.
You can understand the Green Party's temptation – ACC is a huge player on the stock market, like a local version of BlackRock, or Vanguard. Given its vast wealth, brother-can-you-spare-a-dime might seem an appropriate course of action.
But the ACC fund exists to pay for future injuries, and arguably should not be raided to pay for one year's costs, given that the rest of the New Zealand polity doesn't do long term planning very well (or at all).
(According to this theory, the NZ Super Fund is not a proper savings scheme, but an alibi for a populist retirement policy which gives everyone a false sense of security.)
Meanwhile the ACT Party continued its drip drip drip of policy statements til my in-box was practically groaning with overuse.
ACT's MO is to divide the political world into lots of small sub-categories and then issue a separate election policy on each one. That makes the party seem very busy to the public. It also makes sure its ideas don't get lost in the fine print of a very long media release.
In the course of just a few days, ACT went from fiscal discipline, to anti money-laundering laws, to small businesses, to spending cuts. to medicines, to farmers, to defence spending, to regulatory culls, to co-governance, and that was just for starters.
The party leader David Seymour came to resemble one of those cartoon woodpeckers who just can't stop hammering away at their tree.
Meanwhile, National pulled a neat PR stunt of its own, by issuing its 100-day plan. This reiterated things it has already said, but had journalists scouring the list to see what is in and what is out, in an is-Taylor-Swift-still-in-the-charts kind of way.
The list is extremely long, and involves many complex things things, of which reversing the RMA and water reforms are just two. So mighty is the task ahead, and so short the time frame, that National MPs might be in for some very hard work and some very long working hours. It could get so serious that someone might have to ask the CTU to step in to try to improve their working conditions.
Labour was meanwhile shakily offering to help small grocers take on the supermarket duopoly, in a way that “could include finance”, although details were scarce.
Elsewhere, the EV leitmotif came up once more, with both National and Labour arguing over who would put in more charging stations. For the record, though, EV chargers didn't make National's 100 day plan, unlike cracking down on gangs and dealing with youth offenders.
The period was also noted for two acrimonious TV interviews with Winston Peters, one by Jack Tame and the other by Rebecca Wright. A bad tempered Peters called Tame a “dirt merchant" and accused Wright of “lazy journalism”.
During both interviews, Peters portrayed himself as a victim of the press, which might work with the media-are-the-real-virus brigade, but its appeal to the wider public is uncertain.
A disturbing element came to light later - Labour took to issuing business-of-Government announcements dressed up as election promises, such as paying soldiers a decent wage, or safeguarding wildlife.
Since the enemy could attack at any time, and wildlife can expire without regard for the electoral cycle, these things should perhaps be done as a matter of course, and not saved up for an election campaign.
Elsewhere, both Labour and National courted a relatively small demographic, the aerospace industry, with National even planning to appoint Minister for Space. It is arguable that a Minister for the Earth's Core would be more useful, given our dependence on geothermal energy, but then I am not out there writing manifestos.
Meanwhile Labour wants a special anti scamming unit to add to the alphabet soup of FMA, SFO, RBNZ and others. However, since Labour believes National's tax cuts are the biggest scam of all, it probably could do with some extra help.
Finally, a series of TV debates culminated with a gathering of the four minor parties, ACT, NZ First, the Greens and Te Pati Maori. Amid a tsunami of argument, there was agreement on one thing: the need for adults in the room. But argument promptly resumed over just who are the adults and who are the children squabbling about their toys.
You can compare the policy positions of all parties here.
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