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Now, I can’t imagine Labour’s woken up feeling awesome this morning about how that reset is going. What do you think?
This is a reset – you do realise that. After months of saying nothing, having no new policy and generating headlines for Ayesha Verrall singing weird songs about ducks, they started this week with a classic reset move.
They got themselves a story in the Herald on Monday, claiming Nicola Willis tried to hide secret spending in the Budget. Then they followed it up really quickly with a list announcement, unveiling the policeman candidate.
And then tomorrow they were supposed to have their big, substantive policy announcement – something they haven’t done in months. It was meant to be this run of good news.
Unfortunately for them, it’s gone a little bit pear-shaped, hasn’t it?
The “secret money” has turned out to actually just be an accounting provision. The list announcement got derailed by Greg O’Connor taking a crack at them.
Then the new guy for one of the Māori seats revealed there’s some tax relief policy coming – which he wasn’t supposed to say. Then Chippy got busted for using his government KiwiSaver to buy a bach, and the policeman didn’t tell his bosses early enough that he was off to join the Labour Party.
All of this is not a good look for Labour, because they can hardly expect to convince voters they’re ready to govern if they can’t even get 24 hours’ worth of announcements to go to plan without being derailed by four or five different issues.
But to be fair to Labour, the last 24–48 hours is really not the end of the world. A lot of this is pretty beltway stuff – at least the parts involving the policeman are. In five months’ time, when the election rolls around, no one but the biggest political nerds in this country will remember any of it.
Five months gives them plenty of time to fix all of this, but they really do have to get on and fix it, because this is the same problem, just repeated – the same problem as the Ayesha Verrall duck-song situation. It looks like a party unable to get its act together and just do one thing properly.
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