Analysis: Q+A's Jack Tame says Labour came to power in 2017 with an ambitious agenda, but has struggled to live up to the spirit of those promises.
And with that, finally, the parliamentary term has limped to its conclusion.
The House has risen for the final time and Labour can shift fully from the demands of government to full-time campaigning.
As has been noted widely already, Covid-19 has had a warping effect on the electorate’s collective sense of time.
Although Labour has governed for the last two parliamentary terms, to many voters (and many Labour MPs) the last six years feel like nine. A two-term government has three-term-itis.
For the incumbent governing party, election campaigns have additional dimensions which distinguish it from its opposition.
Parties are differentiated by their respective campaign policies, but the governing party also has a fresh record to be compared against its new proposals.
And what good are new promises if a government didn’t deliver on its previous ones?
Labour came to power in 2017 with an ambitious agenda.
Whereas John Key’s National government had essentially campaigned on economic stability and steady GDP growth, Jacinda Ardern ran a Barack Obama Hope and Change style campaign.
Labour would tackle the mental health crisis, end child poverty, and solve the housing crisis. Climate change was the nuclear free issue of this generation and a Labour government would rise to the challenge.
In government, Labour has not lived up to the spirit of those promises.
House prices today are more expensive relative to incomes than they were in 2017 (and indeed were more expensive, even before the Covid-19 surge).
Rents are up, too.
Although the Government has substantially increased the number of state houses built, the social housing wait list has ballooned (which Labour MPs argue is due to more generous eligibility criteria).
The Government has introduced frameworks for emissions reductions and agreed on a net-zero target, but the most difficult emission reductions decisions have been deferred to future governments.
New Zealand’s largest-emitting industry still doesn’t pay for its emissions and climate experts say a modest drop in our overall emissions is only because it’s been raining a lot.
Has child poverty meaningfully improved? Labour consistently points to metrics which show 77,000 children have been “lifted out of poverty”, although food banks claim demand has increased 165% since 2020.
Almost half a million New Zealanders need food support each month.
At the end of last year the chief executive of the Mental Health Foundation said “the transformation of mental health is failing."
"Things are overall getting worse, not better."
There is, of course, an enormous caveat to any assessment of the Government’s performance.
Covid-19 caused disruption on a scale most of us have never experienced.
A counterfactual alternative to Labour’s pandemic management is that under different political leadership, many more New Zealanders might be dead, along with the social and economic carnage that would have caused.
Labour’s initial response to the pandemic was rewarded by voters at the last election with the first majority government in MMP history. But credit for that response has waned in the eyes of many voters.
And while it would be totally unreasonable for any fair-minded assessor not to consider the impacts of the pandemic on the Government’s progress, there is no escaping the transformational void.
2023 is not 2017. The political and economic environment has changed. Labour’s campaign has a completely different tone from the grand pronouncements and ambitious policies of six years ago.
But while most voters will not scrutinise the exact detail of what was promised on the campaign versus what was delivered in Government, while trying to simultaneously allow for the pandemic’s incursion, many will consider Labour’s record with some version of a simple question: "After six years of a Labour Government, is my life today meaningfully improved from my life in 2017?"
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