Election 2020: Politicians roll out the promises in election campaign poker

OPINION: Your billion and up two.

The great poker game, aka general election campaign, rolls on and the promises roll out.

We might be poor, but we’re happy – after all there are said to be more people with Covid in the White House than there are cases in New Zealand. So it’s hard to understand why the Americans haven’t asked us how we do it.

Perhaps the delay has something to do with Judith Collins’ recently public relationship with a higher power. There was a photo that showed her and Him-Her apparently having a chat, although what about wasn’t revealed.

READ MORE:
* Election 2020: Jacinda Ardern and Judith Collins to go head-to-head in first leaders' debate
* Show us the money: Politicians are making big spending promises, but does it all stack up?
* ACT launches debt cut calculator as other parties notch up billion-dollar spending promises

STUFF

Judith Collins and Jacinda Ardern were off the mark when it came to knowing the price of cow's milk at the supermarket.

But in America, they have an ongoing closeness with the Almighty. We know this because they say so, often. So there’s a good chance they’re just waiting for Collins to win next Saturday, for then our relationship with the United States will surely reach godly new heights.

Especially, as she noted the other day: “Parliament can do pretty much anything it likes if you have the majority.” As definitions of “elected dictatorship” go, that’s one Rob Muldoon would have been proud of.

But it’s winning that majority that is the thorny issue and has been since 1996. In Muldoon’s day, under FPP, it was never a problem.

With MMP though, you have to form a coalition to be in government unless you win an outright majority of seats and that hasn’t happened since 1996, the year of the first MMP election. Nor will it this time either, unless Collins knows something the rest of us don’t.

A fat Labour majority did look on the cards for a while earlier in the year while Jacindamania was at its height, but inevitably the race is tightening now as election day nears and rampant Covid has been kept at a comforting distance – like mostly on the other side of the Tasman.

The irony is that Labour’s Covid competence has freed up people to think of other things, stuff that National wants voters to look at.

Labour should still win, but as Collins has become better known outside the National Party caucus room and the country has returned to relative normality, the margin has shrunk.

What is it about politicians and numbers, it has to be asked? Not only are they frequently large, but almost invariably they are nice round figures.

Consider, for instance, Labour’s ill-fated 100,000 “affordable” homes that were going to be built over 10 years. It seems the policy was dreamt up in 2012 by one-time Labour minister Annette King after a yarn with a couple of Salvation Army blokes, according to her biography.

Not that Collins is averse to a large number or two. One of her latest is the creation of 10,000 jobs a month should National lead the next government. Like Labour eight years ago, that must feel like a harmless enough thing to put out there, given that one’s party is rather unlikely to have to try to live up to it for a few years yet.

Yet National assiduously cultivates a bright shining image of super-duper economic management that seems to be reflected back in polls.

That’s the thing about polls though, whether of parties, individuals or issues. Think about what they’re saying for too long and you’ll go blind.

Is it pandemic management or is it the climate emergency, or both, that are top of mind?

The former, it has to be said, is likely to go away one day, because medical science will eventually get the better of Covid.

More than 209,000 people have died from Covid in the US thus far, a toll that adds up to more than the combined number of victims of the flu in its past five seasons. So Covid is not something to be trivialised or made into conspiracy theory ammunition.

The climate emergency, however, is something else, both in scale and duration. For it is, potentially, the death of us all, which is why it is easy to succumb to despair at some of the facile preoccupations of our politicians and the commentariat during the campaign. The price of milk and lamb, the “clangers” that so worry Winston Peters – other people’s, of course, not his own – the fatuous obsessing over who “won” the latest debate and so forth.

The so-called debates are unreal. They’re an entertainment that offer little scrutiny of policy, of what is in the contenders’ manifestos and, perhaps more importantly, what is missing.

Instead, there is incessant demand for instant fixes of problems such as housing, for instance. But they are issues that don’t fit into a three-year election cycle, yet that’s what seems to be demanded from the politicians, who in response feed the fire with silly promises of action.

Next Saturday night should reveal the answers voters want and who they want them from. Perhaps.

Let's block ads! (Why?)

from Poker