Okay, so we’ve had the first little parry of the election campaign, with Nicola Willis calling a news conference to accuse Labour of numbers that don’t add up, and then Barbara Edmonds responding.
I’m going to call this - by the slimmest of margins - for Edmonds. I think she actually won this exchange purely by holding her ground, sounding confident and pointing out that she doesn’t actually have to have public numbers that add up just yet.
It’s June. The election is five months away. Labour hasn’t announced all its policies yet - heck, it’s only announced about three or four.
They are entitled to have a little bit of time to roll out the full suite of policies and the full fiscal plan in the next few months.
Now, this is not to say that Willis is wrong in her assertion. I think, in time, she’s going to be proven right that Labour’s numbers don’t add up. That $20-a-week public transport policy has been hugely under-costed. Reinstating pay equity will cost billions of dollars Labour doesn’t have; they’re just going to have to put that on the debt.
The capital gains tax is not going to bring in the amount of money that Labour says it will.
So Willis is right - Labour hasn’t got the money - but her timing is wrong. She has gone too hard, too early.
But Willis also has a significant side issue of her own here, which is that she doesn’t hold the economic high ground. She doesn’t have the money either for what the National Party has promised, particularly regarding the Roads of National Significance. They promised 17 of them. We are not going to get 17 of them while these guys are in power.
These roads are now being downgraded - as in the case of Mill Road and one other - or they’re being delayed to the point that we only had one of these roads delivered in the latest Budget.
Now, obviously, an early parry doesn’t win an election. I think this is a case of Labour having - yep, sure - won an early battle but they’re still going to lose the war.
But what this should tell you is that Edmonds is maybe just a little bit better than some people would estimate her to be.
And timing, as they say, is everything.
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