Mike's Minute: Week two of the campaign

Week two of the campaign has come and gone - so who are the winners?

Well, if you go on polling alone, it's the new Government of National and Act.

But if you believe that this campaign counts, if you believe that these events and stunts and announcements count for a lot, then there is still much to play for.

For the record, I will repeat, I think the whole thing is a foregone conclusion.

This, more than most elections, has already been decided on the Government's record. It's not about policy from the opposition, because most people already broadly know that the opposition is offering a change from the status quo.

It's what happened when we tossed David Lange's Labour out.

What happened when we tossed Robert Muldoon? What happened when we tossed Helen Clark out?

For a variety of reasons, in Muldoon and Clark's case, we were over the agenda. In Lange's case, we were over the party imploding and the chaos.

That’s why they say Government's lose elections and oppositions don’t win them.

If you're interested in policy there have been some good ones. Act's law and order policy is full of common sense and scratches an itch felt by many a New Zealander fed up with crime.

You can't argue with more doctors, except the fact Labour took six years to do it, which in and of itself is an example of why they are losing.

National's literacy policy last Friday makes sense and many a parent will welcome a crack at tangible improvement in the classroom.

But the downside of campaigns is the down in the weeds obsession you tend to get when the media put a lot of resource into a single event. When you're looking to eke every last dollar out of having journalists wander aimlessly around the country, you tend to end up with the nonsense we got on National's tax policy.

Some economists thought there was a hole. My take - so what? There are other economists who don't think there is a hole.

The Treasury PREFU said we aren't going into recession and the media swallowed that hook, line and sinker. Yet Bryce Wilkinson of the NZ Initiative wrote yesterday and said those numbers are bogus. Where was the media's obsession around that?

Duelling economists is the sort of side show a campaign brings.

But in summation, you can see poor, old Hipkins looking more and more deflated and Luxon looking more and more bullish. Seymour overplayed his hand a bit on the confidence thing, James Shaw called an Act MP a "clown show", Winston Peters refuted the polls, again, and I think one of the Maori leaders went surfing.

Next week we have the debates. I don’t put the weight some do on them. They're important, yes. But they aren't a deal breaker.

As I say, my gut says this thing is over, the script was written over the past 24 months.

We are, to a degree, going through the motions.

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