Labour and the Greens get inspiration from Broadway, National bites off more than it can chew, both main parties do financial sums and NZ First quarrels with everyone

By Eric Frykberg

Week four of the election campaign kicked off with the Greens and Labour seeming to get inspiration from Doris Day.

Their shared motto was "Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better", and it just went on and on.

So repetitively did the two parties jostle to be smarter, faster and brighter than the other that I soon had the song on the brain – and believe me, it is not the sort of earworm that one really wants.

The Greens kicked it off by smugly saying we-did-it-first when Labour promised renewed support for free school lunches.

Then, Labour announced an amnesty for long term overstayers, but the Greens spoiled that, too, arguing Labour's version of “long term” was far too long. Instead, there should be “accessible residency pathways for everyone”.

Labour finally played its trump card and promised to build more state houses. This is about as core Labour Party as you can get – it practically paints Chris Hipkins as a Michael Joseph Savage clone.

But a re-elected Labour pledge of 27,000 state houses provided in ten years was not “ambitious” enough for the Greens, who want 35,000 built in five years.

And the campaign is far from over, and nor is all the skiting.

You can understand why teachers get fed up and feel like going on strike when their two classroom swots shoot up their hands before a question is even finished, and call out, “Me, Sir, Me!”

Not that this obsessive behaviour is confined to the Left. The ACT Party insists National's desire to have faster speed limits on the roads is tame policy-making, and should be seriously beefed up.

And there was jostling across the aisle as well, with ACT, National and Labour arguing over who would be kinder to granny when she wants to come and live in New Zealand to help her immigrant offspring raise their own children.

Who knows where all this Yes-I-can-No-you-can't will end? And who knows when a new policy on a new topic will emerge, and spare us the sight of two parties wrestling on a known piece of turf? Not me.

In another development, the National Party declared war on road cones. This will surely be a vote winner for many bewildered motorists, who must see the profusion of red cones as a local version of a biblical plague, but far more numerous than boils or frogs.

However, the National Party leaders neglected to provide a realistic option on where all these road cones would go. They didn't say they would open a dozen more landfills so there would be somewhere to put them all. Nor did they say who would pay for the large fleet of trucks needed to remove them, or what would be the impact on GDP by reversing this fast-growing sector of the economy.

I think we deserve answers.

Meanwhile, National had another problem, nibbling tentatively at the NZ First cookie, but declining to take a serious bite. Mind you, you can understand National's shyness, with Winston Peters peeping over the 5% threshold and then dipping back down again, in a now-you-see-me-now-you-don't sort of way.

Labour's Chris Hipkins has it far easier. He has ruled out working with Winston Peters "who causes chaos wherever he goes". He would not be so "rude" as to refuse to answer a phone call from Peters - he would answer it, and then say No.

Luxon, by contrast, has a far tougher phone call ahead, like a teenager who has dinged Dad's car but still has to ask if he can borrow it again.

New Zealand First was meanwhile joining ACT and National in clamping down on beneficiaries who are abusing a typical largesse of $350 a week.

And Peters remained adamant that Australian-owned banks and supermarkets were ripping off New Zealanders and no-one could "come the raw prawn" with him.

Meanwhile, the prospect of both David Seymour and Winston Peters leaving the subs bench to join Luxon's scrum in pushing Labour back over the try-line seemed to bring out both men's mutual antipathy.

Peters was "an arsonist dressed up as a firefighter" according to Seymour, while "Seymour wouldn't last 10 seconds in the ring with me," according to Peters. These and other insults were helpfully compiled in a colourful dossier of insults by The Spinoff.

All this dislike means a future centre-right "coalition" will be anything but a solid bloc. Instead, it will consist of scattered fragments dotted all over parliament, which come together only for special occasions.

Meanwhile, all contenders ended the week arguing about money, as though bent on proving that politics is all about "Who gets What, When, How."

That famous description came from an American political scientist, Harold Lasswell, and New Zealand politicians must have been reading his textbook.

And dutifully trotting out the right answers served only to bring out the Doris Day in just about everyone. Labour was planning to spend more on capital works each year, but not too much more. National would be still more careful, and even the Greens announced they know full well there are 100 cents in the dollar.

Perhaps Doris Day is not the right metaphor, after all. Perhaps it is more like Goldilocks. The only trouble is, no one can agree on what is not-too-hot-and-not-too-cold.