[ad_1]
CAMPAIGN JOURNAL: Jacinda Ardern often follows a less is more campaign style.
In the last election, Bill English would pack every hour of the day with another coffee, another business, another factory. Ardern would visit a place or two, announce a policy, hold a press conference, and drop her there. After all, there is only one part of your day that will make the news at 6:00 p.m.
That was not the case today in Wairarapa, a country-style seat in the lower North Island. Labor believes he has a very good chance of winning. Ardern made six stops across the expanding electorate, took a ride on his battered candidate’s ute, and posed for photos in the rain with all the local businesses who asked.
Loren Dougan / Stuff
Labor leader Jacinda Ardern takes a selfie in Masterton.
Wairarapa is far from being monolithic. Ardern’s day began in the more rural northern half of the electorate in Pahiatua, a small town of 2,500, the kind of place where some mispronounce “kia ora.” He ended up in Featherston, a town that public officials travel to Wellington from where he has an artisan cheese shop.
READ MORE:
* The work would eliminate the Provincial Growth Fund, promising a ‘focused evolution’ of regional development
The electorates do not decide who wins the government, of course. But winning them is a big deal for the local candidate and the local party, and the campaigns that are contested for them can significantly boost the party’s vote across the country. And as Labor begins to accept being by far the most popular party in the country again, the party will be eager for victories outside of its urban strongholds, just as National sought to win urban Labor seats like Hutt South when it was dominant. .
Loren Dougan / Stuff
List MP Kieran McAnulty, Jacinda Ardern and Meka Whaitiri chat over coffee in Eketahuna.
In local races, candidates matter a lot. Kieran McAnulty, the MP on the list here, has done his best to brand himself as a Labor MP who does not feel at all like a typical Labor MP. He’s from Eketahuna, not Auckland. His career before politics was as a TAB bookmaker, not as a union organizer. And he’s refreshingly laid-back in conversation, not the type of guy you’d be worried about offending with a mean joke.
He is famously owning a red van with 413,000 km on the clock and a broken rear window, which he once had a fight to save from a thief.
McAnulty closed the gap with National considerably in the last election, to 2,900 from 6,700 in the previous election, and significantly outnumbered his party’s vote. But it was running against the perfect counterpoint: Alastair Scott, a patrician winery owner who actually lived in Wellington.
Scott retires in this election, so McAnulty faces Mike Butterick, a local farmer who was instrumental in the 50 Shades of Green movement against rural forestry. Both men claim that they basically like each other, and neither of them seems likely to arouse serious negative feelings in the population.
“If I don’t win it this time, I probably never win it,” McAnulty said. Stuff.
He “takes nothing for granted”, but as a former bookie is also happy to do some idle statistical speculation: specifically around the fact that Labor typically underperforms its national party’s vote by about 5 percent. percent in this electorate and, one of the most recent polls, the party is 20% ahead of National.
“The reason I’m confident is because of the work that Kieran has put into this seat,” Ardern said of the race.
“I’ve had people come up to me and say ‘look, Kieran has earned it.’ And that’s who we are to us, we never take anything for granted, we don’t assume anything, we just work hard. “
Loren Dougan / Stuff
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern speaks to a boy while it was raining in Wairarapa.
McAnulty started the day looking quite upset, standing in wellies and a suit under a Speights-branded umbrella. The Prime Minister was in Pahiatua to open a water treatment plant, and the heavens were providing abundant untreated rainwater. The Prime Minister does not come to her electorate every day, and the day she was raining in her parade.
Ardern said she always felt like a “Johnny-come-lately” at the rural project opening events, as the locals were the ones who put years of work into the projects – “Then I come and develop a plaque. This seemed more pertinent later in the day when Ardern announced that Labor would effectively end the $ 3 billion Provincial Growth Fund (PGF) if elected, replacing it with a more specific and much smaller regional development fund of $ 200 million. The money already committed under the PGF would be paid, but a new version would not be created.
This is expected to provoke some outrage, but it does not appear to have done so. The companies Ardern spoke to in the electorate were much more interested in a more expensive and much less complicated flow of funds from Wellington: the wage subsidy. Even the head of the local regional development board was satisfied that the PGF unit remained active in the government.
McAnulty’s mood seemed to pick up on the road in his hometown of Eketahuna, where the prime minister stopped for a cup of tea and a photo with the huge Kiwi statue on the main street. He took off his rubber boots to visit a cafe with Ardern, despite his concrete floor, sporting a pair of electorate-made socks. A local vet, extremely pleased to meet Ardern and take a selfie with him, said. Stuff he was definitely “two red ticks” after seeing Ardern in person. Another local sat bewildered as television cameras and a group of reporters surrounded his breakfast table.
Ardern jumped on McAnulty’s famous ute for the next leg, a situation that clearly didn’t excite his bodyguards, who had chatted with him about the car before the trip.
“They said, ‘We understand the boss is going in there, we just want to make sure you don’t take us off.’ I said friend, that thing hasn’t passed 110 km / h in a decade, I’m not going to take off with you. ‘
The next stop was Masterton, where Ardern stopped at Bear Flag Books and Retro, a vintage store that had relied on the wage subsidy. Ardern expressed his love for paper plate holders, an ancient instrument for stiffening paper plates on barbecues, while McAnulty asked why just a plate wouldn’t be used, if paper plate stiffness was an issue. Ardern explained that he actually uses them for photo frames.
After some selfies on the sidewalk, she went to Greytown and the White Swan Hotel, which, you guessed it, was greatly helped by the salary subsidy. (It’s almost as if they planned these trips in advance.) Wairarapa is a tourist region better able to withstand the Covid-19 storm than most, as much of its tourism dollars come from the hill in Wellington, where public sector wages are still flowing.
This could be a problem for the National challenger, since the party’s national campaign is based on criticizing the economy that this government is achieving.
“At this stage we are progressing quite well,” Butterick said.
“We are very, very lucky, and I say knock on wood, 80 percent of our tourism has been national. The southern end of the electorate has a favorable geographic location. “
He was adamant that there was not much division between the more rural parts of the electorate and the more urban ones, since a “business is a business” and the region was interconnected.
McAnulty was more willing to cut it a bit, noting that in 2017 he had gained the bits closer to Wellington and lost the more rural areas.
“In fact, I won Wairarapa. I won the area south of Eketahuna. It was the northern part that was not so striking, ”said McAnulty.
His address to voters is simple enough: Labor will likely win the election. Would you prefer to have a deputy from the opposition as your local representative or someone “in the heart of the Government”?
However, you are careful not to let your confidence become a real prediction.
“Let’s not forget that in the last elections we were voting 23 percent. Then, six weeks later, Jacinda Ardern was Prime Minister. “
