Election 2020: Jacinda Ardern and Judith Collins paint dreams and nightmares as they head straight home

Jacinda Ardern began the final week of the campaign by outlining her vision of what New Zealand could achieve 10 years from now.

Judith Collins began last week outlining her idea of ​​a nightmare scenario if Labor and the Greens held power together after Saturday’s election.

Ardern remains the undisputed favorite to form a second government, with or without the Greens, as Collins struggles to avoid a humiliating defeat.

Both leaders refrain from saying or doing anything that seems prematurely victorious or defeated.

In the final sprint to the finish, Ardern will head to Hamilton today and Collins will head to Christchurch and they will go head-to-head one last time on Thursday for the TVNZ leaders debate.

Ardern will also appear on Mike Hosking’s Newtalk ZB Breakfast this morning from 7 am to 9 am. Listen and watch live on nzherald.co.nz, Newstalk ZB and iHeart Radio.

Ardern’s message throughout the week will be the same as he made to 800 loyal supporters at a rally in Wellington yesterday: to promote Labor as the party of stability, which responded well to the Covid-19 crisis, but has more to do.

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the last three years … it’s what you do when the unexpected happens that counts,” he said.

“We can all campaign with a long list of policies and ideas, but you really get to know your government when disaster strikes.”

He quoted the words of Sir James Henare: “We have gone too far not to go further, we have done too much, not to do more.”

He said Covid had the potential to worsen child poverty, the housing crisis, and climate change.

“But fortunately, before the pandemic reached our shores, we sowed the seeds of change.”

Ardern’s idea outlining the 2030 vision (child poverty halved, housing waiting list fulfilled, 100% renewable energy) served to suggest that while Labor was essentially campaigning on the management of Covid, it would not forget its central policies.

Collins and National campaign strategists decided to start the last week with a fiscal attack, declaring that Sunday was “Stop Wealth Tax Day.”

Labor has ruled out the implementation of the Greens wealth tax, a 1% tax on people’s net wealth over $ 1 million and 2% on wealth over $ 2 million.

But Collins insisted that Labor could renege on those commitments during the coalition talks.

Clearly, his goal was to try and win over the elderly homeowners, who appear to have left National en masse for Jacinda Ardern through the Covid health crisis.

“There should be a lot of people concerned that if you’ve paid for your Auckland house and you’re retired and you have some money in the bank, you’re probably subject to estate tax if James Shaw gets away with it,” Collins said.

A tax attack on Labor and the Greens was an effective weapon in the 2017 campaign when Ardern left open the possibility of implementing a capital gains tax during the current term. National was so effective that Ardern later ruled out implementing any CGT during this period.

Yesterday, Ardern again ruled out the implementation of a wealth tax and dismissed National’s latest tax attack: “I consider it the latest roll of the disinformation dice.”

Greens co-leader James Shaw gave the tax weapon oxygen last week when he told Mike Hosking of Newstalk that the wealth tax was a new version of a CGT that he would test after the Coalition Government not only rejected a capital gains tax, but Ardern said Labor. I would never campaign on him again under his leadership.

The Greens have stepped up their campaign presence in Auckland, where they are trying to win Auckland Central and garner more than 5 percent of the Party’s votes nationally.

But Shaw admitted that Jacinda Ardern’s popularity was affecting her campaign.

“She is blocking the sun at the moment, which makes it a very difficult operating environment,” he told TVNZ’s Q + A.

New Zealand First leader Winston Peters will hold public meetings in Whanganui today and Tauranga tomorrow. Yesterday he was in Palmerston North promising a five percent salary increase for Defense Forces personnel and saying that border quarantine facilities should be on military bases.

The leader of the event, David Seymour, will campaign in Tauranga today. Yesterday he attacked the government’s policy of border waivers as elitist, saying it allowed them for international rugby players, Hollywood stars and America’s Cup billionaires.

“What about CSR workers, fishermen and international students?”