Political & Economic Week Ahead: will the World Cup win help the Government?

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Parliament returns this week, with various politicians jetting back from points in the northern hemisphere not a million miles away from Twickenham.

The government will be hoping the feel-good buzz from the Rugby World Cup win will spill over into an lift in the polls: if history is a guide, a well-performing All Black side has often correlated with a return to the office for the incumbent government ad the next general election.

Correlation is not causation, however, and National kicked off the week signalling what sounds like a potentially radical revamp of New Zealand’s planning laws.

Not only the Resource Management Act but also the Local Government Act and the Land Transport Act are to be the focus of a “blue skies” review by the Productivity Commission, announced on the weekend by Finance Minister Bill English.

This could be just another review but its scope suggests something bigger with the potential to be more radical.

Across the aisle in Parliament, Labour leader Andrew Little goes into his first conference as party leader this weekend. Labour has had a patchy 12 months: after a decidedly messy first half of the year a few stronger MPs started showing their potential: Te Tai Tokerau’s Kelvin Davis being the standout performer. Veteran and deputy Annette King remains the party’s anchor in Parliament.

But the great hopes of the party – Grant Robertson and Jacinda Ardern – are still more promise than substance. And they cannot afford to be seen to be performing too well, lest they overshadow Mr Little and cause the kind of instability Labour is hoping to put behind it.

The economic focus this week also has a labour element – job market figures, to be released on Wednesday. Always one of the most political piece of economic data, the big question is how much the swelling size of the job market, due to record net immigration, has pushed up the unemployment rate.

Hiring intentions fell over the most recent quarter – although they rebounded over October – and unemployment could go above 6% even if the numbers in work continue to rise.

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