Voter sentiment is changing from not wanting much change to wanting significant change. Some want revolution.

Perceived personality of politician has become more important than policies and actions – to an increasing number of voters and also to journalists who are increasingly involved in make the narrative rather than reporting.

But the hope of compassionate revolution is not (yet) being realised.

“We have moved into a political era where talk of empathy and compassion rates more highly than taking action, and the extent to which Jacinda Ardern can continue to rewrite the narrative this way will determine the outcome of the next election”

“The Prime Minister’s challenge is to entrench empathy and compassion as the basis of contemporary government, before evidence and achievement reassert themselves.”

Peter Dunne (Newsroom):  Government by worthy sentiment

For the older voters, the broad consensus from 1999 to 2017 was a welcome relief to the upheavals of the 1980s and early 1990s that had led them to opt for MMP in 1993, to place a greater restraint on governments. But for 1999 first time voters, most of whom would have been too young to recall directly the experiences and hardships of the restructurings of the 1980s and early 1990s, the same broad consensus was actually a straightjacket.

No matter the complexion of the government, the policy outcomes had still been broadly the same. While the country was being transformed, quietly and significantly, in those years, to those voters nothing much was actually seeming to change.

So it really did not matter to them which of the major parties was in power – they were all broadly the same anyway, and the succession of leaders each major party put up while in Opposition tended to confirm that.

If anything National under Simon Bridges’ leadership is becoming more old school conservative. His recent “What the Kiwi way of life means to me’ hints more than a little of ‘the good old days’ that we have evolved significantly away from.  There are ,more Kiwi ways of life than there ever was.

What these voters were yearning for, and did not see in contemporary political leaders, were “people like them” becoming more prominent in politics. People who would speak their language, and share their concerns and frustrations.

Bridges is failing at speaking anyone’s language well if at all.

The fortuitous arrival of Jacinda Ardern as leader of the Labour Party in quite dramatic circumstances weeks before the 2017 election was the tonic many of them were seeking to vote for, in the expectation of a real break from the status quo they had known all their voting lives. She was, after all, one of them, fitting their demographic near perfectly, and completely untainted by ever having held any previous significant or substantial political office. So, for her, no problem was insoluble, no challenge insurmountable, and no existing solution sufficient.

Her appeal was (and remains) that she is a break from the past in so many ways.

The contrast between Ardern and the four Labour leaders who preceded her was huge. She made an immediate impact when she stepped up. The media become unusually excited and gave her an enormous amount of favourable coverage, but people, voters, could see for themselves that she was different, she spoke a different language that resonated.

That of itself provides those voters with a confidence that she understands their plight, because she is living it too. Forget the fact that she has changed very few of the policies that Labour took to the 2011 and 2014 elections where they were trashed; or that those they have tried to implement now (like Kiwibuild) are becoming embarrassing failures.

Forget too that her Government now admits that it does not even know how to measure whether or not its policies are working, and the deteriorating relationship with our major trading partner.

It just seems not to matter because the sustaining feature of this Government is not anything it has done or stands for, but rather the effervescent personality of the Prime Minister, that fits the current mood of the group of voters around the median population age.

Indeed, it is highly doubtful whether many of them could articulate beyond the vaguest of platitudes what she actually stands for.

Your NZ commenters probably don’t represent average voters, but as an exercise I asked What does Jacinda Ardern stand for?

We are now in an almost post ‘politics as usual’ phase, where the previous emphasis on policy and delivery has given way to feeling and identifying with the issues of the day, although it is far from clear to where that is leading, or what the new norms will be.

The emerging reality is that, despite some of the rhetoric, we are moving into an era where commitment to aspiration (prioritising empathy and compassion) rates more highly than action (prioritising evidence and achievement).

The Prime Minister’s challenge is to entrench empathy and compassion as the basis of contemporary government, before evidence and achievement reassert themselves.

The extent to which she can rewrite the political narrative this way, and paint National as cold and heartless in the process, and therefore part of the past, rather than anything her Government manages to do, let alone what the opinion polls may say, will determine the outcome of the 2020 election.

I think many on the left would love for Judith Collins to take over the National leadership so they could build on the “cold and heartless” contrast with Ardern. As things stand Bridges playing into National’s opponents hands with his opposition to a compassionate approach to drug law, his opposition a compassionate legalising of euthanasia.

Ardern’s compassion and empathy and wellbeing and fairness – at a superficial level at least – is going to be hard to beat, unless Government failures to match rhetoric with action become too apparent (they are really struggling with housing and health in particular, with poorly performing Ministers Phil Twyford and David Clark).

National have indicated they plan to roll out policies this year, trying to offer substance over nice but empty words. But will voters listen, whether bridges or Collins are leading?

Labour are helped in the compassionate politics stakes by the Greens, but Winston Peters and NZ First are a sharply contrasting blast from the past. This may not matter if NZ First fail to make the threshold next election.

It may be that Ardern successfully manages to fool the masses with more feel good than actual good.