It’s been fun Winston, but now back to business

Winston Peters kept the ship steady, and gave the country – including his Government colleagues – a bit of a breather after a whirlwind 10 months since the election. But Jacinda Ardern’s return will give the Government back some momentum – and a chance for a reset.

The Government’s popularity appears to be holding up, according to internal party polling at least. But the gulf between business and the Government is turning into a chasm. Business confidence is in a funk and – extraordinarily – on a par with levels not seen since the global financial crisis.

Ardern won’t have been oblivious to that while on maternity leave.

She tried to confront business confidence head on in the weeks before having her baby – admitting to one business audience it was the elephant in the room.

But it is now looming as the biggest central concern her Government faces.

There is a feeling in Labour that much of the rhetoric is unfair – Ardern pulled out the stops to rescue the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement as one of her first acts as a new prime minister and the Government has pressed ahead with an aggressive trade agenda in the face of global uncertainty fuelled by the fear of trade wars.

It will also throw an estimated $1 billion at dairy farming in an attempt to arrest Mycoplasma bovis, has billions of dollars in cash to spread around provincial New Zealand via the provincial growth fund, as well as R&D tax credits, and green investment fund championing sustainable technology, all of which are seen as business-friendly policies.

Yet business continues to feel excluded by a government that it considers unfriendly at best and hostile at worst.

Much of that us driven by uncertainty about the Government’s industrial relations agenda, but the Government has also taken on board the lessons from the decision to halt oil and gas exploration without notice, which helped fuel the sense of ‘‘them and us’’.

The two sides could keep talking past each other about who’s right and who’s wrong, but it’s now beyond that point.

Someone has to fix it and the only person who can do that is Ardern.

Ardern was popular with Auckland business before she became leader of the Opposition and a mood-of-the-boardroom survey rated her well ahead of any of her colleagues as being one of Labour’s more business-savvy MPs.

Labour probably didn’t make enough of that in the early stages of this government.

So don’t be surprised if one of Ardern’s first moves on her return is to bring some of the ‘‘Jacinda effect’’ to bear on business by taking a more front and centre approach to the economy.