At all such conferences political parties attempt to present a united front, and if there is any discontent simmering in Labour’s ranks it was not overtly apparent at the Auckland gathering.
Party leader Chris Hipkins has been under intense scrutiny for the past two years, having led Labour to a historic defeat in 2023.
Many leaders in his position would have resigned immediately. Mr Hipkins opted to tough it out and his toil is starting to bear fruit.
A year out from the next general election Mr Hipkins has restored Labour to a position in the polls where it is conceivable to talk about them potentially leading the next government. His caucus appears disciplined, is working hard, and Mr Hipkins looks secure in his job.
To be fair, that is likely as much to do with National’s inability to shift its own faltering polling upwards as much as anything Mr Hipkins is doing.
But on October 15, 2023, the only way for Labour was up and — slowly — that is the direction in which Mr Hipkins has taken his party.
The one simmering argument in Labour circles — to CGT or not to CGT — has been cooled by the party’s announcement in late October that it would indeed campaign to introduce a limited, targeted version of the controversial capital gains tax.
Labour quite possibly wanted to make that announcement the centrepiece of last weekend’s conference, but being rushed into announcing it early may have been no bad thing from a strategy perspective: it being out in the open defused any potential public fight at the gathering for or against the tax and allowed Labour to focus on selling it, and itself to voters.
Mr Hipkins confronted that head-on in his conference speech, saying that Labour recognised that such people had worked hard, saved carefully, and made responsible choices, and that Labour would not punish them for doing so.
He asserted that taxing profit in investment was the aim of the policy and that nine out of 10 New Zealanders would not pay a cent. Should it come to pass that might be so, but having publicly ringfenced future CGT income to present health initiatives Labour runs the risk of promoting an allegedly self-financing policy that will not raise enough revenue to sustain itself.
When it announced the tax policy Labour endeavoured to pitch it as a health policy. Its centrepiece announcement for this conference was more health policy, a proposal to make cheap loans available for GPs to set up their own local medical practices.
While this is not a bad idea — Health Minister Simeon Brown was careful not to dismiss it out of hand — it does come with several caveats.
The obvious one is where are all these aspiring GPs to come from? The country is short of GPs now and looming likely levels of retirement will make it even worse.
It will take years to train these people, and Labour is no fan of National’s flagship policy for addressing that issue, a new medical school at the University of Waikato.
Nor is there any guarantee that these doctors will set up shop where people actually need them. Labour’s rhetoric of people being able to easily get an affordable appointment with their local doctor sounds good, but it will be much more complicated than that appealing soundbite reveals.
It is a small policy which sounds good but is far from a game changer. It will do as a pre-campaign election sweetener, but Labour knows that when it comes time for it to fire the big guns it will need more substantial ammunition than this.
On Sunday Mr Hipkins set out the battleground for 2026, as he sees it: "Jobs. Health. Homes."
He argued that those three concepts were the foundation of a good society, and that it was the foundation of Labour’s plan for New Zealand.
The first assertion will brook little debate; too few details exist to test the second.
But, for now, it will be enough to put Labour in the fight.
