Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s response to a terrorist attack on Muslim mosques in Christchurch was superb. ‘They are us’ was a clarion call to decency and communal cohesion in a world where polarisation is much more common.

The subsequent call for international action to prevent a recurrence of the social media exploitation that accompanied the Christchurch tragedy had more mixed effects. The ‘Christchurch call’ launched by Ardern with French President Emmanuel Macron has attracted support from 48 countries but its impact is uncertain.

International law and agreements always lack the coercive power that makes domestic law binding. But the Christchurch call is uncertain because it is not based on authoritative analysis of the problem it seeks to address. Social media and the Internet may challenge desirable values and norms but the technology is also enormously valuable in making information available. The challenge to policymakers is not to express disapproval of evil but to operationalise the boundary between good and evil.

Domestic policy suffers from the same inadequacy. There have been many enquiries and reports but little effective policy development. The promise of ‘transformational policy’ looks hollow. The first well-being budget confirmed predictions that creating an explicit label would achieve little change as governments had always sought well-being. Current budget processes include a welcome focus on the objectives of groups of ministers with related portfolios. Any emphasis on explicit cost-benefit analysis seems to be declining.

Discrete policy areas have limited achievements. The Minister of Education showed finesse in inducing a committee of enquiry to reconsider its recommendations and worked with officials to develop a sensible set of initiatives. The real work of securing desired change has yet to occur. Other initiatives in the sector, those concerned with polytechnics, are even less assured. It is heroic to hope that revised trades training will relieve constraints on building industries.

Enquiries in the health field have yet to bear fruit. No significant changes have been made in taxation. Efforts have been wasted on a misguided approach to capital gains and expenditure has been restrained by resource constraints. This was symbolised by the abject failure of the Kiwibuild housing scheme.

The government has mostly avoided establishing targets for itself. It created targets for reducing child poverty but there is little reason to think they will be influential. It has secured a political consensus on ‘zero carbon by 2050’ but only by setting aside difficult issues in agriculture. Child poverty and climate change, ‘the issue of my generation’, were presented as the key objectives of the government. The First Labour government promised to abolish poverty in 1938 and declared success in 1946 when it ‘had abolished poverty in New Zealand’, having ‘freed the people from want’, making ‘our nation and its people the happiest on earth’.

Finance Minister Grant Robertson has maintained fiscal discipline. Government debt levels are low. The ability of the public accounts to support a burst of infrastructure spending and investment will be the government strategy in 2020. An initial tranche of spending on educational maintenance was announced at the 2019 conference of the Labour Party, but while schools and other infrastructure need maintenance, the availability of real resources is very doubtful. Few share the confidence of Robertson in the ability of trades training programs to deliver needed capacity.

Low investment plans are not restricted to New Zealand. Capital output ratios everywhere have probably been reduced by the revolution in information and communications technology. But the buoyancy of the economy is unlikely to rescue the government. The recent experience of expanding though population growth while per capita incomes grow slowly is an experience likely to continue through 2020 and beyond.

The result of next year’s election will depend on extraneous events — mismanagement of party affairs and financial scandals — rather than on domestic economic management. The mixed-member proportion electoral system means that much will depend on the technicalities of coalition politics.

Foreign affairs will not figure strongly. New Zealand will muddle its way through US–China trade and technology contests. The government achieved a review of the China free trade agreement and managed to keep Huawei to technocratic issues about the security of a secure core network. The government will continue to advocate for the multilateral system and will join coalitions to promote it. But it will also do enough to placate worries about threats to national interests from foreign investment. It will probably be sufficiently sophisticated to avoid the charge of protectionism.

The 2017 volume in a series of studies on New Zealand’s elections was called Stardust & Substance. The first term of the Ardern government has clearly delivered stardust.

Gary Hawke is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand and a member of the Academic Advisory Council of the Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia (ERIA).

This article is part of an EAF special feature series on 2019 in review and the year ahead.