For some pundits, elections are magical times in which pundits’ favourite policy hobby-horses transform into the election-winning platform for any party that might listen. I will recommend something a little different for Labour’s incoming leader.

Jacinda Ardern has received a lot of unsolicited advice in areas ranging from Labour’s Memorandum of Understanding with the Greens to the necessity of going full-Corbyn.

For those who do not believe in magic, options are a bit more constrained.

Developing new policy a few weeks out from an election is a recipe for the kind of big mistakes that let an incumbent party paint a new leader as inexperienced and not up to the task.

This is especially the case for an incoming leader that has not held senior shadow cabinet responsibilities, and whose Private Member’s Bills were light on substance.

And so Ardern might reasonably be cautious about straying from the platform that Labour has already developed. Choice should then mostly be around policy emphasis and communication.

In early July, Colmar Brunton asked about Kiwis’ greatest concern going into the election. House prices, housing affordability, housing shortages, and homelessness together were listed by just over 23 percent of the surveyed electorate. A further 14 percent listed poverty and the gap between rich and poor. We at the Initiative have argued that that concern likely reflects the obvious effects of the housing crisis.

Labour has established a credible portfolio of policies for dealing with New Zealand’s housing crisis.

Kiwibuild seems the weakest plank in that portfolio, and the one that I would most strongly argue against. If zoning and infrastructure financing are not set properly, then Kiwibuild will hit the same barriers that face any private developer. But if zoning and infrastructure financing are fixed, then Kiwibuild is not necessary as private developers could do the job. It either will not work, or is not needed.

But in a world without magic, Kiwibuild remains good politics even if I think it is a bad policy. A lot of voters have a hard time seeing the links between zoning, infrastructure, and housing shortages. For those voters, Kiwibuild would be a credible demonstration of Labour’s commitment to fix the problem that National allowed to grow over the past decade.

And it is a message credibly conveyed by a leader age-adjacent to youths locked out of the housing market.

Housing remains National’s Achilles’ Heel. Go for it.