Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: The polls revealed how people felt about the pay equity saga - Heather du Plessis-Allan Drive

We've had a case of conflicting polls over the last twenty-four hours, with two completely different Governments predicted.

But if there's one thing you can take from these polls, which they both agree on, it's that the pay equity revamp hasn’t turned into the circuit breaker that the left clearly thought it was going to be.

The polls are almost identical in the proportion of people who oppose the revamp. The One News poll had 45 percent, the RNZ poll had 43 percent.

That is not big. It is absolutely a plurality - in both polls, more people oppose it than support it.

I’ve seen polls where 70 percent, 80 percent of people oppose something. Someone pointed out to me the polls that were done after Hekia Parata used Budget 2012 to announce class sizes would change - about 80 percent hated it. So 45 percent is nothing.

It certainly isn’t the circuit breaker and make-people-hate-the-Government moment that Labour and the Greens and the unions were hoping it would be.

Why? I don’t know. I thought it was a slam dunk for the opposition to run home but maybe people didn’t understand it enough to care.

Maybe the Government managed to claw back the narrative when it started properly explaining what it was doing, maybe Labour completely ballsed it up, maybe Andrea Vance distracted everyone by calling female ministers the c-bomb.

Or maybe people are just ideologically entrenched and not wanting to oppose anything the Government does because they voted for the Government - and so on.

I don’t know. But what is clear is that it’s not the moment it could’ve been - or was expected to be.

And the Government has not been damaged by this as badly as it could’ve been.

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