And so begins what might prove to be perhaps the ultimate test of Jacinda Ardern’s credentials as Prime Minister.
And no, we are not talking about the multi-tasking required in having a baby on board in the Beehive.
During her nine month-plus tenure as the country’s leader, Ardern has exhibited a confidence, sure-footedness and decisiveness which has been second to none when it has come to her handling of the multitude of always tricky matters which end up on the prime minister’s desk for resolution.
She has mastered the complexities, complications and compromises that are part and parcel of running a three-party governing arrangement.
She has done the seemingly impossible in taming Winston Peters, transforming him from adversary to ally.
If all that was not tough enough, she may now be facing what might qualify as the hardest challenge of all - keeping a government alive when the economy looks like it might be on the slide.
Until now, the economic growth which had continued unabated regardless of last year’s change of government meant her ability to talk matters financial garnered little attention.
The collapse in business confidence has changed all that. All of a sudden she has found herself on the defensive. All of a sudden she appears vulnerable in an area of policy where Labour has always been open to the charge that National does a better job.
All of a sudden she sounds rather ordinary.
That was evident in her rather pedestrian and less than convincing responses to questions during her weekly post-Cabinet press conference on Monday.
Not surprisingly, the assembled media greeted her return from six weeks of maternity leave by focussing on the alarming increase in economic gloom - now at levels not witnessed since the global financial crisis of a decade ago. The journos wanted to know what she intended doing to remedy it.
That was an invitation to treat the near unanimous trend displayed by the host of surveys which regularly gauge the mood of entrepreneurs both major and minor at face value. It would have amounted to an acknowledgement the collapse in confidence was a “crisis”.
That would have left her being deluged with ridicule by the Opposition which has delighted in at last finding some bad news to throw at the Government.
Furthermore, were the Prime Minister to give even the slightest hint in public that she thinks things are at crisis point, that would risk setting a self-fulfilling prophecy in motion.
Ardern would likely have also drawn a lesson from Labour’s previous experience of a “winter of discontent” during the early life of Helen Clark’s government.
That example of extreme unhappiness on the part of business saw the commercial sector focus on blocking Labour’s legislation replacing the much-hated Employment Contract Act which was the legacy of the previous National government.
Once Labour’s alternative measure had become law, the anger dissipated. It had nowhere else to go. There was no longer a crisis.
Labour’s view that the current fuss over business confidence is being likewise overdramatised and its hope that it will fade away looks like being more than a touch optimistic.
What business hates is uncertainty. The Labour part of the current governing coalition keeps piling policy uncertainty on policy uncertainty in areas which are of crucial import to commerce, be it the possibility of major changes to the tax system or the overhauling of industrial relations law.
Labour would argue that the plethora of working groups and taskforces which have been established to review the efficacy of current policy in just about every field of government activity is necessary to ensure there is adequate public consultation and that the recommendations for change are backed by solid and sound analysis. And - though you will never hear Labour ministers saying as much - that they dovetail with their party’s ideology.
What you will continue to hear is Ardern peddling the line that the “perceptions” of the business world which were measured by the confidence surveys are out of line with the “reality” of the robustness of economic fundamentals.
In other words, the ongoing measures of gloom simply do not square with the long-established and highly reliable “markers” of the true health of the economy. Those dials are all pointing in the right direction.
Ardern has completely missed the point, however. The slump in business confidence might seem inexplicable and illogical in the context of the current rosy state of the economy. The argument has long moved on, however.
The so-called perceptions which Ardern dismisses out of hand matter very much to investors assessing the wisdom of committing capital to long-term projects.
Caution is likely to become the watchword in an environment of increasingly rampant negativity.
Ardern and her colleagues should be afraid, very afraid.
The slump in economic optimism is now a crisis bigger than all the problems combined which have confronted them in recent months.
It is no longer a question of whether the residential property is cooling. It is a matter of by how much and for how long.
Likewise only a fool would put money on Fletcher Building and Ebert Construction being the only high-profile victims of the Wild West which is New Zealand’s commercial building sector.
The sharemarket is overdue for a major “correction”. The chill wind of technology-induced change in shopping habits has long been buffeting the High Street. The retail sector is in no condition to entertain a crash in consumer confidence.
Ardern’s Government cannot be be blamed for many of the factors responsible for drop in confidence, be it the potential outbreak of a trade war or the shambolic state of the construction sector.
But Labour will get blamed if it does nothing to help lift the gloom.
Labour has instead taken the Rip van Winkle option. It thought that its first Budget since its return to power would be regarded as fiscally responsible enough to appease the party’s critics in the corporate world.
National leader Simon Bridges said the results were “not some kind of airy-fairy thing, it has a real effect on the economy and jobs over time”.
Not so. Silencing the chorus of doomsayers will more than likely require a sacrifice which is of sufficient symbolic potency to persuade them that the Government does not have its head in the sand and is acutely aware of the repercussions should business confidence crash through the floor.
The obvious candidate for such shelving is the Jim Bolger-chaired working group on fair pay agreements - the first step in a potential return towards industry-wide collective bargaining through the setting of minimum standards for pay and conditions across an industry or occupation.
Ditching that policy would raise the ire of trade unions affiliated to the Labour Party.
But so be it. Doing nothing might end up requiring further and even bigger and more politically-sensitive sacrifices down the track.
Ardern might beg to differ, but doing nothing is not an option.
Current circumstances demand that she rekindle some of her political magic in an economic context and that she stop her Nero-like playing of the fiddle while her Government risks being burnt - and badly so.
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