New Zealand has just passed a law that will revolutionise workers’ rights. It probably won’t last

‘Labour has finally enacted its 2017 promise to create fair pay agreements for workers. National is absolutely dead set on repealing them.’ Photograph: Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images

Changes of government often entail less change than people expect.

When Jacinda Ardern came to power in 2017 she did not renationalise the power companies John Key had partly privatised, or immediately force agriculture into the emissions trading scheme. When Key came to power in 2008 he ended up increasing and building on Helen Clark’s working for families programme, which he had previously called “communism by stealth”. And when Clark was elected in 1999 the major rightward shift enacted in the 1980s and 1990s largely survived.