Labour leader Andrew Little talks to the public at the Labour party conference in Palmerston North.

One commentator said Andrew Little "nailed it" at the Labour Party annual conference at the weekend. An editorial writer, however, described the conference, which was notable for the unusual absence of blood-letting, a "policy desert".

Both assessments are fair.

What's really interesting is that peace has broken out not only inside the Labour Party, but also between Labour and National in some fundamental policy areas.

In part, that follows party leader Andrew Little's finally euthanising some old policies he had long judged political poison, irrespective of their merits in a perfect world.

Behind closed doors and with very little fuss, capital gains tax, a higher pension entitlement age, and that complicated electricity policy that everyone worried wouldn't work, were formally ditched.

Also behind closed doors and with even less fuss, housing spokesman Phil Twyford also got sign-off on three new legs to Labour's housing policy, two of which have all but been announced by the government.

He announced a National Policy Statement would be used to dictate to city councils on urban densification and on removing urban boundaries that create a massive distortion between the price of land inside the boundary and land just outside it.

Twyford has concluded, along with everyone apart from anti-sprawl advocates and Nimbys, that a big part of why Auckland's house prices are so crazy is the web of rules that drive the construction of costly homes. The government has reached the same conclusions and an NPS on urban form is in the pipeline to deal with "building up" and "building out" issues, especially in Auckland.

However, before Labour's critics nod sagely and mutter "National-lite" to themselves, there are two other important aspects of Labour's approach to housing that National doesn't have.

Firstly, Labour remains committed to its KiwiBuild policy, which would see the government back the construction of thousands of 'affordable' homes in Auckland and other places where house prices are under pressure because houses are in short supply.

And secondly, Twyford's latest policy would finance new suburban infrastructure by issuing long term, lower interest local government bonds, funded over the long term by rates targeted at the area benefiting from the new roads, water and drainage.

This would smooth over 30 years or more the up-front costs that property developers currently seek to pass straight to the owners of new houses in new subdivisions.

So, in this area, Labour can be said to have developed over some seven years a rounded, differentiated policy to National's.

ALTERNATIVE POLICY

Progress on fresh, alternative policy elsewhere is harder to spot.

Finance spokesman Grant Robertson's 'future of work' speech and session were remarkable only for the fact that it's unusual to have the managing director of any company – in this case, Victoria Crone from Xero – addressing a Labour conference about how work is changing.

It would also once have been unimaginable for a crowd of the Labour faithful to sit quietly through a 'challenge session' pushing not only the virtues, but the inevitability, of highly flexible, often self-employed work in the future.

But one year into his Future of Work Commission's deliberations, Robertson's speech on that vital subject dwelt in commonplace observations : that automation is coming for white collar workers in the way it already has for blue collar jobs; that in the future, "soft skills" will become more valuable compared to technical skills; or that few people will have a job for life and many will have a lot of different jobs at once.

Not only did the future of work not sound like much fun, but the speech delivered no galvanising insight into how Robertson is seeking to deal with all this.

Perhaps this is all part of an entirely reasonable plan not to launch policy for the 2017 election too early. However, the Robertson's speech was so lightweight as to beg the question of just how far the thinking has advanced.

It may be too early to announce policy, but it's not too early to start framing a new and compelling vision for what work in the future might look like, how it might be regulated and organised, and what Labour has uniquely to offer for the next generation of workers in a very different world.

This matters particularly because Labour has to own this particular territory like no other by 2017 if it is to have a shot at leading a centre-left government. That's partly because it's core Labour territory anyway, and partly because most of the other big platforms are taken already.

National owns sound economic management, even it looks tired and visionless. The Greens own climate change and green tech so utterly that Labour is invisible on both the Paris climate change summit in Paris next month and on electric vehicles or renewable energy.

While Labour will attempt to make restricting residential land sales to foreigners a non-negotiable objection to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Little said himself in his conference closing speech that Labour is "a party of free trade". The housing ban issue is a distraction from the fact that Labour's parliamentary wing will support a trade and investment agreement that rank and file Labour members love to hate.

In other words, New Zealand First faces no serious challenge when it comes to old-style protectionist nationalism.

To be taken seriously as the leading party in the next government, Labour needs not only fully developed policies, but differentiated policies in major areas of substance that resonate with its natural support base.

The future of work initiative is the key to that. Grant Robertson needs to start proving sooner rather than later that he has more than platitudes to offer.

-BusinessDesk