Since the Policy tool launched on the Spinoff last month, its creators have watched people arrive by the tens of thousands to learn about the parties’ positions. What lessons have they drawn?

There’s a right way and a wrong way to think about voting.

First you have to care. Easy enough.

Then you’ve got to think. Slightly harder.

You’ve got to put away childish things – personality, tradition, values – and sit down at the adults’ table to think about the policies. Evidence based ones. Sensible ones that deliver for New Zealanders. Fresh policies. Smart, innovative policies dreamed up in think-tanks and evangelised at TED talks, imported from Norway and proven in Nevada. Ideally involving apps.

As the TOP billboards put it: think, care, vote. For a party whose central pitch is new ways of thinking, this proposition is fundamentally uncontroversial. This election everyone agrees.

Everyone is about policy in 2017.

Labour’s policies, National says, aren’t clear enough. National’s policies, Labour says, are made “on the hoof”. The Greens, meanwhile, produce lengthy and detailed plans for Labour to pinch, and ACT promises to not just be tough on crime but “tough and smart”.

The parties announce new policy endlessly; so much so that they sometimes announce the same policies twice. On Sunday, National announced its “Families Policy”, which would be better described as “National’s List of Policies Previously Announced of Particular Pertinence to Families”. The Greens did much the same a few days previously, repackaging long standing tertiary policies into the “Student fair deal”.

The policies themselves differ, of course, but beneath the platforms is a consistent way of thinking about voting. Vote for policies. This is a virtue. Voting for anything else – for personality, tradition, or values – is a vice. This is why “Jacindamania” was a pejorative from the start, framing the apparently genuine hope and excitement of many people, and particularly the young, as delirious and unserious. Jacinda, the thinking goes, is nothing but star-dust.

“Now is the time for scrutiny, not starry eyes,” the commentator says.

“People can’t go shopping with your values,” Bill chides Jacinda.

“If only they stopped publishing polls,” Gareth whispers as New Zealand edges closer to breaking his evidence-based heart.

Even Jacinda, champion of values, agrees: “I think, actually, voters want to hear what we’ll do.”

So despite all the outsider rhetoric, TOP is not a party of heretics, but of true believers, convicts to the belief system advanced by most mainstream parties that if only we thought about things harder and actually implemented some evidence-based policies we’d be set. Their policies, of course.

You might think we’d think the same, having spent 18 months making Policy, a tool that is pretty much a shrine to this way of thinking. We could advise you to head over to Policy and let the graph tell you who to vote for.

But really, it’s just lipstick on a spreadsheet.

We made Policy because we found it surprisingly hard last election to find out what was on offer. We wanted to make this easier for everyone. The idea was we’d read press releases and PDFs until our eyes bled, sort the policy from the puff and put it all in one place. Then we’d all be able to think more clearly.

And we did it.

Six weeks ago Policy launched on The Spinoff with over 700 policies from seven parties across 30+ issues, each changing by the day. Since then over 100,000 people have used the tool, spending a cumulative total of two years pouring over policies, selecting those they like and discovering which parties they align with. Policy, and a number of other tools like it, have made this election more accessible than any before.

And look, it’s great knowing the policies. At the very least so you know you’re not being lied to. But people hoped for even more. We’ve had requests for dislike buttons, the ability to weight issues, and even to measure the costs of each policy favourited.

If we could just refine the tool a bit, if we could just make it smarter and more sophisticated, perhaps we could cut away all the messiness. Freed from puff, rhetoric and personality, we might be able to at last sort the good policies from the bad.

Certainly, taking a good hard look at the policy dispels some of the old stereotypes. The common belief, for instance, that National is the party of facts, figures and well-costed policy, and Labour and the Greens the parties of reckless innumerates, doesn’t really hold up.

While the Greens routinely produce costed and clearly presented policy documents, it’s sometimes difficult to figure out exactly what National’s policies are and how they relate to one another. It’s harder still to figure out whether a given announcement is new policy or something ongoing, or even already achieved; whether there’s new money or just a specific application of funding from the previous budget.

There is, though, a lot to be said for the conventional wisdom about the conventionally wise NZ First. While their website boasts a sprawling and extensive list of policies, some of it is so dated there’s still a reference to something called ‘Telecom’(?). And Winston’s daily pronouncements on the campaign trail lend the party’s policy documents an element of quantum uncertainty.

But there’s a limit to the granularised, pointillist analysis that the Policy tool allows.

Three years is a long time and no suite of policies can cover off the many decisions that a government must make. You don’t enact your manifesto and then call it a day, and you don’t stick to your policy promises come what may. A global financial crisis might thwart your plan to cut taxes. Nuclear winter might hamper your solar power subsidy scheme.

But even if we could predict the future – even if government was required by law to enact a mandated manifesto and nothing more – the Policy tool of the future couldn’t tell you who to vote for. Even if it had a dislike button.

How, after all, are we supposed to evaluate these policies? So much for careful thinking – so much of policy discussion is assertion and counter assertion, bogged down in attempts to clarify matters as simple as how to use Excel properly. And often enough, “talking about policy” isn’t really talking about policy at all.

On Saturday the Herald published a column by John Roughan, John Key’s biographer, in which he drew a dichotomy between “the head” and “the heart”. The heart (his? yours?) says address poverty. But the head (certainly his) asks “once we have lifted all household incomes above the statistical poverty line do you think all the kids will come to school with a cut lunch?” Stupid heart! The head doesn’t, though, bother to answer this hypothetical or explain its relevance.

Of free post-school education, he laments “It’s sickening to see [millennials] offered this temptation to use the first vote of their lives for self interest.” Free education? It’s “just plain bad public policy”. But what does he really mean by bad policy?

Presumably, he means that it’s inadequately targeted use of money that could better be put to scholarships or what have you. But even if Roughan had spelt this out, many would still advocate the policy, and not because they necessarily dispute Roughan’s analysis of the consequences. Because there isn’t an objective good and bad policy.

Mostly, these assertions about “good policy” and “bad policy” are really just shorthand for “good for me” or “bad for me”. This is what’s missing from the imagined politics of evidence – there are actually conflicting interests which aren’t resolved by questions of evidence, but by a struggle over whose interests are preferred. In this case, by an election.

Tallied policies don’t explain the real social forces which give rise to the policies in the first place. But they can give you a sense of them.

Renting policies, viewed as a whole, are one of the starkest example of this – some parties represent the half of the population which owns none of the houses, and some represent the half which owns all of the houses. In this case, it’s actually that simple. Go have a look and you’ll see what we mean.

Just don’t see the policies as isolated line strokes. See them instead as letters that make words that make sentences that make stories.

There are some very different stories being told.

It was make or break for Daenerys and Stannis Jacinda and Bill tonight on the back of a horrorshow poll result for Labour. So did either deliver a knockout blow?

Duncan Greive: this election is going to be incredibly close and I don’t know who will win

An original take, I know, but to be fair I spent much of the debate’s preamble and first half talking with Mike Joy and Sean Plunket. The TOP versus Greens tension is ricocheting into quite fascinating places, a mini-drag race (albeit with wildly unequal polling) which is, in truth, as interesting as the big show. What we saw tonight was essentially the entire campaign, distilled. English: dogged, stolid, indefatigable. Ardern: passionate, idealistic, frustrated.

Neither could claim it as a win, though in the aftermath of a freaky poll Ardern had a greater need to dominate. In that vacuum Hosking again edged the politicians – weakened by the flu and gassed in the second half, he was nonetheless often brilliant. It was an intimate physical setting, mirroring that of his ZB desk setup, and he looked the most at home of any of them. During that first half he hectored and harangued them both, impatient to snap them out of prepped lines. As the end drew near the politicians took over and he glazed a little.

Who could blame him? It’s been a long campaign, and even the most hopeless political addict is now running on fumes. Bring on Saturday, and Saturday night – on tonight’s showing, Tom Sainsbury has had the most accurate view into exactly how our prospective PMs are feeling

Simon Wilson: Ardern failed to land a death blow.

Jacinda need to crush Bill tonight. Land those body blows, leave him looking like he wasn’t sure what day it was.

She was never going to do that with reason or calm reassurance, and certainly not with relentless positivity. The defining characteristics of her campaign have been phenomenally successful, but at this point, like the campaigns of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, they have not been successful enough.

She needed to go, This man is a liar. She needed to go, This man is lost for ideas. All the National Party does is nothing, they do nothing until they work out what people are upset about and then they copy our ideas and pretend they are their own. They’re fighting poverty? Give me a break, they discovered poverty last week. They’re building houses? They still won’t commit to building houses. They’re putting money into mental health? They have no idea what to do about mental health.

She didn’t really do that. She needed to go, Booya! I see through you! And have Bill, even for a moment, lost for words.

She didn’t do that either. She did say “You discovered poverty last week” and it’s a good line. But she didn’t build it into a great moment.

She didn’t nail him on the fuel pipeline fiasco, which is surely an outrageous failure for a government that’s been so proud of building resilience. She was good on free trade agreements and foreign buyers of NZ property, and pretty good on the town and country divide that National is stoking, and very good on health.

But Bill sat there projecting a settled confidence. This battle is either the adult vs the smug and stupid old fart, or the flighty young thing against the adult. Blow for blow, I thought Jacinda won easily. He had nothing. Really, nothing at all. But he still sat there, projecting himself as the dependable adult. She didn’t knock him out.

Annabelle Lee: The winner on the day was… that giant desk

It’s amazing what a difference a desk and a couple of tūru can make. The seated format changed the dynamic of the leaders debate – English forced to face Ardern instead of ignoring her in his peripheral vision. Ardern used the seating arrangement to her advantage, interjecting with her own questions about National’s policy and at one point challenging English to look at her and state that he stands by the assertion that Labour has an 11 billion dollar hole, which he did sheepishly.

When it came to talking about the actual hole (the one in the fuel pipeline) English sounded like the leader of a party running on E. But as you would expect from the Southlander, when it came to the rural divide he was able to evoke the wairua of the good old Kiwi battler, passionately championing the cause of hard working, salt of the earth farmers who are being unfairly picked on by meany environmentalist and townies. It was great to see a reasonable chunk of time dedicated to the issue of health, but even the Hosk seemed unconvinced by the PM’s arguments. Both Ardern and English gave as good as they got and played well to their respective strengths (him: it’s the economy stupid. Her: kids are living in cars stupid) so no clear winner other than the desk which could double as the iceberg in the remake of The Titanic.

Ben Thomas: A plodding draw

Jacinda and Bill English completed their respective Hero’s Journeys tonight – returning to the TVNZ headquarters where this year’s excruciating debate series began approximately one million years ago.

Both have grown through the campaign. At that debate, English admonished the audience that you can’t go to the supermarket with values; the next week that we couldn’t replace our tunnels with a vision. Yet within minutes tonight he had enthused to Hosking about how interested voters were in his vision on the campaign trail, and closed the evening by talking about the two visions on offer in the election. The blind now, can at least, see.

It was also a harder English that emerged. Rightly challenged on his characterisation of Labour scrapping planned tax cuts as a “tax rise”, he doubled down. Asked about the now-notorious $11 billion, he nakedly misrepresented the argument and its outcome saying economists agreed there was a “hole” (no economists agreed, either on the accounting or the metaphor). Hosking slumped in his seat exasperated, but Ardern’s response of surprise rather than fury failed to settle the matter for anyone unfamiliar with the facts (still a possibility even after the last few exhausting weeks). She called him “mischievous”, which fed into English’s narrative that it was all just a typical politicians’ semantic playfight.

Ardern’s own vision, expressed during the election period as a concern for the children in poverty and locked out of homes, didn’t make an appearance until the dying minutes. It was her strongest moment, but not enough to save the debate from being a plodding draw.

Madeleine Chapman: Please, god, can this be over now?

This debate was so boring. Usually I can do screengrabs while also remaining engaged but by god, I felt like I was watching a family argue at dinner. Interesting to hear Bill (followed by the National Party twitter page) double down on the “Labour is going to raise income tax” line despite being told in no uncertain terms by both Jacinda and Mama Mike that that was untrue. Mike Hosking was the most engaging yet again, asking all the follow up questions that each candidate wanted to ask but were too slow to articulate. When Jacinda told Bill “look me in the eye” regarding his insistence that Steven Joyce (very much wrong) was right about the non-existent $11.7b Labour fiscal hole, I expected her to follow up with an “I’m the captain now” to make all my meme dreams come true. Instead I could only manage some uninspired memes from an uninspiring debate.