For some decades, the political rules that voters can’t handle the truth and that serious policy only loses votes have seemed to hold.
But the magnitude of New Zealand’s problems and growing implausibility that it can survive as a wealthy, cohesive society are now too obvious for even the median voter to ignore.
Finance Minister Nicola Willis was first to step up with her sober, transparent leadership of the Government’s response to the fuel crisis.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon followed last week with his well-received speech to BusinessNZ in Auckland, the authorship of which remains a subject of speculation but is ultimately irrelevant.
He is the Prime Minister and, whatever his role in the wordsmithing, he signed it off and read it out.
Crucially, the Government has followed up with some substance.
It may have taken two aborted coup attempts, a failed year of growth, a war in the Middle East, alarming rises in bond yields, a worsening financial outlook and National collapsing below 30% in the polls, but the upper floors of the Beehive seem to have abandoned the softly, softly, incrementalist approach of the last 20 years that has culminated in the current polycrisis.
It may have been better had this happened immediately after the last election rather than soon before the next, but defenders of the Government’s approach argue Luxon and Willis have established conditions where the public is calling out for serious reform rather than having it foisted on them.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Finance Minister Nicola Willis during an update on the Iran war and fuel supplies in April. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Those who have advocated for greater progress over the past two and a half years respond that launching a reform programme five months before an election is unconventional and risks the Government’s defeat.
Then again, the Government was heading to defeat anyway – or, at best, the National Party might have eked out a Pyrrhic victory in which half its backbench foot-soldiers would be killed in action and what remained completely dominated by their coalition partners around the Cabinet table.
A more serious approach to government is also National’s best political strategy. Labour has been left floundering, looking unserious and irrelevant to the discussion about the future.
Along with the rules on shielding voters from the truth and avoiding serious policy, another canon of recent political strategy may be disproven: that MMP governments need to look united to maintain support.
Against conventional standards, Luxon looks like he’s running a circus, with Foreign Minister Winston Peters attacking his own Government’s policies including the free-trade agreement with India, revealing Budget secrets like the abolition of the one-year fees-free policy and denying his ministry will be part of Willis’ public-service reforms.
Yet, with NZ First and to a lesser extent Act playing the role of opposition, the political conversation is being led by arms of the coalition, with Labour and its far-left allies contributing nothing meaningful.
Labour’s finance spokeswoman Barbara Edmonds had the kernel of a good idea in her Future Fund policy.
But the lack of detail apart from the planned constraint on it actively managing the Crown’s asset portfolio to grow overall wealth makes it little more than a slogan, in the best traditions of Labour’s comical KiwiBuild in 2012.
Labour leader Chris Hipkins saying this week that voters don’t really care about the details of the Future Fund might have been true until he said so. It now appears to have no more substance than the Key-English Government’s “Future Investment Fund” which existed primarily in press statements and social media tiles.
Likewise, Labour’s capital gains tax is so minimalist it is worth neither supporting nor opposing and the money will apparently be given to GPs anyway – assuming the new tax raises any revenue at a time asset prices are falling.
Outmanoeuvred by National’s bold moves this week, Labour finds itself on the wrong side of public opinion: defending the bloated Wellington bureaucracy, Treaty clauses in school charters, and the failed NCEA qualification and previously knowledge-free school curriculum, and cost blowouts in social housing.
Labour strategists may find all this terribly unfair. After all, meaningless sloganeering worked perfectly well for Luxon in 2023, and for Dame Jacinda Ardern in 2017 and Sir John Key in 2008. Why should Hipkins be held to a higher standard in 2026?
Well, life’s not fair and times change.
Just as National has finally realised it won’t retain office by offering a seventh edition of its safety-first, light-blue 2008 campaign, Labour will need to realise it won’t regain power by offering a third term of the failed Ardern-Hipkins regime.
New Zealand is forecast to be a quarter of a trillion dollars more in the red by 2030 than when Key cruised to power in 2008.
Through that time, productivity growth has been anaemic at best. GDP-per-capita has been mainly stagnant or in decline.
Our population is ageing as we’ve known it would for decades. But the post-2030 fiscal crunch will be worse than expected with the birth rate well below replacement levels and our young people making the right choice as individuals by leaving the country.
Since 2008, we have demanded more public services and bureaucrats than we have been willing to pay for.
If I’m wrong about the politics, and median voters won’t reward politicians willing to take these crises seriously, then so be it.
The current coalition will be out, and a Labour-Green-Te Pāti Māori regime will be in and fulfil another apparent rule of MMP politics – that each government is worse than the one before.
The good news is that, however belatedly, the National-led Government has finally decided to have a try at tackling our deep-seated issues.
Next week’s Budget will be decisive in revealing if that is true.
In the meantime, and in the absence of a serious alternative, they at least deserve a bit of encouragement.
Disclosure: Matthew Hooton has over 30 years’ experience in political and corporate communications and strategy for clients in Australasia, Asia, Europe and North America, including the National and Act parties and the Mayor of Auckland.
Catch up on the debates that dominated the week by signing up to our Opinion newsletter – a weekly round-up of our best commentary.