Hartwich declared he had found that \u201cyou cannot educate central Government\u201d, but there were opportunities when political parties left the Beehive.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you\u2019re in Opposition, nobody wants to talk to you \u2026 you haven\u2019t got the 60,000 people in the public service behind you, and they\u2019re usually grateful when people actually want to talk to them.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo you use that opportunity and talk to Opposition, no matter whether it\u2019s Labour or National or anyone else, because these people have time, they listen, they need ideas, and then you make sure that they really commit to these great ideas in Opposition.<\/p>\n
\u201cOnce they\u2019re in government, they\u2019ve got the whole inertia of the public service behind them, who tell them that all of these ideas are crazy and stupid and we\u2019ve always done it differently.\u201d<\/p>\n
He admitted that engagement with Luxon while in Opposition hadn\u2019t been as effective as he\u2019d hoped.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s seen it, and he\u2019s given great speeches \u2026 that\u2019s when we thought we had him on localism. But the forces of inertia and central Government and the forces of actually the status quo are too great \u2026 we need a bigger hero than Christopher Luxon to actually achieve this in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n
Localism, an approach intended to empower local communities instead of central entities retaining authority, was a key theme of National\u2019s 2023 election campaign under Luxon as he railed against the previous Labour Government\u2019s Three Waters reforms, which the current Government scrapped and replaced with its Local Water Done Well policy.<\/p>\n
New Zealand Initiative executive director Dr Oliver Hartwich spoke at Parliament today.<\/p>\n
Earlier, Hartwich referenced delegations he had been on with Luxon to countries such as Switzerland and Sweden, which he considered to be good examples of localism and effective regional taxation structures.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had Christopher Luxon convinced at the time; he gave beautiful speeches as Opposition spokesperson on the role of incentives and the wonderful things he learned going on these trips with us.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs soon as you swap these politicians in central Government, they turn into centralists, and it doesn\u2019t matter whether it\u2019s National or Labour, it\u2019s always the same.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe really frustrating thing is everybody gets the rationale in Opposition, [but] as soon as they get into this building to the ninth floor, they forget about it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Luxon\u2019s office has been approached for comment.<\/p>\n
Copland, who spoke from extensive experience as former Infrastructure Commission chief executive, put it bluntly when assessing central Government\u2019s ability to plan and deliver infrastructure.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe closer infrastructure decision-making gets to politics, the poorer the outcomes. Unequivocally.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause politicians make decisions about infrastructure investment, they\u2019re not made in a rational, logical, sound, economically justifiable way.\u201d<\/p>\n
Adam Pearse is the deputy political editor and part of the NZ Herald\u2019s press gallery team based at Parliament in Wellington. He has worked for NZME since 2018, reporting for the Northern Advocate in Whang\u0101rei and the Herald in Auckland.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hartwich declared he had found that \u201cyou cannot educate central Government\u201d, but there were opportunities when political parties…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":305105,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[17248,26504,682,41216,1738,16426,4766,26519,2841,29429,2837,5903,266,12811,440,166983,16427,27983,17250,5978,71084,5971,111,43,139,69,51708,16422,14904,131,61,8222,5977],"class_list":{"0":"post-305104","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-zealand","8":"tag-17248","9":"tag-ability","10":"tag-being","11":"tag-bigger","12":"tag-campaign","13":"tag-christopher","14":"tag-conference","15":"tag-councillors","16":"tag-country","17":"tag-deliver","18":"tag-during","19":"tag-election","20":"tag-government","21":"tag-hero","22":"tag-local","23":"tag-localism","24":"tag-luxon","25":"tag-luxons","26":"tag-mayors","27":"tag-might","28":"tag-nationals","29":"tag-need","30":"tag-new-zealand","31":"tag-news","32":"tag-newzealand","33":"tag-nz","34":"tag-plank","35":"tag-pm","36":"tag-questioned","37":"tag-than","38":"tag-to","39":"tag-warned","40":"tag-which"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305104"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305104\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/305105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}