Wins all around for coalition partners

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

Opinion

Hasn’t Winston Peters done well?

The NZ First leader nixed National’s plan to lift the ban on foreign home ownership for houses that sell for $2m or more, as expected — likewise, the age for superannuation eligibility stays the same; he secured a $1.2bn regional infrastructure fund, 500 more police officers in the next two years, and repeal of the recently passed Therapeutics Products Act; and he is first up as deputy prime minister, in a splitting of the role with Act leader David Seymour over this term, as well as Foreign Minister.

It’s no surprise, really, with Peters and NZ First holding the balance of power and therefore the key to the formation of New Zealand’s first three-way coalition Government.

One concession from NZ First is a broadening of the Covid-19 response inquiry, rather than the new Royal Commission of Inquiry it had pledged.

Act and Seymour get a Treaty of Waitangi Principles bill which the coalition will support through its first reading — but almost certainly no referendum, considering Act is the only party that seems to think it is a good idea — gun law reform, and a new Ministry for Regulation (to assess the quality of new and existing regulation, with Seymour as Minister). Other wins for Act are faster restoration of mortgage interest deductibility than National was planning, the ability for landlords to charge “pet bonds”, and pseudoephedrine will be allowed back into cold medication next winter. And Seymour will be deputy PM for the second half of the term.

The Act-National agreement also contains a number of stop-work notices to be issued immediately: including for Three Waters, Auckland Light Rail, Let’s Get Wellington Moving, income insurance, industry transformation plans, and the Lake Onslow Pumped Hydro investigation.

The new Government will restore the right to local referendums on Māori wards, and require them at the next local-body elections for councils such as ours that introduced them recently. It will remove co-governance from the delivery of public services, and disestablish the Māori Health Authority.

National, of course, leads the Government and gets the vast majority of its policy platform endorsed and supported by its coalition partners.

Compared to National’s fiscal plan there is a little less revenue generation, which is likely to be offset by deeper spending cuts; money for its tax cuts package that it intended to come from a tax on foreign home buyers will be found from “reprioritisation and other revenue gathering”.

There were no big surprises in the coalition reveal yesterday, but the new Government and new political partnership certainly has an ambitious work programme to get on with.