National convinced New Zealand can be turned around

A crowd of over 200 came to hear National Leader Christopher Luxon and Todd Muller speak.

"We can run the economy better than the current government and this would flow on to key sectors like education, health and police," said Leader of the National Party Christopher Luxon in Dannevirke on Tuesday, November 1 in The Hub.

Both he and National's Agriculture and Fisheries Spokesman Todd Muller were on a tour of the Wairarapa electorate "getting out to the heart of the rural communities" to spread their message.

Luxon described the Labour Government's performance as "all spin and no delivery" with "wasteful spending much of it on 14,000 new bureaucrats while most sectors of its administration are going backwards."

He criticised the trend to centralise and concentrate government in Wellington citing the Three Waters grab for 67 local councils' water assets, the centralisation of 23 polytechnics into one entity, the concentration of district health boards into four regional structures with changes to the local body structure looming.

Hon Chris Luxon gratefully receives a book gift on Te Apiti from Mayor Tracey Collis.

Luxon condemned the government's policies in agriculture to combat climate change which are putting the sector under huge threat, saying farmers were condemned as villains and he reminded the audience that during the pandemic when tourism and international student education collapsed it was agriculture which got New Zealand through.

Finally appreciating that he was portraying a gloomy assessment of New Zealand's situation he said he was "incredibly confident about New Zealand's future", saying it was better than the rest of the world and only needs some policies turned around.

He identified five planks for action emphasising that he was "ruthlessly obsessed at achieving outcomes."

■ Education was a key, getting kids back to school where truancy is very bad and teachers are not being adequately supported.

■ Infrastructure was also important both within NZ and with its trading partners.

■ Research and development especially in agriculture had to be encouraged and funded.

■ Creating a positive environment for business by cutting a lot of red tape.

■ Developing international connections with the world.

Luxon criticised the government's reluctance to interact with the outside world being very slow to accept new immigrants when there is a desperate shortage of labour and being slow to set up trade deals with key partners. He pointed out other countries with five million people like Ireland, Denmark and Singapore have got free of the pandemic's narrow focus and are doing far better than New Zealand.

In question time carbon farming was raised as an issue to which Todd Muller said National's solution would involve creating other kinds of carbon units such as ocean and seaweed units, and incorporating wetlands and shelter belts on farms into the ETS scheme.

To the question what would National do for small business, Luxon said he would unwind a lot of the legislation that currently slows it down and deal to inflation by giving the Reserve Bank back its target of keeping it within 1-3 per cent.

To the question about Central Government mandating changes which local councils had to implement, Luxon likened it to a Punch and Judy show, promising his government would work with each local government to implement policies it needed rather than using "one size fits all".

In summary Luxon concluded that "We get the country we deserve, we are all in this together and we need to make the decisions which will produce desired outcomes so we can all come out the other side."