ANALYSIS
We’ve all been blissfully politics-free for the summer, though that is about to come to an abrupt end with the first Cabinet meeting of the year tomorrow. Senior writer Derek Cheng takes a look at the battleground issues for 2024.
Okay, so this one already interrupted the politics-free summer following Ministry of Justice advice about a government bill on the Treaty’s principles, which was leaked right before the national hui-ā-iwi at Ngāruawāhia on Saturday.
The rewriting of the principles in the bill - that the Government has the right to govern all New Zealanders; the Government will honour New Zealanders’ “chieftainship” of their land and all their property; and all New Zealanders are equal under the law with the same rights and duties - has provoked a backlash.
But they shouldn’t have come as a surprise; Act has been pushing them for the past year, including throughout the election campaign.
They contrast with the principles as they are currently understood - as outlined by the Waitangi Tribunal - which include the principle of redress, and the principles of partnership, participation and protection.
The new Government is also promising to review all legislation that refers to the Treaty principles with a view to “replace all such references with specific words relating to the relevance and application of the Treaty, or repeal the references”.
It has already seen the NZ Transport Agency put its English name ahead of its Māori name, and it is scrapping extra pay for public servants proficient in te reo.
These are all contributing to mounting concerns that the revival of Māori language and culture will take a giant step backwards under this Government.
There are also concerns about outcomes for Māori getting worse with the planned axing of the Māori Health Authority Te Aka Whai Ora, and co-governance arrangements such as, for instance, in the previous Government’s Three Waters regime.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has rejected this, and though he did not attend the hui (though two National MPs attended), he has only pledged support for the bill on the Treaty principles for the first reading.
There is an impression that National will not support it beyond that, but so far Luxon has not explicitly said so.
Expect him to be grilled on these issues at his post-Cabinet press conference tomorrow, when he visits Rātana on Wednesday, and beyond those into Waitangi Day.
The biggest issue over the election campaign was the cost of living, and the Government has said that its 100-day plan will ease the pressures on people’s wallets.
Labour has already started a campaign opposing the cuts which would put more pressure on the costs of living, including getting rid of cheaper public transport for those under 25.
National argues that tax relief is a better way to boost people’s spending power, but its mini-Budget right before Christmas didn’t shed any light on how that will be delivered.
All we know is that the Government still plans on a package that would put at least as much money in people’s pockets as National’s tax plan would have; its policy to adjust income tax brackets for inflation would’ve seen low-income earners receive relief of between $112 and $980 a year, and medium- to high-income earners receive $1043.
How it will all come together without additional borrowing, which would add inflation pressure, also remains to be seen, though we know that this is now more challenging due to the axing - thanks to NZ First - of National’s wish to open up the residential housing market to foreigners.
The $740m-a-year in tax revenue this was hoped to have generated may be made up in public service cuts, though how these will be made and what effect they may have on frontline public service delivery all remain to be seen.
We may not know the tax relief plan until Budget 2024, but the economic wheels continue to turn; the Government will get the year’s first taste of inflation trends tomorrow, with the rate expected to be below the 5 per cent that the Reserve Bank forecast in November.
Luxon’s job will be made easier with a rock-star economy, rather than one with falling GDP and, amid record migration, more-sharply falling GDP-per-capita.
An economic turnaround is Luxon’s main mission, but can the man with the relentless focus on outcomes deliver?
This is always a battleground issue, but is especially important at the moment given the learning loss that has been happening in our classrooms.
There have been three reminders recently: the PISA report showing falling levels in maths and science, though the level in science has been steady since 2018; the truancy report showing only 46 per cent of school pupils attended classes regularly in term 3 in 2023; and NCEA results sliding for the third straight year.
Education shouldn’t be viewed in a vacuum, meaning innumerable variables - such as poverty and parenting - outside the system itself contribute to education outcomes.
But the system isn’t blameless either, and the Government has a plan on how to fix it including mandating an hour a day of reading, writing and maths in primary and intermediate schools, regular assessments, banning cellphones in schools, more radical charter schools, and a return to a knowledge-based curriculum instead of greater teacher flexibility.
Whether it will work won’t be known overnight, and how well it will work is an open question as education unions - which put a higher premium on teacher flexibility - gear up to fight the changes.
These are also perpetual issues, but they hold greater weight at the moment as crime was one of the major election issues behind the cost of living, while the crisis in the health system has been exacerbated by the Covid pandemic.
Crime rates have actually been falling over the past decade and a half, but there has been an uptick in serious crime and in youth crime since the pandemic. The issue has also taken centre stage with a number of high-profile ram-raids (which have actually been dropping since mid-2022) and justice system failures.
The Government’s 100-day plan includes a host of policies aimed at improving public safety.
Those include a crackdown on gangs, with Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith wanting to walk a fine line in giving police enough tools without inviting those tools to be misused.
The plan also includes “begin work to crack down on serious youth offending”, something which could be fulfilled by reading an article about youth crime, but will eventually lead to a supposedly better version of the boot camps that had a 12-month reoffending rate of 86 per cent.
There is also the issue of the relationship between Police Minister Mark Mitchell and Police Commissioner Andrew Coster, and what impact that might have on the success or failure of government policy.
As with education, policy settings are only one of innumerable factors that contribute to crime levels, and we shouldn’t expect any overnight changes.
The broader question is whether the next chapter in the story of the justice system since the 1980s - that it has been failing victims, offenders, communities and iwi - will be any different from the past decades.
As for Health, the Government wants to set five targets including wait times and cancer treatment within 100 days of taking office, and move towards extending free breast cancer screening to those aged up to 74.
Many of its answers to other issues - migration and retention to fill major staff shortages, for example - are the same as the previous Government, with hopes of simply doing it better.
As Luxon has repeatedly said, he - and the rest of us - will be laser-focused on outcomes.
Scrapping the previous Government’s plans to fix a problem doesn’t make the problem go away.
Luxon has had an answer for what will replace everything that falls under this Government’s axe, but there isn’t a lot of detail yet.
An example is the Waitangi Tribunal’s acceptance of an urgent claim about disestablishing the Māori Health Authority Te Aka Whai Ora, which was hoped to improve Māori health outcomes with more Māori voices at the table, its own budget, and autonomy on how to use it.
Luxon has broadly talked about a greater emphasis on devolution and local solutions, including from local Māori health providers, but how that will happen isn’t clear.
The tribunal accepted the claim because, it said, what the Government does instead should be evaluated.
The same questions hang over a number of other falling axes, such as Three Waters. Our poor water infrastructure hasn’t gone away, which is abundantly clear with Wellington’s water woes this summer, and though the Government has a plan to replace Three Waters, so far the crystal ball is very hazy on whether it will work.
The roll-back of the previous Government’s vocational education changes has long been signalled, but the same questions will emerge with reverting to independent and local entities, the most pertinent being whether they will be financially viable. (Questions of financial viability also hung over Te Pūkenga.)
The Government has no detailed plan yet on what is replacing the laws that themselves replaced the Resource Management Act, but we can reliably predict - thanks to coalition agreements - that it will redraw the line closer to private property rights than environmental protection.
And dropping light rail in Auckland and Let’s Get Wellington Moving, and financial backing to upgrade the ferry system between the North and South Islands, will save the Government money - but the transport issues those were meant to help aren’t going away.
Luxon has talked up multiple ways to fund infrastructure and has started moves to create a National Infrastructure Agency, but with such a dizzyingly massive infrastructure deficit across the country, his attempts to make any inroads will be keenly watched.
He has also talked up the Government’s promise to meet the climate change pledges it has signed up to, even though it has scrapped the Clean Car Discount, will reverse the oil and gas ban (mainly gas, which the Government says will be needed as a transition fuel), and plans to push back pricing agricultural methane.
Those axes will leave holes. One of the main ways the Government hopes to fill them is a plan for an easier consenting process to double renewable energy.
National, Act and NZ First seem an unlikely political threesome, given the verbal clashes over the years between Act leader David Seymour and NZ First leader Winston Peters.
Will New Zealand’s first three-party coalition Government go the distance? Will it even last the year?
Much of that is probably up to Peters.
Luxon is Prime Minister, and why would he pull the plug on that? Ditto David Seymour, the Deputy PM-in-waiting, and finally with a chance to make a difference having spent years on the edge of political irrelevance as a one-person party.
The likelihood of them pushing “abort” on the coalition isn’t impossible, but it seems a lot less likely than Peters, who has done so before (in 1998 after then-PM Jenny Shipley sacked him from Cabinet).
That’s not to say that Peters getting to this point is a likely prospect, having talked up the importance of stability and the urgent need for change.
Any calculation on ending the coalition has to factor in the probable voter blowback from doing so, as well as the status of the Opposition, and how well Labour picks up the pieces and presents itself as a viable alternative.
But this is a new chapter in New Zealand’s MMP history, so how it will go is anybody’s guess.
The crystal ball here, again, is very hazy.
Derek Cheng is a senior journalist who started at the Herald in 2004. He has worked several stints in the press gallery and is a former deputy political editor.
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