Will National deliver in first AGM since forming Government? - The Front Page

Prime Minister and National Party leader Christopher Luxon. Photo / Mark Mitchell

The National Party will be riding high as MPs and party members gather in Auckland for the Annual General Meeting this weekend.

The party’s first AGM since returning to Government last year comes a few days after their long promised tax cuts, a key election pledge last year, finally came into effect.

NZ Herald political editor Claire Trevett told The Front Page that the tax cuts coming in will contribute to a “fair bit of energy” this weekend.

“That was very much the centrepiece of its election campaign and it’s delivered on them. It’s also gone hard on law and order in the lead up to it. It’s rolled out the military-style boot camps. They’ve had the announcement that police were going to put more police on the beat, which is the, it’s just the kind of stuff that the National Party faithful like.

“And then of course, there’s Simeon Brown with his potholes taskforces. So it’s all kind of roads, law and order and tax cuts is all a good diet for a National Party member. They’ll be pretty happy with what they’ve seen in that regard.”

While last year’s election promises are coming into effect, Trevett said that the party will soon need to look at 2026 and what they want to campaign on then.

“They can’t just willy-nilly bring in new policies this term because of the coalition agreement. They’ve agreed to do whatever’s in those agreements and that’s kind of where it stops. So if they want to do anything that they hadn’t campaigned on last time and that coalition partners hadn’t agreed to, they would have to get their approval before they could kind of do it.

“So I’m trying to work out which of the things in the Government’s action plan haven’t yet been done, which might form the basis of an announcement for this conference, or whether or not Christopher Luxon might pitch a bit further forward and give some indication of what they might be thinking about doing.”

National remains the highest polling party in Parliament, with the most recent 1News Verian poll putting them on 38%. The poll also showed that coalition partners, Act and NZ First, would return to Parliament as well, on 7 and 6% respectively.

Trevett said that the party’s goal is to get back into the 40% mark, and that the party faithful would prefer a National-Act coalition without NZ Fist involved, but the tricky aspect for National is trying to signal that to the public without upsetting the coalition.

“As the election starts to learn closer, we’ll see the parties start to differentiate themselves a bit more. So at the moment, Luxon has been treading pretty carefully and just trying to distance National as much as possible from the coalition partners policies that are quite controversial, which they have agreed to kind of support, but don’t necessarily want to advocate too much. And a lot of those will be in the race area.

“I had actually expected National to be polling a little bit more strongly, and the last one we saw, Luxon ticked up as preferred PM purely by virtue of being in Government and they have been fairly active. They have done things that they said they would do and at some point they will be hoping they get the rewards for that.

Listen to the full episode to hear more about how National is performing, which ministers are doing the best job, and what policies they have responsibility for could be a problem for them.

The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am. The episode is presented by Georgina Campbell, a Wellington-based reporter who has a particular interest in local government, transport, and seismic issues. She joined the Herald in 2019 after working as a broadcast journalist.

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