In his first public speech of 2024, Christopher Luxon announced, “We’re looking ahead to deliver a set of deliverables that will help our vision of New Zealand take root and come to pass.”
John Key communicated in All Blacks analogies, Jacinda Ardern employed the therapeutic language of love, wellbeing and kindness. Our new CEO PM loves management jargon and he mixes metaphors like a needle in a long-tailed cat.
Every new administration begins with the assumption it can solve problems where its predecessors failed; it will fix what the last lot broke and Labour’s consistent failure was delivery – an inability to turn Ardern’s shimmering dreams into any kind of reality.
National believes it can do better but during its first two months, the new coalition government has experienced a Summer of Discontent: protests, leaks, court actions and intense criticism from prominent Māori leaders have combined to deny National and its partners the traditional honeymoon enjoyed by incoming governments.
It has also made promises around spending and tax cuts it will struggle to reconcile. Is Luxon’s vision invisible? Are his deliverables undeliverable?
Its most serious problem is the response to its Treaty of Waitangi agenda. Each coalition partner has policies that would be controversial on their own – National’s abolition of Three Waters and the Māori Health Authority, New Zealand First’s promotion of the English language over te reo and its plan to erase the principles of the treaty from legislation, and Act’s Treaty Principles Bill.
Taken together, they represent an unprecedented rollback of 40 years of political, legal and cultural progress on treaty and Tikanga issues, and Opposition Māori politicians have promised an equivalent response.
Two of Luxon’s “key performance indicators” are to govern for all New Zealanders and give the country its mojo back. These will be difficult to accomplish in a nation racked by angry protests.
His newly appointed ministers also have a rebellious public service to contend with. One day before the well-attended hui at Tūrangawaewae Marae, a draft memo from Ministry of Justice officials criticising Act’s treaty bill was leaked to Te Pāti Māori. Since the government was formed, there has been a steady stream of leaks to media and the Opposition and the government assumes these are from disgruntled civil servants.
Governing the state is often compared to piloting a supertanker: it is a complex and ponderous vessel and the new captain can struggle for control of the wheel with a mutinous crew who want to keep heading in the opposite direction.
Labour was also frustrated with public service performance, although its problem was inertia rather than sedition. In 2021, then-deputy prime minister Grant Robertson set up a new Implementation Unit in a heroic but doomed attempt to make his civil servants deliver the policies their ministers had announced.
But despite its efforts, Labour’s grand transport and infrastructure projects stagnated while escalating in cost. The money it released for mental health and child welfare either sat in the crown accounts unspent or slowly drained away, absorbed by an ever-thirsty bureaucracy.
Conflicting agendas
National wants to avoid these issues by devolving many public services out of Wellington to community providers. This will make the government less reliant on the public service. But it will need the public service to deliver this new framework – to design, negotiate, fund, implement and oversee it.
Some of the government’s own election promises are likely to work against it. It has pledged to reduce the cost of living and to deliver tax relief in this year’s Budget, but the tax cuts were supposed to be funded via a foreign buyers’ tax, which New Zealand First vetoed. Economists warn that borrowing for tax cuts could be inflationary, and increasing inflation could conflict with the government’s goal of reducing inflation.
National has also promised it will address the nation’s infrastructure deficit, estimated at $210 billion and growing. A recent Treasury report estimated the economic cost of our ageing, crumbling or unbuilt schools, roads, housing, hospitals and water services at $4-12 billion a year. But Finance Minister Nicola Willis has pledged to return the government’s books to surplus by 2027. How she will accomplish tax cuts, infrastructure investment, low inflation and lower public spending simultaneously has yet to be made clear.
Blueprint to follow
There is some precedent to the coalition’s messy beginning. When Helen Clark came to power in late 1999, she represented the first genuinely left-wing government since the 1970s, and sections of the business community greeted her election with a very prolonged and undignified temper tantrum. This became known as the Winter of Discontent.
Labour moderated a few policies and built relationships in business circles, although it also accepted that its loudest critics were simply its political and ideological enemies, and came to relish their hatred rather than indulge it. Clark won an increased majority at the next election and governed for two more terms.
This is the path National would like to follow. Te Pāti Māori won’t tire of accusing it of white supremacism, but Luxon pointedly refers to his engagement with Māori leaders “who want to do the right thing by their people”.
Would those leaders like more control over health, education and welfare services for their communities, or would they prefer to fixate on Act’s Treaty Principles Bill, which National has promised to support only as far as select committee stage?
National hopes that once the bill goes down, most iwi and hapū will seek the former, and the Summer of Discontent will fade into an Autumn of Normality and the traditional challenges of government – implementation and delivery, resolving unresolvable promises and achieving addressing the nation’s existing problems without creating new ones.
Danyl McLauchlan is the Listener’s new weekly political columnist.
