Winners:
Christopher Luxon and Nicola Willis have formed a government without conceding anything they didn’t want to. Winston Peters as foreign minister? Fine. Peters and David Seymour taking turns at deputy PM? Whatever. But Peters is not Finance Minister or Attorney-General and David Seymour doesn’t have the finance portfolio either. National maintains agriculture. There’s no guaranteed referendum on the Treaty of Waitangi. They still have their tax cuts.
National has given up their policy on taxing foreign buyers, which might look like a loss but it was unlikely to raise the revenues they confidently predicted it would, so even that comes out as a technical success. All their top-performing MPs have the portfolios they want while Willis, holding the joint portfolios of finance and public service, will wield enormous influence. She’ll deliver a mini Budget before the end of the year - although given the amount of time she has to prepare it, even “mini” might be too generous a term.
Winston Peters was never going to come last in all of this. Even though he leads the smallest party in the coalition, he’s secured his coveted foreign affairs portfolio and re-established the $1.2 billion provincial growth slush fund. (Last time they were in power, their so-called provincial fund built a racecourse in the middle of Christchurch and attracted criticism from the Auditor-General for conflicts of interests.) Of course, Peters is also the Minister of Racing. There are rumours that his thoughts have – finally – turned to retirement and succession, and ensuring his party survives him. He’ll be 81 by the next election. Perhaps the end of his 18 months as deputy prime minister will see a more significant announcement.
The English language: Turns out only sign language and te reo are our official state languages and, while English is the default language, it has no legal status. That’s about to change. Under the heading “Strengthening democracy and freedom”, New Zealand First will make English the nation’s lingua franca. It will also compel all public service departments to primarily identify themselves with an English name and to primarily communicate using English. Also, the government isn’t allowed to change the name of the country (currently, Dutch for “New Sea Land”) without a referendum.
Covid mandate critics: New Zealand First pushed along the anti-vax cause during the election campaign, and few of Peters’ promises have made it into the coalition agreements. The hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation he promised for vaccine injuries and for those who lost their jobs due to the mandates are not listed in the coalition agreements, but he has delivered on his commitment to abolish the government’s vaccine mandates. All of which expired in August.
He has also secured “a full-scale, wide-ranging, independent inquiry, conducted publicly with local and international experts, into how the Covid pandemic was handled in New Zealand”. New Zealand already has an inquiry into Covid under way, but it’s being conducted under the near-total secrecy so beloved of the Ardern government. A more open investigation can only be a good thing.
Judith Collins has done very well for herself. Arguably National’s most right-wing MP, she’s Attorney-General and Minister of Defence, New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (SIS), Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), Science and Research, Space and the government response to the Christchurch mosque attacks. Collins is said to be an artificial intelligence hawk, spending much of her post-leadership time in Opposition browbeating her colleagues about the subject.
Fourteen-year-old smokers: In late 2022, the previous government introduced a law that would make it illegal to sell cigarettes or other tobacco products to anyone born after January 1, 2009. That law has gone and the additional excise revenue from budding young smokers will replace the foreign buyers’ tax as a revenue stream for funding next year’s tax package. Also…
People with head colds: Act’s election promise to return pseudoephedrine to pharmacy shelves is locked in. Effective decongestant medication is back!
Lobbyists: It would be hard to beat Jacinda Ardern’s government at being more accommodating to industry sectors or more willing to overlook conflicts of interest and perpetuate the cosy little money-go-round that drives so much of New Zealand politics. But with former Federated Farmers president Andrew Hoggard as an Associate Minister of Agriculture (animal welfare, skills), former fishing industry executive Shane Jones as Minister of Oceans and Fisheries and former gun industry lobbyist Nicole McKee serving as associate Justice Minister (firearms) the calls for corporate welfare will be coming from inside the Beehive.
Losers
The last Labour government: Governments can try to establish a bipartisan consensus around some of their policies, safeguarding them once they’re no longer in power. Or if they act quickly, they can make their changes so embedded they’re impossible to unwind. Or they can do things that are so popular the incoming government doesn’t dare touch them. Jacinda Ardern’s government made the strategically odd decision to implement policies broadly hated by both the opposition parties and the public, and to deliver them so haphazardly and slowly they barely existed at all. And now almost everything they did will be undone. The next 100 days of the new government will focus largely on the eradication of the achievements of the old.
David Seymour: It’s all relative, of course. Seymour is in government, one of the most powerful people in the country and he’s got a number of policy wins. But while Peters is Foreign Minister running one of the government’s largest, most influential and well-funded agencies, Seymour is Minister of Regulation, a newly created position. He will run an as yet uncreated agency that will audit and advise on the many regulations and requirements the state imposes. This will be funded by disestablishing the Productivity Commission. When Seymour describes this new agency, it is similar in importance and impact to Treasury, long regarded as the most influential public service entity. But the reality is that Seymour’s agency will probably be a peripheral office that produces reports no one reads, and which can be abolished by an incoming government on a whim, ie, it will be like the Productivity Commission.
Instead of his referendum on the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi, Seymour has merely secured a bill that his coalition partners will support to select committee with no guarantee of progressing things any further. Seymour is a clever politician - perhaps he thinks he’ll be able to wedge his coalition partners on this issue? But will voters still care about the principles of the treaty once the terrifying bilingual road signs are gone?
Seymour is also Associate Minister of Education (partnership schools), known in other countries as charter schools. They’re privately run, publicly funded schools that operate outside the regulations and curriculum set down by the Ministry of Education. Act brought them in last time they were in government, Labour shut them down as soon as they were re-elected and will almost certainly do so again when the government changes.
Either the Department of Internal Affairs or Brooke van Velden: Is DIA the worst department in the state sector? It’s probably in the bottom five: a sclerotic sprawling mess that is now accountable to Act’s deputy leader. This is a popular portfolio to concede to minor parties – it was held by United Future’s Peter Dunne and then New Zealand First’s Tracey Martin. It’s important enough to secure Cabinet representation while still being a poison chalice. Van Velden is a skilled political operative; perhaps she’ll transform it into a competent and diligent organisation. She’s also an Act MP; maybe she’ll just fire everyone and outsource everything. The most likely outcome is that her reports will drown her in bureaucracy, prevent her from accomplishing everything and cheerfully carry on with their empire building.
The Parliamentary Counsel Office: This is the office responsible for drafting and publishing New Zealand’s legislation. Since the late 1980s, many laws have included references to the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi, an attempt to reconcile the different interpretations of the nation’s founding document. New Zealand First believes that the principles have become too vague and too broad, especially as wielded by the Supreme Court and Waitangi Tribunal. So, the new government will review and replace all references to the treaty principles with “specific words relating to the relevance and application of the treaty or repeal the references”.
As Peters describes it, this is a trivial matter: essentially an automated find and replace function on the legislation database. Many other legal experts disagree, regarding it as a Herculean task reinterpreting many – if not most of – the laws passed in the last three decades.
The left: There are so many odd provisions in the coalition documents. You can read Act’s here and New Zealand First’s here. There’s a policy to defund tertiary providers that don’t commit to a “free speech policy”, an agreement with New Zealand First to “ensure publicly funded sporting bodies support fair competition that is not compromised by rules relating to gender”. There’s the repeated obsession with prioritising English over te reo. These probably sound baffling to the wider public because they’re culture war issues – the grave concerns of the over-educated and extremely online. In most senses, this will be a centrist government: a gentle continuation of the Bolger-Clark-Key-Ardern regime. But in terms of culture war issues, this government marks a very sharp shift to the right. If there’s one thing binding the coalition together, it’s a rejection of wokeness, the catch-all term conservatives use to describe the evangelical package of new left ideas that have surged across academic, cultural and public sector institutions over the past 10 years.
But politics is tidal: ideas bob around in ebbs and flows. There will be future left-wing governments; hopefully their reforms will be more substantive than those of the outgoing administration. The best notions of the cultural and intellectual left will endure while the nonsense is swept out to sea. And one fine day, the losers will be winners again.
