Whenever a new government takes office, there’s inevitably a wave of change as it seeks to put its stamp on the country. But the changes made by the National-led coalition in its first 12 months go way beyond what any other administration has done for at least 40 years – you have to go back to Roger Douglas’s neoliberal revolution of the mid-1980s to find a precedent.
Repeals, removals, rollbacks, revisions – they’ve just kept coming since the signing of the coalition agreement on November 24 last year, in what Newsroom co-editor Tim Murphy has called a “thunderous cascade of change and reform”.
It’s impressive in one sense, and even politically smart up to a point: there’s no doubt the Labour government was floundering, and a bit of brisk let’s-get-things-done-ism was never going to go amiss. And most polls suggest that support for the coalition would still translate to a parliamentary majority were an election held tomorrow. But these are early days, and there are justifiable fears about the consequences of such a breakneck agenda.
Of course, all governments like to cram their most contentious reforms into the first year in office, in the (sometimes forlorn) hope that by their third year, the voting public will have learnt to live with the changes, or even forgotten all about them. And it was 80s finance minister Douglas, again, who emphasised the importance of speed in decision-making, otherwise interest groups would have time to “mobilise and drag you down”.
Christopher Luxon and co have clearly borrowed from his script, with NZ First deputy leader Shane Jones in the attack-dog role once so memorably played by Richard Prebble. Together, they’ve made Douglas look like a slowcoach. They started with a hiss, a roar and a 100-day action plan designed to give the impression that after years of woke wallowing, the nation’s affairs were now firmly in the hands of people who meant business (literally). As soon as Parliament sat last December, the coalition began pushing through legislation under urgency, expunging the unsavoury memory of Labour’s faffing about. More bills – 21 – were debated under urgency in the first three months of its term than by any other government in decades.
The plug was swiftly pulled on new Interislander ferries, fair-pay agreements and oil and gas exploration bans, and two new laws crafted by Labour to replace the creaky Resource Management Act were ditched without a moment’s hesitation (let alone consultation), as was legislation requiring Inland Revenue to report on the fairness or otherwise of the tax system.
In quick succession over the next few months, out went Labour’s revised Three Waters plan, Auckland light rail, the Productivity Commission, the Māori Health Authority, the spending of $1.5 billion on public transport, cycling and walking. In came tax cuts, $2.9 billion worth of tax deductibility for landlords over four years, and plans for 15 new Roads of National Significance. Drive, they said – and faster, with Labour’s speed limit restrictions on local streets and highways to be reversed next year despite evidence this will lead to more road deaths. Such is progress.
It has seemed at times, in fact, as if the government won’t rest until it has obliterated virtually everything its predecessor introduced. That’s not true, of course, but you’d be forgiven for getting that impression from Luxon’s repeated assertions that the sooner we “turn things around” and get “back on track”, the better. The direction is clear, and it’s arguably not forward: the much-touted “action plans” might just as well be called reaction plans in areas such as the environment and indigenous issues.
Political commentator Richard Harman has even drawn an analogy with the reactionary Muldoon government elected in 1975, which rolled back much of what Norman Kirk’s progressive Labour government had done; the latter’s time in office turned out to be a false dawn for the baby-boomer generation. Similarly, suggests Harman, “It may well be that in the future, Ardern’s government, with its emphasis on diversity, inclusion, climate change, biculturalism and (yes) ‘kindness’, will be seen as another false dawn for the eventual and inevitable ascendancy of the post-baby boomer generation.”
The difficulty with that argument is that most current cabinet ministers are post-baby boomers, too, which just goes to show the dangers of generalisation. But Harman has a point; let alone 1975, there are even echoes of 1969-70, when a National government wedded to major development projects such as the Bluff aluminium smelter, spurned the emerging environmental movement.
Serving its constituency
None of this means the government is acting in bad faith (apart from the debacle over National’s pre-election promise to fund new cancer drugs) and doing everything wrong. Like any government, it’s prioritising the interests of its natural constituencies (in this case, farmers, small business, investors, the corporate world) and consoling the rest of us by insisting that the “tough choices” it makes will eventually improve our lives.
Nor can ministers be faulted for seeking economic growth – every government since the year dot does that. But if, as Finance Minister Nicola Willis says, “the ultimate purpose of a strong economy is to deliver better for people, to improve their choices, opportunities and the quality of their everyday lives”, then the by-no-means-exhaustive list of policy changes accompanying this article (see “A year in reverse”, below) shows up certain disturbing themes …
Tough love
It’s the less well off, essentially, who have paid for getting inflation down. Another phrase for this approach is “outsourcing risk”. One of the coalition’s less-publicised but more cold-blooded moves has been to switch the indexation of benefit rates from wages to inflation – in other words, benefits will still go up each year, but by much less than had they stayed indexed to wages. It’s been estimated this will save the government $670 million over the next four years; $670m that could have gone into the pockets of some of the country’s poorest.
Luxon has said he makes no apology for a “tough love” approach to beneficiaries, which prompted Listener columnist Danyl McLauchlan to ask: “Where’s the political courage to mete out tough love to the wealthy?” Which brings us to …
Rewarding the rich
Aka corporate welfare. Exhibit A: allowing landlords to, eventually, write off 100% of their mortgage interest costs when it comes to calculating their tax – a move that over the next four years will, in effect, give property investors $2.9b (pretty much the amount the government says it can’t afford to spend on rebuilding Dunedin Hospital to the standard it promised last year).
Meanwhile, the bulk of the much-vaunted tax cuts (which will cost the country $14.7b over four years) benefited people in higher income brackets, while those in lower brackets were barely compensated for inflation. For most households, in fact, the additional income didn’t even touch the sides.
Minimising Māori
For a country that had seemed relatively progressive on race relations and indigenous issues, 2024 has been an eye-opener. The coalition swiftly introduced measures discouraging te reo in public services and even the mention of Māori in public discourse. It later directed that all public services be delivered on the basis of “need rather than race”. Of course, Pākehā got and kept power in Aotearoa only on the basis of race (their own), not need, so there’s irony in the government’s stance.
How deep does this go? Within weeks of the coalition coming to power, the message it was sending was so clear that Archbishop Don Tamihere told Māori gathered at Te Hui ā Motu in Ngāruawahia: “Someone has made a political decision that they can renegotiate our existence.”
Act’s Treaty Principles Bill is a particularly provocative part of this backlash.
Defunding social services
It’s been difficult to keep up with the bewildering pace of cuts to the budgets of state-funded social-service providers – and that’s just the experience of the providers themselves, who in some cases had no idea their funding was about to be reduced or taken away entirely. Though ministers talk about “budgetary envelopes” and “reprioritisation”, community groups suddenly find they can’t pay their staff or help the people they set out to help.
Such is the obsession with saving money that Act leader David Seymour has been micro-managing school lunches, while Penny Simmonds was so dismissive of the needs of disabled people and their family carers that the portfolio was taken from her.
Negating nature
Remember the environment? Climate change? Apart from a few token nods, these minor irritants have been pushed way down the list of policy-making. The guiding principle of the proposed new resource management regime is the “enjoyment of property rights”. When presented with a development project for fast-track approval, economic development will take precedence over environmental considerations; the Infrastructure Minister is required only to consider whether a proposal will “address significant environmental issues” and “support climate-change mitigation”. That’s pretty much it when it comes to taking into account the biodiversity crisis, resource depletion and, you know, global warming.
The latest reversal is the weakening of freshwater standards after years of efforts under governments of both stripes to restore the ecological health of the country’s waterways.
Lowering the tone
Shane Jones is the worst offender here – whatever you think of Greenpeace, calling its activists “bloodsucking vermin” set a new low for ministerial rhetoric. And Luxon’s crack at the ANZ bank chief executive after she advocated a capital gains tax was hardly becoming of our Prime Minister. A parallel kind of discourse degradation is the corporate waffle favoured by many ministers, which can be paraphrased as, “I’m focused on our commitment to deliver outcomes and drive greater impact.”
Dodgy decision-making
This one is summed up by Dame Anne Salmond, who last month said that although the coalition promised its decisions would be based on data and evidence, “they are acting with such haste and hubris that there is no opportunity for evidence to be gathered and weighed in the balance”. To which it might be added that when evidence is produced in support of a change, it often turns out to be alarmingly insubstantial or based on cherry-picked research (a behavioural pattern also known as Costello-isation).
Part of the problem may be the coalition agreements between National and Act and National and New Zealand First. These documents are so elaborately detailed that you almost expect to come across a pledge to dot all New Zealanders’ i’s and cross all their t’s, while putting in a crown observer to ensure it’s done within budget.
The agreements are also remarkable for what they don’t say, which raises the question of what the government has deliberately chosen not to reverse or roll back. Unemployment. Fossil-fuel use. Family violence. The supermarket duopoly. The big banks’ oligopoly. Rents. Shrinking glaciers. Casey Costello. Above all, inequality.
And in the end …
Before we take a wee break from making tough choices over summer, there’s one more R to add to our list of this government’s repeals, removals, rollbacks and revisions. It’s retreat. Retreat, you might say, from the whole complexity of modern life; from the emerging ethos of this age; from the upwelling of Māoriness so evident in schools today; from the unflinching recognition of global warming as the existential threat bearing down on us all; from acknowledging that at the sharp end of any budgetary decisions are flesh-and-blood human beings whose lives and work do not fit neatly into risk modelling, social investment and pro-growth agendas.
It’s a sad sign of the times when Lester Levy, the man put in charge of the nation’s health service – you know, the one that’s supposed to look after sick people – says Te Whatu Ora must “increase output”.
In the end, as the Beatles said, the love you take is equal to the love you make. This government may have created “efficiencies”, it may have made things more “effective”, it may have saved heaps of money and it may, for all anyone knows, be growing the economy as we speak. But it has not shown much compassion, it has punished the poor and demonised Māori, and it has put a business straitjacket on state agencies and civil society institutions whose kaupapa should never be exclusively profit-driven.
When the UK’s Conservative Party was driven from office last year, historian David Kynaston said one of the reasons for its defeat was that it had been “so little imbued with imaginative empathy about the daily lives of the people it governed”. That comment could well apply to this coalition government; but there may yet be scope for empathy and imagination.
But wait, there’s more
Of course, after the deluge of policy reversals, there’s a raft of incoming policies next year:
Charter schools – The last National-led government introduced them, its Labour-led successor shut them down. From January 1, they’re back with more budget behind them than previously.
The lifting of the moratorium on genetic modification.
Local Water Done Well – the government’s replacement for Labour’s ill-fated Three Waters.
The return of Anzus (well, Aukus, anyway, if the government signs on as a party to the non-nuclear technology and security-sharing tier of this agreement).
The reintroduction of “three strikes” sentencing in courts.
An eased foreign investment regime, with investors no longer having to prove “benefits” for the country.
Changes to the education curriculum – including to sex education guidelines, as part of a refocus on “academic achievement and not ideology”, and to the history curriculum, which David Seymour says wrongly blames all the country’s problems on colonisation.
Repeal of the Therapeutic Products Act.
And the rest.
