Category: Politics

Source: Radio New Zealand

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon is holding his post-Cabinet press conference, as Australia reels from the terrorist attack on Sydney.

Earlier on Monday, Luxon said he had contacted Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to offer support and condolences after 16 people died – including a shooter – when a father and son opened fire at a Jewish holiday celebration at Sydney’s Bondi Beach

“These were shocking and appalling images we saw last night; I was sickened as I watched it. Our thoughts go straight to the people who have lost their lives or their loved ones, or been injured. But also our thoughts go to the Jewish community in Australia, but also here and around the world.

“There is no indication of any New Zealanders caught up in the attack. Obviously, many of us know that area very well and there’s a lot of Kiwis in that area.”

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade said it is not aware of any New Zealanders involved in the fatal shooting.

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

The Defence Force is brainstorming with local and overseas companies on how to improve intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance in the oceans around New Zealand.

Its capability plans calls for spending $50- to $100 million over four years on long-range aerial drones.

But the NZDF in a new tender document said drones were just an example and it was open to any solutions for monitoring the South-West Pacific and Southern Ocean.

“The Persistent Surveillance (Air) (PS(A)) project aims to improve the NZDF’s ability to collect high fidelity ISR data, for longer durations, against a range of targets,” it said.

It is holding three workshops in January to hear back from industry, timed to get American, European and Australian involvement too.

“The workshops are designed to be brainstorming sessions that will identify innovative and viable opportunities.”

Initially, any solution might be owned and operated commercially but in future phases Defence could take over ownership, it said.

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

In its penultimate sitting week of the year, Parliament was flat out, debating 12 different bills – 11 of them under urgency.

The week began with the hype around the Resource Management Act (RMA) announcement, but while two major RMA bills were introduced, they weren’t actually debated.

The small RMA-related bill that was debated, which extends certain consents, was contentious mostly because of the urgency and its very late reveal to the opposition.

The big flashpoints came later in the week, with two particularly contentious pieces of legislation debated through Thursday and until nearly 2am Friday, and the other through much of Friday.

The first of them was the Electoral Amendment Bill, back in the House from the Justice Select Committee, and given the urgency treatment for its second reading and committee stage.

The bill proposed some significant changes to general election rules, including shifting the enrolment deadline to 13 days before election day. That meant no more enrolling or updating your details on the day, something 110,000 people did on election day 2023.

The bill would also re-instate a wider ban on prisoner voting.

The government argued the earlier enrolment cut-off was needed to address slow vote-counting times. Minister of Justice Paul Goldsmith told the House at second reading that “it now takes a week longer to get the official results after an election than it did prior to 2020.

“It used to take two weeks, now it’s three weeks and that’s an extra week of uncertainty for New Zealanders.”

He said the wait could be even longer, with the reality of coalition negotiations under MMP.

Despite this being the third consecutive evening under urgency, MPs were especially fired-up for this electoral bill. Labour’s Ginny Andersen was the first opposition MP to speak on it and immediately set a combative tone.

“Out of all the unethical, shady and dishonest things this government has done, I think this one is possibly the worst,” she said, “It’s stopping people from voting in the next general election.”

Describing the bill as a crafty sandpaper-on-the-cricket-ball-type move designed to tilt the game in the government’s favour, Andersen questioned whether the change would even speed up the count.

“The Electoral Commission told the Justice Committee that, even with all the changes present in the bill, there will be no difference between the time it took to count the votes at the previous election and the time it will take in the next election… so that begs the question, why is this bill being passed now?” she said.

Associate Justice Minister and ACT leader David Seymour attempted to flip the ‘gaming the system’ argument by comparing Labour’s 2022 electoral law change, regarding donations, to this week’s changes.

“It’s only three years ago that many of the people on that side of the House… passed a law that would require the disclosure of donations at a much different threshold than had been done previously, to effectively dox people who supported a party, but didn’t want to be publicly revealed for doing so,” he said.

“When it was revealed that that change would disproportionately affect the parties that they were about to campaign against, did they say, ‘Oh, we’re sorry, this is being done through venal motivations?’ No, they did not.

“They said, ‘It’s all about transparency’. Well, they can’t have it both ways.”

Once the bill’s committee stage began, it quickly became clear the opposition planned to make the government work for every clause.

After a long night of speeches and protracted voting, the House didn’t adjourn until 1.40am Friday, with the committee stage not actually wrapping up until 11pm.

As specialists in this content, the Justice Committee’s MPs, with little sleep, were back in the chamber at 9am to resume where they left off. It capped off an especially gruelling week and year for justice spokespeople, with four justice-related bills put through urgency this week.

Once the Electoral Amendment Bill was finally reported back – and the justice spokespeople had presumably slumped to their offices for a much-needed kip – fresh faces entered the chamber for the other major flashpoint of the week – the Climate Change Response (2050 Target and Other Matters) Amendment Bill.

This bill received the VIP urgency treatment, passing through all debating stages, but skipping select committee (meaning no opportunity for public input).

It is a simple bill and primarily amends New Zealand’s targeted biogenic methane reduction (from 2017 levels), from a 24-47 percent, to a 14-27 percent by 2050, nearly half the previous target.

It was clear from the first opposition speech that they intended to dig into the methodology behind the new target during the committee stage, once again a hint at a gritty battle to come. Between the electoral reforms and the climate target reset, the two most controversial bills of the week consumed a hefty chunk of Parliament’s lengthy sitting time this week, pushing the House into an extra, nearly 15-hour long day of debating on Friday.

RNZ’s The House, with insights into Parliament, legislation and issues, is made with funding from Parliament’s Office of the Clerk.

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

Labour leader Chris Hipkins is promising voters will see a different Labour in 2026 to the party they turned their backs on in 2023.

The last election saw Labour’s six years in government come to an end, and Hipkins returning to the opposition benches just 10 months after becoming prime minister.

Speaking to RNZ for an end of year sit-down interview, Hipkins was keen to cast some distance between the government he led to defeat, and the party he will take to the next election.

“The country’s moved on. The challenges facing the country are different, and so the solutions have got to be different too.”

Settling on a tax

Hipkins said 2025 had been a big year for Labour, and releasing its tax policy had been one of the highlights.

The party finally ended speculation over what kind of tax it would pursue, opting for a capital gains tax over a wealth tax, targeted at investment and commercial property.

The revenue would be ringfenced and go towards three free doctors visits a year for everyone. A Future Fund, free cervical screening, and a GP loan scheme have also rolled off the policy pipeline.

Asked whether Labour had given any consideration to using the tax revenue to go into the general pot or pay down debt, Hipkins said one of the biggest fiscal challenges any incoming government would face after the next election was the escalating cost of healthcare.

“Our national obsession with buying up rental houses isn’t actually helping us to grow the economy, and that needs to change. So targeting a capital gains tax at that area in order to encourage more investment in the productive economy was our first priority,” he said.

“The second thing is, what are we using that money for? We’ve got a crisis in our health system. We’ve got to do more to keep people healthy.”

Paying for those promises relies on there actually being capital gains to tax. Hipkins said economic forecasts suggested house prices would return back to their long-run average.

A different Labour?

Labour’s challenge is to convince voters it is a different Labour to the one they voted out, and Hipkins believed the public was seeing that.

“The Labour Party has been through quite a period of renewal. But also what we’re offering New Zealanders is quite different now. We’re in a very different situation now to the one that we were in two years ago when we went into the 2023 election, and the answers that we offer New Zealanders need to be different as well, and they are.”

A message to the party at this year’s conference was it cannot “say yes” to everything.

That meant, Hipkins said, that any promises Labour would make at the election were ones it knew it could keep.

“We’ve had a series of governments now who have encouraged people to be aspirational for New Zealand and have promised things that have been completely unrealistic. I don’t think we can afford to do that anymore. I think people will lose faith in a whole democratic system if we see politicians continuing to do that, I’m not going to fall into that trap.”

Depending on your pollster of choice, Labour is marginally in front of National or marginally behind. Likewise, Hipkins is either just in front of Christopher Luxon as preferred Prime Minister, or just behind.

All of that is to say it is tight. It means the major parties’ fortunes are looking increasingly reliant on their potential partners, and Hipkins has a problem in the shape of Te Pāti Māori.

The party has never gone into government with Labour, and yet they continue to be grouped together, especially by the coalition.

Te Pāti Māori’s ongoing scandals and internal turmoil have led Hipkins to declare it is a “shambles” and not ready for government, and he wants Labour to win all seven Māori electorates to ensure Te Pāti Māori is not part of the conversation post-election.

The nature of MMP means parties usually need friends, but Hipkins is not resiling from his intention to eliminate Te Pāti Māori.

“Every election is different. There have been a whole variety of different outcomes in MMP elections. Parties have come and gone, and that will continue to be the case.”

He also will not entirely rule out New Zealand First, repeating Labour would signal who it will and will not work with ahead of the election, but with no commitment around a date.

“There’s a lot of water to flow under the bridge. My goal is pretty simple. If you want a change of government, if you want to see good, solid, positive leadership for the country, then vote Labour.”

Some big names have left since the election. Kelvin Davis, Grant Robertson, Andrew Little and David Parker have gone. The likes of Barbara Edmonds, Kieran McAnulty and Willow-Jean Prime have been promoted to the front bench.

“It’s actually a very different Labour lineup now. So if you look at our senior team, our front bench lineup, there’s only, I think, three MPs left there who were there before the election,” Hipkins said.

Despite the same person at the top of the list, Hipkins said it was a “very nice problem to have” that many people were putting their names forward to stand.

“Growing our support means we bring in a whole lot of new talent, and I’m really excited about that. I offer some stability, some continuity, some experience, and you know, I’ve had that brief experience of being prime minister, so I know what to expect.”

A cost-of-living election

Signs point to the economy being rosier by the time of the election.

Business confidence is up, and ASB recently predicted the economy would turn around in 2026.

Hipkins was not concerned that Labour’s attack line on the economy could be running out of runway.

“New Zealanders deserve an economic recovery that benefits all New Zealanders. This government are only focused on benefitting those at the top. New Zealanders need to see a recovery that they all feel, and they’re not feeling that from this government,” he said.

“They don’t think this government cares about them. They don’t think this government’s focused on working New Zealanders who go out there and flog their guts out every day to create a better future for the country. That’s what my focus is.”

The coalition has prosecuted Labour for the “mess” it inherited.

Hipkins conceded that 7.5 percent inflation in 2023 was hurting New Zealand families, and that was reflected in the way they voted. But he said other countries had bounced back quicker since then.

“Why is it that New Zealand has been such an outlier here? It’s because of the decisions of this government, not the previous government. They want to blame everyone for problems that they have created.”

Labour has promised it would repeal the Regulatory Standards Bill, and restore pay equity (although on that point, the party will not say how it will pay for the restoration, which saved the government $1.8 billion a year).

But there have been other cases where Hipkins has said Labour would not repeal legislation it has opposed, saying the public had no appetite for another repeal-and-replace merry-go-round.

That was also partly because Hipkins did not see the point spending the first years of a new term unwinding legislation, adding he was in favour of a four-year term.

An Auckland-focused campaign

Hipkins has previously conceded Labour was not “listening” to Auckland, as its vote plummeted in the Super City.

Previously safe seats like New Lynn and Mt Roskill flipped blue, while turnout in South Auckland strongholds was low.

Since then, Hipkins has spent a lot of his time in Auckland, and is convinced Auckland is now listening in return.

“It’s been a long, slow rebuild for us in Auckland, the first 18 months or so of this Parliamentary term. It was slow going, but we have seen, particularly in the last half of this year, a real increase in our support in Auckland and some energy really building behind our campaign,” he said.

“Momentum matters in campaigns, and we didn’t have the right momentum in the last campaign. That was pretty clear. You know, trending in the polling sort of started going down from July onwards, which meant that we got to that critical turnout period, and the momentum wasn’t with us.

“This is very different now. The momentum is building for Labour. We’ve got a good groundswell of support rebuilding. We’re going to run a very big and very aggressive turnout strategy at the next election.”

Hipkins said he would be spending a lot of time in Auckland on the campaign to ensure that turnout, and had also reflected on his own style of campaigning.

In contrast to the give-everything-a-go Luxon campaign, Hipkins sometimes struggled on the road, relying on a “good to see you”, a handshake and moving on.

Five-and-a-half days laid up with Covid-19 did not help. He exited isolation into the final stretch with renewed vigour, but by then it was too late.

Hipkins said now that he had “had a go” at a campaign, he would be doing things differently.

“I was balancing a lot of things during the last campaign, including the fact that I’d basically only just become prime minister and was trying to lead the country through some really difficult circumstances.

“This time around, I’ve had the opportunity to go through a campaign. I know what to expect. It will be quite different for me. We’ll be doing different things.”

New Zealand has not had an election where the prime minister and the leader of the opposition were the same person as the election before since 1993.

Just as then, the roles were flipped, with former Prime Minister Mike Moore going up against the man that ousted him in 1990, Jim Bolger.

And, just like Moore, Hipkins had not served a full term before being beaten.

“I was campaigning to re-elect a government that I hadn’t been the leader of for most of the time we’d been in government. This time around, I’ll be setting out quite a different vision for the country, quite a different set of priorities. And so it would be my opportunity to stamp my own mark on the campaign and on the next government.”

As for what the public could expect from a full term of a Chris Hipkins-led government, he said Labour would be better prepared.

“Becoming prime minister in the tail end of a parliamentary term is really hard, because you’ve got to both figure out the direction you want to take things in and reset everything that’s already happening.

“Campaigning in my own right for a new government will be quite different to that, because I’ll be able to set out: these are my priorities, this is where I want to lead the country, this is what I want my government to be about.”

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

“Are you worried about this Taxpayers’ Union campaign that’s going to be launched against Nicola Willis?” Heather du Plessis-Allan asked the prime minister on Newstalk ZB last Monday.

“I haven’t seen it. But I would find it very unusual that a Taxpayers’ Union would want to advocate for a Labour-led government with a radical economic agenda,” Christopher Luxon replied.

No one had seen the campaign she spoke about, but commentators had surfaced it in the media.

“One insider calls it the biggest and toughest campaign ever launched against an ostensibly friendly target by the union, founded 12 years ago by lawyer Jordan Williams and National Party pollster David Farrar and chaired by former finance minister Ruth Richardson,” Matthew Hooton had written in his weekly New Zealand Herald column the previous Friday.

The Taxpayers’ Union professed to be politically independent, but felt compelled to condemn Willis for borrowing and spending more than the previous government, Hooton said.

That prompted the Herald‘s head of business Fran O’Sullivan to ask the next day: Who is bankrolling the push to dump Nicola Willis as finance minister?

“Big campaigns take cold hard cash. While the Taxpayers’ Union says it sports 200,000 on its newsletter list, it’s not transparent over its major donors. This detracts from its authenticity.”

O’Sullivan also said Taxpayers’ Union executive director Williams asked to put ads attacking government spending in the New Zealand Herald’s ‘Mood of the Boardroom’ publication in October.

Back in September, under the headline Inside the Attack Campaign Testing Nicola Willis’s Standing the national affairs editor of The Post, Andrea Vance, said the Taxpayers’ Union put out 11 media statements and more than 60 social media posts in the previous month which criticised her handling of the economy.

Williams told The Post it was just holding Willis to account for promises of fiscal discipline she had made.

“The critique is sharpened by the voice delivering it. The think tank’s chair is former National Finance Minister Ruth Richardson, remembered for her radical 1991 ‘Mother of all Budgets,” Vance wrote.

That was three months ago – and last Tuesday, Willis had a response ready for Richardson.

“Instead of lurking in the shadows with secretly funded ads in the paper, come and debate me right here in Parliament,” she told reporters.

“I’m ready anytime, anywhere,” she said, challenging media outlets to host that tussle.

Richardson told RNZ on Tuesday she wasn’t interested in a fiscal face-off, but the Taxpayers’ Union subsequently said she would debate “the sorry state of our fiscal position” next week.

The union immediately claimed a “campaign victory” on social media – and then bickering began over which media would host what it dubbed #motherofalldebates – and what Newstalk ZB’s du Plessis-Allan called “the finance girl on finance girl debate”.

“Hopefully it doesn’t fall over because I’m getting my popcorn ready now,” she told listeners.

The fudge starts flying

Last Thursday the Taxpayers’ Union finally launched its Willis campaign, complete with AI video, adverts and free fudge.

“The organisation has released packaged fudge from the imaginary Nicola Fudge Company. It’s branded with an image of Ms. Willis with the slogan: ‘a treat today, a tax tomorrow’,” RNZ reported.

The Taxpayers’ Union sent the pun-filled fudge boxes to the nation’s newsrooms to make sure they knew all about it.

Nadine Higgins tried to get the outgoing NZ Herald writer Simon Wilson to eat some on the Herald Now show on Friday. He declined – on the very reasonable grounds he wouldn’t be able to answer her questions on TV with his mouth full.

Right v left

Wilson reckoned the Taxpayers’ Union succeeded in creating a debate limited to right-wing prescriptions offering differing degrees of austerity.

It was Predator vs Alien according to Gordon Campbell at scoop.co.nz.

“Only Richardson could make Willis look relatively benign on tax, debt and spending policy. That – as the [Public Service Associatin] has suggested – may have been the original concept all along,” he wrote.

“If you think we’re being treated poorly under current management, take a look at this cobwebbed relic of the early 1990s, and be grateful for small mercies.”

‘Is Nicola Willis losing the right?‘ The Spinoff asked on Thursday, while the Herald‘s senior political correspondent Audrey Young said Nicola Willis was “getting it from both sides.”

“The left [is] painting her as austere as Ruth Richardson and the right [is] painting her as profligate as Grant Robertson,” she said.

Willis herself told RNZ it was a case of “clowns to the left of me and jokers to the right”.

“Stuck in the middle with you”, is the next line in the old song, but the opposition complained this was a sideshow with just one side – the right.

Polarisation playing out

It’s often said that “left versus right” isn’t that relevant in our politics any more. But at times it seems our media are still stuck on it. And in these polarised times – on the concept of far-left and far-right as well.

Last week the New Zealand Listener had a long look at “the global rise of radical conservatism” and its influence on our news and politics.

In a two part special report, the magazine’s politics writer Danyl McLauchlan looked at the populist politics on the rise worldwide. And journalist Peter Bale pondered the impact on politics and commentary here.

Bale included sceptical views of the media from Brian Tamaki and Christian nationalist William McGimpsey, among others. And he noted the “speed at which memes and themes from the US – especially the Trump-inspired MAGA movement – get picked up and repurposed for domestic consumption”.

This week two meetings pondered the impact of some of this on our news and our journalism.

One was the annual Journalism Education Association of New Zealand (JEANZ) gathering at Massey University.

Associate Professor Sean Phelan spoke of “reactionary watchdogism” in a session on “Journalism and the Far Right”.

“I think there’s a general wariness of calling this stuff ‘far right’ in New Zealand. People invoke terms like ‘polarisation’ … somehow reshaping our public life, but not attributed to any particular agents. I think a lot of this stuff needs to be called out as part of a far-right political project that’s increasingly transnational.”

An obsession with “wokeness” had normalised some far-right rhetoric in New Zealand, he said – and it was “rather naive to think this was just rhetorical stuff”.

Another Massey University communications professor, Mohan Dutta, said right-wing media outlets were part of an ideological project with economic backing and colonial roots.

Investigative journalist Nicky Hager urged other journalists not to isolate or ignore people who might have fallen under far-right influence at events such as anti-vaccine and Covid protests.

Journalists should try to bring people back into coverage of public life, he said.

Newsroom’s Marc Daalder told the conference it was becoming more complicated for journalists to make news judgements.

“Some aspects of these extremist views have made their way into sort of more mainstream politics – which makes it more complicated to cover that in a way that is responsible and holds power to account – but while also trying to protect ourselves against bad-faith accusations of bias.”

Phelan also said he believed right-wing media outlets had helped shift “the sensible centre of liberal democracy – and also the sensible centre of journalism”.

View from the US

Some of these themes were also aired this week in Queenstown at an event bluntly titled: “Will we ever Trust the News Again?.”

This was run by the New Zealand arm of the US-based Aspen Institute, a non-profit think tank that says we need to “tackle big issues across political, social, economic and religious divides.”

Running that show was Vivian Schiller, the director of Aspen Digital which says it promotes “responsible stewardship of technology and media”.

Schiller has huge experience in both. She was the chief executive of the US public broadcaster NPR, general manager of the New York Times website and the chief digital officer of NBC News.

She was also head of CNN’s documentary division and the head of news at Twitter when the app was influential and widely used by newsrooms a decade ago.

She was also a director of the Scott Trust, the not-for-profit entity that owns The Guardian.

“Survey after survey shows that around the world we don’t trust the media now. Younger generations trust the media less and less,” Schiller told Mediawatch.

“If you are a right-leaning person, you’re probably going to have mistrust of publishers or outlets that lean left and vice-versa. Because of human nature, we immediately jump to who we don’t trust, rather than who we do.”

This week’s Aspen Institute seminars attracted business leaders, policymakers and communications professionals.

“There was surprisingly little variance with what I hear in the US – the same levels of scepticism and mistrust about what feel like shaky sources, and the same desire to have reliable sources.”

“Obviously the dynamics in the US and New Zealand are different but where they are the same, sadly, is that societies are becoming more and more polarised … because of information ecosystems that cause higher levels of mistrust and division.”

“This particular group … had a good instinct of what’s trustworthy and what’s not. Their concerns were that people might fall prey to bad-faith media and exacerbate divisions in society.”

“There’s many things about the media in New Zealand that are better than the US. There seems to be more engagement in local news and more local news outlets.

The size of the country means that you don’t have the deep divide in the US between national news and local news. So I think that helps with community cohesion.”

Have media failed to adapt to a rightward shift in politics?

“That came up in the seminar. It’s not so much that ‘the right’ is not being covered, but mainstream media … have struggled to adapt to a different kind of politician.

“In the US … you have high-ranking officials who proclaim flat-out mistruths from their perch of leadership. In other words – lies.

“The news media have struggled with that word, but it’s more and more important to call out that – and fact-check critical issues up top. That has contributed to mistrust.

“But mistrust cuts both ways. Those on the right in the US blame mainstream media for not giving credence to right-wing views over the years. And I think there’s some truth to that.”

In 2011, Schiller quit as the chief executive at NPR after conservative activists posing as campaigners covertly recorded a fundraising staffer saying some outrageous and racist things.

“Unfortunately it was a harbinger of the world we live in today,” Schiller told Mediawatch.

The Aspen Institute is funded by a mix of major philanthropic foundations and corporations including Google, Microsoft and Amazon. While it claims to have an influence, Schiller insists it is not a lobbyist.

But do lobby groups – that now create a lot of content for news media and their own media channels – have more influence than ever on the issues the media cover?

“I don’t think that’s a new phenomenon. And it is the job of journalists to talk to a wide range of sources and to not just reprint a press release or position paper by a lobbying group.

“But any good news organisation wants to hear a range of views and [lobby groups] are a source of perspectives … for journalists to consider among many other sources.

“In the US, a lot of news organisations are based in urban areas on the coasts – or Chicago. That can make it difficult to understand the perspectives of people in rural areas. I think it is a fair complaint from some on the right that some of their concerns and issues were not fully covered by some news organisations.

“I think there has been sort of a reckoning – and a lot of analysis at news organisations to try to make sure that that doesn’t happen again.

Asked about the prospect of a Taxpayers Union campaign prompting the finance minister into a set-piece media debate about government spending, Schiller said: “I don’t know enough New Zealand to opine. But this is not exclusive to New Zealand. Sunlight and transparency is the best way to get issues in front of the voters. The remedy to bad information is good information – and more information.”

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

Labour leader Chris Hipkins is promising voters will see a different Labour in 2026 to the party they turned their backs on in 2023.

The last election saw Labour’s six years in government come to an end, and Hipkins returning to the opposition benches just 10 months after becoming prime minister.

Speaking to RNZ for an end of year sit-down interview, Hipkins was keen to cast some distance between the government he led to defeat, and the party he will take to the next election.

“The country’s moved on. The challenges facing the country are different, and so the solutions have got to be different too.”

Settling on a tax

Hipkins said 2025 had been a big year for Labour, and releasing its tax policy had been one of the highlights.

The party finally ended speculation over what kind of tax it would pursue, opting for a capital gains tax over a wealth tax, targeted at investment and commercial property.

The revenue would be ringfenced and go towards three free doctors visits a year for everyone. A Future Fund, free cervical screening, and a GP loan scheme have also rolled off the policy pipeline.

Asked whether Labour had given any consideration to using the tax revenue to go into the general pot or pay down debt, Hipkins said one of the biggest fiscal challenges any incoming government would face after the next election was the escalating cost of healthcare.

“Our national obsession with buying up rental houses isn’t actually helping us to grow the economy, and that needs to change. So targeting a capital gains tax at that area in order to encourage more investment in the productive economy was our first priority,” he said.

“The second thing is, what are we using that money for? We’ve got a crisis in our health system. We’ve got to do more to keep people healthy.”

Paying for those promises relies on there actually being capital gains to tax. Hipkins said economic forecasts suggested house prices would return back to their long-run average.

A different Labour?

Labour’s challenge is to convince voters it is a different Labour to the one they voted out, and Hipkins believed the public was seeing that.

“The Labour Party has been through quite a period of renewal. But also what we’re offering New Zealanders is quite different now. We’re in a very different situation now to the one that we were in two years ago when we went into the 2023 election, and the answers that we offer New Zealanders need to be different as well, and they are.”

A message to the party at this year’s conference was it cannot “say yes” to everything.

That meant, Hipkins said, that any promises Labour would make at the election were ones it knew it could keep.

“We’ve had a series of governments now who have encouraged people to be aspirational for New Zealand and have promised things that have been completely unrealistic. I don’t think we can afford to do that anymore. I think people will lose faith in a whole democratic system if we see politicians continuing to do that, I’m not going to fall into that trap.”

Depending on your pollster of choice, Labour is marginally in front of National or marginally behind. Likewise, Hipkins is either just in front of Christopher Luxon as preferred Prime Minister, or just behind.

All of that is to say it is tight. It means the major parties’ fortunes are looking increasingly reliant on their potential partners, and Hipkins has a problem in the shape of Te Pāti Māori.

The party has never gone into government with Labour, and yet they continue to be grouped together, especially by the coalition.

Te Pāti Māori’s ongoing scandals and internal turmoil have led Hipkins to declare it is a “shambles” and not ready for government, and he wants Labour to win all seven Māori electorates to ensure Te Pāti Māori is not part of the conversation post-election.

The nature of MMP means parties usually need friends, but Hipkins is not resiling from his intention to eliminate Te Pāti Māori.

“Every election is different. There have been a whole variety of different outcomes in MMP elections. Parties have come and gone, and that will continue to be the case.”

He also will not entirely rule out New Zealand First, repeating Labour would signal who it will and will not work with ahead of the election, but with no commitment around a date.

“There’s a lot of water to flow under the bridge. My goal is pretty simple. If you want a change of government, if you want to see good, solid, positive leadership for the country, then vote Labour.”

Some big names have left since the election. Kelvin Davis, Grant Robertson, Andrew Little and David Parker have gone. The likes of Barbara Edmonds, Kieran McAnulty and Willow-Jean Prime have been promoted to the front bench.

“It’s actually a very different Labour lineup now. So if you look at our senior team, our front bench lineup, there’s only, I think, three MPs left there who were there before the election,” Hipkins said.

Despite the same person at the top of the list, Hipkins said it was a “very nice problem to have” that many people were putting their names forward to stand.

“Growing our support means we bring in a whole lot of new talent, and I’m really excited about that. I offer some stability, some continuity, some experience, and you know, I’ve had that brief experience of being prime minister, so I know what to expect.”

A cost-of-living election

Signs point to the economy being rosier by the time of the election.

Business confidence is up, and ASB recently predicted the economy would turn around in 2026.

Hipkins was not concerned that Labour’s attack line on the economy could be running out of runway.

“New Zealanders deserve an economic recovery that benefits all New Zealanders. This government are only focused on benefitting those at the top. New Zealanders need to see a recovery that they all feel, and they’re not feeling that from this government,” he said.

“They don’t think this government cares about them. They don’t think this government’s focused on working New Zealanders who go out there and flog their guts out every day to create a better future for the country. That’s what my focus is.”

The coalition has prosecuted Labour for the “mess” it inherited.

Hipkins conceded that 7.5 percent inflation in 2023 was hurting New Zealand families, and that was reflected in the way they voted. But he said other countries had bounced back quicker since then.

“Why is it that New Zealand has been such an outlier here? It’s because of the decisions of this government, not the previous government. They want to blame everyone for problems that they have created.”

Labour has promised it would repeal the Regulatory Standards Bill, and restore pay equity (although on that point, the party will not say how it will pay for the restoration, which saved the government $1.8 billion a year).

But there have been other cases where Hipkins has said Labour would not repeal legislation it has opposed, saying the public had no appetite for another repeal-and-replace merry-go-round.

That was also partly because Hipkins did not see the point spending the first years of a new term unwinding legislation, adding he was in favour of a four-year term.

An Auckland-focused campaign

Hipkins has previously conceded Labour was not “listening” to Auckland, as its vote plummeted in the Super City.

Previously safe seats like New Lynn and Mt Roskill flipped blue, while turnout in South Auckland strongholds was low.

Since then, Hipkins has spent a lot of his time in Auckland, and is convinced Auckland is now listening in return.

“It’s been a long, slow rebuild for us in Auckland, the first 18 months or so of this Parliamentary term. It was slow going, but we have seen, particularly in the last half of this year, a real increase in our support in Auckland and some energy really building behind our campaign,” he said.

“Momentum matters in campaigns, and we didn’t have the right momentum in the last campaign. That was pretty clear. You know, trending in the polling sort of started going down from July onwards, which meant that we got to that critical turnout period, and the momentum wasn’t with us.

“This is very different now. The momentum is building for Labour. We’ve got a good groundswell of support rebuilding. We’re going to run a very big and very aggressive turnout strategy at the next election.”

Hipkins said he would be spending a lot of time in Auckland on the campaign to ensure that turnout, and had also reflected on his own style of campaigning.

In contrast to the give-everything-a-go Luxon campaign, Hipkins sometimes struggled on the road, relying on a “good to see you”, a handshake and moving on.

Five-and-a-half days laid up with Covid-19 did not help. He exited isolation into the final stretch with renewed vigour, but by then it was too late.

Hipkins said now that he had “had a go” at a campaign, he would be doing things differently.

“I was balancing a lot of things during the last campaign, including the fact that I’d basically only just become prime minister and was trying to lead the country through some really difficult circumstances.

“This time around, I’ve had the opportunity to go through a campaign. I know what to expect. It will be quite different for me. We’ll be doing different things.”

New Zealand has not had an election where the prime minister and the leader of the opposition were the same person as the election before since 1993.

Just as then, the roles were flipped, with former Prime Minister Mike Moore going up against the man that ousted him in 1990, Jim Bolger.

And, just like Moore, Hipkins had not served a full term before being beaten.

“I was campaigning to re-elect a government that I hadn’t been the leader of for most of the time we’d been in government. This time around, I’ll be setting out quite a different vision for the country, quite a different set of priorities. And so it would be my opportunity to stamp my own mark on the campaign and on the next government.”

As for what the public could expect from a full term of a Chris Hipkins-led government, he said Labour would be better prepared.

“Becoming prime minister in the tail end of a parliamentary term is really hard, because you’ve got to both figure out the direction you want to take things in and reset everything that’s already happening.

“Campaigning in my own right for a new government will be quite different to that, because I’ll be able to set out: these are my priorities, this is where I want to lead the country, this is what I want my government to be about.”

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Source: Radio New Zealand

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has mounted a defence of his leadership, reminding people he rebuilt the National Party after “a state of civil war”.

Speculation his job was under threat was whirling around Parliament just a few weeks ago, prompting senior Cabinet ministers to outright deny plotting a coup.

A series of worrying polls had indicated National might net a lower party vote next year, fuelling dissatisfaction within National’s caucus.

In an end of year sit-down interview with RNZ this week Luxon said he would “absolutely” be National’s leader at next year’s election campaign.

“I’ve seen media comments. I’ve had those right from day one. The reality is, I came into politics four or five years ago on our second-worst election result.

“The National Party was in a state of civil war, we’d had five leaders in five years. The media was used to a daily soap opera from the National Party and there’s been a bit of an overhang around that.

“So I’ve had that right from the get-go in all the time that I’ve been involved in politics but I know what it took to rebuild a National Party from 20 percent to 37 percent and find a pathway to win an election after being in quite a dysfunctional state, and then to be able to form a coalition government.”

He said he had a “tight, disciplined team”.

A slow economic recovery

Luxon heralded 2025 as the year of economic growth, though stubborn inflation and US tariffs have stymied progress.

“The reality is we hit quarter two with Trump’s liberation day and that caused a huge loss of confidence.

“Through that winter period in New Zealand it was incredibly difficult because the reaction to the Q2 contraction in the economy, as a function of the chaos and the uncertainty around the tariff policy, caused a huge amount of negative sentiment for people.”

Luxon said he was aware it had been “incredibly difficult and challenging for people”.

“We were slow coming out of Covid, and they’ve walked straight into a recession by virtue of economic management being poor and I know people want it done faster and we’re [going] as fast as we can.”

Luxon said he was “fixated” on unemployment as many people struggled to find work, though he blamed economic mismanagement for the tough job market.

“If you care about working New Zealanders, they’ve taken the brunt of this economic mismanagement and that’s why I feel a huge responsibility to actually fix it.”

He was focused on long-term solutions, not “sugar hits” and “bumper stickers”, he said.

“Unemployment is, technically, below our 15-year average. That doesn’t really matter to someone who’s lost their job and our opportunity is to get inflation down, interest rates down, get the economy growing, create opportunity for jobs.

“One in four jobs in New Zealand are tied to firms that actually export their products and services internationally, yet we had a trade deficit meaning we were importing more than we were exporting.

“Now, for the first time in the last month, we are exporting more than we import and that means New Zealand firms are growing and they can hire more workers and pay workers higher wages.”

Coalition dynamics

Luxon has headed up the country’s first three-way coalition for more than two years now, defying the naysayers who suggested the government might fall apart.

He was “proud” of how the coalition partners had found a way to work together.

“It’s been very important to me from the beginning that people have space to differentiate and when you think about the six parties that are in the New Zealand Parliament, that they all have different brand positionings, different policies, different constituencies, and you have to allow space for that to happen.

“I think what you’ve seen is massive alignment at the centre and on the core, important stuff, but on the margins yes, there will be differences and as we go through the course of next year parties will be looking to differentiate.

“But don’t confuse that with the fact that actually we are still very focused as a coalition government on getting this economy growing, getting law and order restored, better health, better education.”

New Zealand First and the ACT Party have recently gone toe-to-toe on the Regulatory Standards Bill, after Winston Peters vowed to repeal it moments after it was passed into law.

National has not outright committed to keeping it, though Luxon told RNZ it would be a shame to not give the new law a proper go before deciding on any changes.

“We’ve only just passed the bill and the intention of the bill is a bit like the Public Finance Act, to make sure that the politicians are actually making good-quality regulation and legislation, that they’re not causing grief for the New Zealanders as a result of bad law-making.

“So let’s give it a good go, let’s see how it goes and of course if it needs to be tweaked, we can form a view later.”

No apologies for a law-and-order crackdown

The government has implemented a law-and-order crackdown this term, introducing tougher sentencing laws and gang-specific offences.

It’s building hundreds more prison beds in Hawke’s Bay as the prison muster bulges to nearly 11,000 people.

Luxon made no apologies for the growing prison population or the cost of it, saying it was “a great investment”.

“It’s helping the country because what it’s not costing the country is victims of crime being bashed and being victims of violent crime.

“Two years ago, we used to wake up every morning with one or two ram raids that had happened and yes, we’ve had tougher sentencing and yes, you’re right we have 1900 extra prisoners in prison.

“That’s our best place to rehabilitate them. It means that they’re out of our community, causing harm and suffering on New Zealanders, and that’s what our focus has been.”

Luxon said he would eventually like to see the prison population come down.

“The previous administration had a focus on prison population and reducing that by 30 percent and we want to do that as well, we want to see the prison population come down but only because crime has come down.

“What we’re not going to tolerate, in a society built on rights and responsibilities, you don’t get to sit in a community and cause harm, pain and suffering on your fellow New Zealanders.”

The election campaign

Looking ahead to next year’s election, Luxon said his primary focus would be the economy, with an eye on structural challenges in welfare, health and superannuation.

“Without doubt the number one thing is to make sure the economy is growing and that people are feeling that. That is our major focus.

“We want individual New Zealanders to have bigger nest eggs, more like we see in Australia, and we want that capital in this country so that we can invest it in more infrastructure and actually get more things built for people.”

He wouldn’t say who he would prefer to work with next year, only that National had shown voters it could work with both New Zealand First and the ACT Party.

“We’ve provided strong and stable government. All three parties deserve credit for the way they’ve worked together despite differences they may have as well.

“We’ve proven we can work with both. My real preference is to make sure that you party-vote National and I think you’ll hear that a lot over the course of 2026.”

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Source: Radio New Zealand

Farmers will be exposed to the uncertainty of the three-year political cycle by the government’s decision to walk away from the bipartisan consensus on climate change, the Greens say.

The government is pushing through all three stages of a bill to weaken the 2050 methane emissions target under urgency in Parliament on Friday.

If passed, a required 24 to 47 percent reduction in methane from 2017 levels will be halved, to a 14 to 24 percent reduction.

In setting the lower target, the government rejected Climate Change Commission advice, arguing it would lower GDP in 2050 by 2.2 percent from what it otherwise would have been.

Instead, it followed the advice of a methane science review it commissioned, which found the lower target was consistent with a controversial principle of ‘no additional warming’.

Methane – which is a short-lived gas but has a huge warming effect while it exists in the atmosphere – makes up roughly half of New Zealand’s emissions. Most of it comes from farms, especially the burps and breaths of ruminant animals like cows and sheep.

Climate Change Minister Simon Watts said the government was supporting farmers and economic growth.

“Farmers have been clear that they need a methane target that is realistic,” he told Parliament.

“This bill reflects our belief that a thriving climate and thriving economy go hand in hand.”

The government was supporting work on farms to reduce emissions, including investing in agricultrual methane-inhibiting technology via public-private partnership AgriZero.

New Zealand’s international targets – including halving net greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 – were not changing, he said.

Green Party MP Francisco Hernandez said the legislation was “a betrayal of the farming community [National] purport to represent”.

Farmers had been previously shielded by the bipartisanship forged when Parliament passed the Zero Carbon Act – which set New Zealand’s original targets – with near-unanimous support in 2019, Hernandez said.

That would end when the amended target was passed either today or tomorrow.

“Every three years, the agricultural community will now have to face the rollercoaster experience of the chopping and changing of targets.”

He criticised the government’s decision to push through the change under urgency, with no public consultation or select committee scrutiny.

“They will not be able to complain when we use the same process.”

Labour Party climate change spokesperson Deborah Russell said the government had chosen “a very curious day” to be pushing through the bill under urgency.

“It is 10 years to the day since John Key’s National government signed up to the Paris Agreement, and here we are today, in this house, downgrading our methane target, valorising dubious science, and walking away from our commitments to reducing climate change.”

Setting a lower target might be cheaper in the short-term, Russell said.

“But the costs will be borne by our children and our children’s children.”

Previous MPs, including from National, had worked hard together to get a bipartisan consensus on the original targets, she said.

“There was genuine consensus… and that party has walked away from it.”

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Source: Radio New Zealand

The government’s plan for Parliament’s final full week of the year moves 12 different proposed laws through 32 stages of parliamentary approval.

Included in the plan is fixing an error made by tired government MPs during the previous long week of urgency, when they voted for an opposition amendment and, even when prompted, failed to notice the error. This week’s urgency revealed another, bigger error caused presumably by too much haste and not enough care.

Judging by submissions and responses in Parliament’s rules committee, governments’ use of urgency may be losing favour. Vanushi Walters noted in debate on House on Thursday that the House has spent 30.4 percent of this Parliament sitting under urgency, compared to 15.7 percent of the previous Parliament. The previous Parliament used a fair bit of urgency. This Parliament has almost doubled that. Fast Track Legislation is not just the name of a bill.

Speed can be useful, and can be necessary, but it increases the likelihood of errors. On Thursday the House saw significant evidence of this when they debated the wide-ranging Crimes Amendment Bill, from the Minister of Justice, Paul Goldsmith.

His opening speech in the debate can’t have been fun. First he alerted MPs to his intention to give extra instructions to the Select Committee who would look at the bill (more on that below). Then he began listing the things included in the bill but ran out of steam when he reached items he apparently expected, but that were not there.

“This bill is a wide-ranging one. It amends the Crimes Act to ensure criminals face longer penalties for coward punches, attacking first responders, retail crime, human trafficking, and – uhm – further retail crime.”

His problem-some of the broad range of measures promoted as highlights of the bill had been omitted. They had also been listed in his answers during Question Time. Presumably, at some point someone asked where those much-praised law-changes could be found – and the government discovered they were missing.

This was not a misplaced comma or an omitted clause. It was an entire chunk of the legislation, a level of failure that is both extraordinary and embarrassing for the government.

The minister was forced to ask the Select Committee to consider adding the missing items to a bill that was only made public on Tuesday.

A ‘hotchpotch’ of a bill hides an error

Other than unseemly haste, another reason for the screw-up may be the bill’s jumble of disconnected provisions. All were crime-related, but for a muddle of different categories of crime.

This government has been very busy on crime and punishment. Bills considered so far this Parliament included 22 related to crime, or punishment for crime. A couple of those were Members bills – one of these was rolled into this new Crimes Amendment Bill. Most of those crime-related bills have been more focused. Not this one.

Labour’s Ginny Andersen began her response to the bill saying “in all my years working on justice policy as a public servant, as an adviser, [never] have I ever seen such a hotchpotch of different measures all jammed into one bill.” She imagined Paul Goldsmith being told by the Prime Minister that he was behind on his “deliverables” and as a response “sweeping his desk of all the work he was meant to do over the course of the year and putting it into one bill.”

The bill changes the rules around citizen’s arrest, and around property defences (both static and mobile property). It changes offences and penalties around human trafficking, migrant smuggling, and slavery. It creates new offences for assaults on first responders or corrections officers. There are also new offences for punching someone in the head or neck if they don’t see it coming. There is even an offence that the bill describes as theft undertaken in an “offensive, threatening, insulting, or disorderly manner.”

Once the missing measures are added in, it will be possible to give summary fines to shoplifters. Although, as Lawrence Xu-Nan pointed out, those missing provisions don’t relate to the Crimes Act that this bill amends, but instead to the Summary Offences Act.

The jumble of provisions meant there was also a jumble of debate. Opposition MPs could all find things they loved about the bill, and things they were appalled at. The most popular changes related to human trafficking and slavery offences. The least popular were for citizen’s arrest, and the subsequent holding of arrestees.

According to Labour’s spokesperson on the subject, Ginny Andersen, it is not only the opposition who find these measures problematic.

“Officials, both from the Ministry of Justice and from Police, have warned the government that this is a dangerous piece of legislation. They say, in advice, that it would escalate low-level theft into more violent situations and potentially endanger the lives of those people who were the business owners. It even suggests, in some of the police advice that we received, that there will be a situation-if a business owner had detained and restrained an alleged offender, and if they were there for a period of time, that business owner might even be able to be charged with kidnapping if they were held in certain ways.”

On the government side most MPs gave very short speeches indeed, mostly about being hard on crime or focusing on victims. Rima Nakhle, for example, defended the use of urgency on a bill, parts of which won’t come into effect until six months after it passes into law.

“What saddens me to my core”, said Nakhle, “is that we’re having philosophical conversations across the House about the use of urgency. There is urgency for victims, and that’s the reason why this bill is what it is, and that’s the reason why we’re talking about it in urgency: because, to us, the rights of victims and protecting them is absolutely urgent. I commend this bill to the House.”

That was her entire speech, the shortest of a short bunch. The entire first reading debate on the bill took well under an hour.

Once the first reading debate was complete, the responsible minister, Goldsmith returned to seek permission for the Select Committee to consider his amendments to the bill. Amendments to correct the missing provisions, which required a further debate. Oddly, given that the purpose of a first reading is to consider whether the content of a bill is worth considering, MPs were not allowed to debate the content that would be added, only whether the committee should consider adding it.

Opposition MPs were not kind about the missing content.

“Look, this is a disgrace.” said Kieran McAnulty. “They should not have had to rush things through urgency. If they weren’t so focused on getting things through so quickly, I reckon they wouldn’t have made this mistake.”

*RNZ’s The House, with insights into Parliament, legislation and issues, is made with funding from Parliament’s Office of the Clerk. Enjoy our articles or podcast at RNZ.

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Source: Radio New Zealand

MPs may well be cranky after debates under urgency continued until about 1.40am this morning – resuming again at 9am.

The House continues a packed agenda as the government tries to clear through legislation before the end of the year.

When Parliament is under urgency, sittings usually conclude at midnight.

But when amendments are being voted on in the Committee of the Whole House stage of a bill, the session cannot stop until the amendments have been dealt with.

The opposition putting forward more than 200 amendments on the Electoral Amendment Act – which makes several changes to election rules – was therefore what kept MPs going into the early hours.

Labour’s Greg O’Connor was in the Speaker’s chair and patiently kept things running.

“No doubt to the great disappointment of the house, the time has come for me to leave the chair. The house will resume at 9am tomorrow,” he said.

The remaining pieces of legislation on Friday also includes pushing a climate targets bill through all stages – a process that will take significant time – as well as changes to overseas investment national interest tests, and a re-committal of the committee stage of a bill adding two extra judges.

If not all dealt with, sittings will continue on Saturday – potentially until midnight – or whenever voting on amendments concludes.

Urgent sittings this week have seen the government extend RMA consents, backtrack on controversial changes to the fast-track regime, and pass changes to the rules for pig farming.

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