There is every reason to believe National will be chucked out in 2026.
It is lazy thinking to presume that because National were in for 9 years the last three times, that it has to happen again. Comparing Luxon to Key or Bolger is like comparing a pebble to a mountain.
Go into any pharmacy and ask the pharmacist if people are happy with the reintroduced $5 prescription charges or the risk they are now placed in having to store quantities of pseudoephedrine.
Ministers Ciga-Reti and Nicotine Willis defending tax cuts partly funded by tobacco use sustained at a higher population rate, has revealed their cold calculus. Luxon’s fact-free claims about ram raid increases caused by future tobacco retail constraints were simply lies.
No doubt the new Minister of Finance will have her day ‘opening the books’. Works for a week every new government. But once she has to present her very, very, very mini-budget and front up to her own work, Robertson will quickly turn the tables. To see a real mini-budget, check the welfare policies implemented by December 2017 under Labour.
In transport, Minister Brown’s hasty push to kill off the Auckland fuel tax has left him in the unfortunate position of having to figure out where he and NZTA and Auckland Transport are going to get the funding to continue the Eastern Busway, which is upwards of $1.4 billion and currently, contractually, under construction.
The National coalition repealing the new Resource Management Act legislation that Labour spent six years consulting and drafting on simply leaves all the previous 20 years of litigation precedent set in place. There are many environmental groups very quietly celebrating the impending return of the full Resource Management Act, which has complex and onerous effects-based legislation that has delayed and softened thousands of major landscape-altering developments. Stupidly, with no replacement drafted, the default is the previous legislation.
Similar will occur for the newly amalgamated Polytechs, disestablished back to the entities they were in before. This finds the new Minister for Tertiary education having to face the same crises Labour faced in financial instability and regional shrinking. With Labour establishing Te Pukenga, and National disestablishing it, Labour will remind us of the foolishness of antidisestablishmentarianism (not a term that’s been in vogue since to court of George IV).
Then there’s all councils preparing LTPs with crippling 10%+ multi-year rate rises because there is no alternative to the Three Waters National has swept away.
I haven’t even got to climate change and our national policy positions in the COP 28 round.
Multiple portfolio areas in a mess and they’ve only been sworn in a week.
There is every chance that once the initial charge of repealing the Acts and forming Budget 2024 at the first half of next year, they will struggle to do anything except wade through policy and legislative and funding shit of their own making.
Those items that are positively on the coalition agreements such as the 12 new Roads of National Significance and the projects to emanate from the new regional development funding, will each take a decade to start and several more years to finish.
The fast burn on their popularity will be swift and hard: sure in the 2023 election you could fill a stadium with people trying to tear something down and barely fill a public urinal with people trying to make something happen, but then the first national crisis hits and everyone asks the simple question: is Luxon really a leader or just a mid-order retail manager? We’ll all find that out in the first storm to hit. National’s coalition is unstable and Labour’s team are crisis match fit like you wouldn’t believe. That will show before the camera just as it will show in Parliament.
Labour and Greens need to concentrate their efforts so that this lot are only in power for one term and no more. That means more united policy positions, more united marches, and a whole bunch more fundraising so they are ready to fight and win a new election.
The question, beyond the first year of government, is not what you are against, but what you are for. Those simple ‘are we heading in the right direction’ survey questions will take a year and enjoy the tax cuts. But then you have to actually have a direction.
Reality is already hitting and the tax cuts haven’t even arrived. There was no honeymoon. There’s every chance of a quick public opinion divorce.
Kick this lot out in just one term.
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