Opinion: Govt recalls virtue of policies people like, can’t cut its way to popularity

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THREE KEY FACTS
Thomas Coughlan is Deputy Political Editor and covers politics from Parliament. He has worked for the Herald since 2021 and has worked in the press gallery since 2018.
OPINION

The Government sent out three press releases to accompany Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s press
conference on Monday.

The first two declared mission (mostly) accomplished on the Government’s third-quarter action plan and announced the tasks in its fourth-quarter plan. The most abiding of the three was a puppy-eyed press release that came last proclaiming – if the Government does say so itself – “a triple whammy of good news”. Good things, as Messrs Luxon, Seymour and Peters, might say, come in threes.
The news certainly was good. The funding of Keytruda, a vital cancer medicine, Continuous Glucose Monitors (CGM) and insulin pumps, and the commencement of childcare tax credits being paid out will be life-changing for patients and young families.
The three announcements come at significant fiscal cost and the Government has every right to crow about them. Labour certainly wasn’t above periodically reminding and re-reminding people of all its do-gooding.
This one felt significant simply because the Government is suffering from a period of self-inflicted gloomy headlines: from downsizing the Dunedin Hospital rebuild, to concern at the damage done by the decision to strip $1.4 billion in costs from the health system, to the school property build stalling, to questions over the Interislander ferry replacement project, to question marks hanging over 370 Kāinga Ora projects as the Government pivots towards community housing providers.
All of these grim headlines are directly related to decisions to intervene over skyrocketing costs in the health, education and housing portfolios. The Government is currently reaping the returns of those decisions – and those returns are negative. It can cut its way to surplus, but it will struggle to cut its way to popularity.
For a while this quarter – if we’re to use Luxon’s preferred measure of timekeeping – it felt as if the Government had forgotten the merits of doing things that were popular, mistaking populism for popularity. Raising speed limits, reopening the Treaty, and marching public servants back to the office carry a certain culture war cache, but they’re not the substantive stuff, such as hospitals, homes, and classrooms.
This fiscal pickle isn’t of the Government’s own making and the decisions it’s made aren’t entirely without merit. The Government is clearly frontloading its tough but fiscally responsible decisions in its first year, to give it some breathing space as it approaches the next election. But there is a risk it overcooks the fire and brimstone and embeds itself in the public imagination as a pack of chain-smoking hatchet men.
The quarterly plans themselves are a good idea. They responded to a sense under the last Government that the public sector machine was occasionally unfocused and too easily distracted. People mercilessly mock Luxon’s use of terms such as “decision gates”, but in truth, driving a project to “gates” as these plans do, gives it a better chance of actually succeeding – something Labour, which still whiffs of projects such as Auckland Light Rail, Lake Onslow, and KiwiBuild, might do well to remember.
The current plan has a self-described infrastructure focus. The individual line items are fairly pro-market, and if the Government has its way, will encourage a private sector-led infrastructure recovery. Rather awkwardly for an infrastructure-led document, the plan is completely silent on the future of the Interislander. That particular project was meant to have a path forward announced last quarter, but seems to have got lost on its way through the decision gate. The Government now promises an announcement of some kind by the end of the year.
Other announcements include making it easier to consent and build offshore wind farms, introducing a bill to ease the regulatory burden on the infrastructure, energy, housing, and farming sectors, and making it easier to toll roads – a bill that will be crucial to raising the transport revenue the Government so desperately needs to plug a yawning $6b funding gap it created for itself later this decade.
Buried in the plan is a focus on deregulation in the primary sector. The Government will pass one RMA reform bill to “reduce the regulatory burden on farmers and the primary sector” and introduce another that will “cut through the tangle of red and green tape” afflicting farmers. Farmers will also see legislation passed removing them from the ETS.
The Government isn’t completely reversing agriculture’s slow inexorable march to emissions pricing. In fact, it will “finalise the development of farm-level emissions measurement methodology”. This has been well signalled, but all the signalling in the world is unlikely to please some farmers, who feel that any step towards pricing is a step too far.
Slightly more controversial will be a policy to “limit farm conversions to forestry on high-quality land to protect food production”. This topic, which led to heated discussion at a National Party conference back in 2022 is controversial among the party; while some are happy it preserves the rural landscape, others are frustrated that it dictates what people can and can’t do with their land.
The most controversial of the 43 promises will be a commitment to finally pass the fast-track bill, which has become an albatross around the Government’s neck, thanks in part to fears it’ll be used by vested interests to gorge themselves on natural resources without the public having much say. The counterargument to this, is that the bill will bring much-needed investment and jobs to regions that sorely need it. Having belatedly discovered the importance of doing things the public likes, the Government would be well advised to ensure the fast-track act, as it will be by Christmas, can achieve the second of these goals, while avoiding the former.
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