“Choosing the tallest dwarf”: The rot in New Zealand politics
Every serious failure in this country has already been diagnosed, costed and written up by people the taxpayer hired to do it. What is on offer on 7 November is not a set of remedies. It is a choice of brands.
In 1930 a British publisher named Sir Ernest Benn gave politics a definition that has outlived almost everything else he wrote. It is, he said:
" The art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedy."
Groucho Marx usually gets the credit now. Benn earned it, and New Zealand in 2026 is his case study.
With one correction. Benn assumed the misdiagnosis was honest. Here the diagnoses have already been done, properly, at public expense, by royal commissions, expert advisory groups, statutory monitors and independent reviews commissioned by governments of both colours. They sit in bound volumes with ISBNs. The failure is not that nobody knows what is wrong. It is that knowing what is wrong has stopped mattering.
That is the question this election is not asking. On 7 November voters will not be invited to choose between competing remedies for problems everybody agrees exist. They will be invited to choose which brand they mistrust less. Choosing the tallest dwarf is not democracy working. It is democracy being managed.
Contents
The state of the race
Take the pollsters that still sit inside the industry body.
Roy Morgan had the National-led bloc on 49 percent against a 41 percent opposition in July, down from 51.5 in May. RNZ’s Reid Research put Labour on 34 to National’s 28.7. By August, 1News-Verian had Labour on 30, National on 29 and the Opportunity Party on 8, and Talbot Mills had Labour five ahead. Across the full published series the pollsters disagree about who is winning and agree on the shape: both major parties are shrinking, and what leaves them is not coming back.
The outlier is the Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll released on 7 September, which put Labour at its lowest since July 2024 and dumped Opportunity back below the threshold — a result every other survey in the field contradicts. It is also the only poll in the monthly rotation produced by a firm sitting outside the Research Association of New Zealand, David Farrar having resigned Curia from the association in 2024 while a complaint against it was being dealt with. The release timing, the pattern it fits and why it matters are set out here and are not repeated in this piece.
A poll that always lands first, and always lands conveniently, is not a measurement. Treating it as one is how a campaign about nothing gets a scoreboard.
What is not in dispute is that neither leader is wanted. In the same week’s RNZ polling, Chris Hipkins’ preferred prime minister rating fell to 21.3 percent and Christopher Luxon sat on 19.9. Both were net negative on job approval, Luxon at minus 23. Four voters in five want neither man in the job, and one of them will get it.
Nor is the contest being fought on substance. National is campaigning on “Fix the Basics, Build the Future”. Labour launched on “Better Starts Now”. Neither slogan contains a claim that can be tested, which is the point of a slogan.
History still favours the incumbent. New Zealand has thrown out a first-term government only twice since the Second World War, in 1957 and 1975 — the most recent instance 51 years ago. Even the fourth Labour government, which inflicted Rogernomics from 1984, was returned in 1987. But stickiness is not satisfaction. A prime minister who has survived two confidence votes in four months, the second forced by his own defence minister Chris Penk, who was sacked within hours and quit Parliament the same night, is testing how far habit will stretch. On seat projections an overhang remains live, a scenario I mapped here.
The diagnosis was never the problem
Consider what is already on the public record, none of it disputed by any party.
The Randerson review concluded in 2020 that the Resource Management Act could not cope and had to be replaced. The Simpson review found the health system “under serious stress”, complex and fragmented, and recommended cutting district health boards from 20 to between eight and twelve over five years. The Welfare Expert Advisory Group reported in 2019 that the welfare system was no longer fit for purpose, with 42 key recommendations sitting on top of 126 detailed ones. He Ara Oranga made 40 recommendations on mental health and addiction, 38 of which government accepted. The Royal Commission into Abuse in Care produced more than 500 findings and 207 recommendations.
Every one of those was commissioned by a New Zealand government. Every one identified the problem accurately. Not one has been implemented as written.
The Child Poverty Action Group’s stocktakes found that none of the Welfare Expert Advisory Group’s 42 key recommendations had been fully implemented, with four of the 126 detailed ones achieved. Labour, which commissioned the review, declined on the day of release to lift benefits by the recommended amount. National said it disagreed with the bulk of the report. That is bipartisanship of a sort.
The abuse-in-care sequence is starker. Two years after the final report, survivors describe a perpetual consultation process in which claims take five to ten years and people die waiting. When the Redress System for Abuse in Care Bill reached its second reading in May, MPs pointed out that it excludes a group of survivors the Royal Commission expressly said should not be excluded. The commission diagnosed. Parliament prescribed something else.
And the diagnostic work carries on regardless. The Infrastructure Commission’s own research finds New Zealand spends more per person on infrastructure than comparable high-income countries and sits in the bottom ten percent for the value it gets back.
We spend more per head on infrastructure than almost any comparable country and rank in the bottom ten percent for what we get for it. That is not a funding problem. It is a decision problem.
Electricity: the problem everyone can name and nobody will touch
If you want a single test of the Benn proposition, use the power bill.
The diagnosis is not contested by anybody. The OECD’s 2026 survey of New Zealand puts the affordability, security and sustainability of the electricity system at the top of its list of high-impact structural priorities. Every party agrees power costs too much. Every party has a policy about it. Not one has a policy that touches the mechanism setting the price.
That mechanism is not a mystery either. Before 1998 the state-owned Electricity Corporation ran the hydro and thermal fleet as a single system, priced power at average cost and reinvested the surplus in new generation. The reforms broke it into competing generator-retailers whose revenue is set at the margin, usually by the most expensive plant running, rather than at the average cost of producing it. I set the full case out in Power Failure, and have been making it since 2013.
The consequences are visible on the NZX rather than in any policy document. Contact Energy posted a $423 million annual profit this winter, up 62 percent, off the back of record power prices. Meridian is worth close to $15.7 billion, Mercury about $9.6 billion, Contact about $9.3 billion and Genesis about $3.2 billion — close to $38 billion between the four of them. A physics-based audit of the Waikato, Waitaki and Clutha schemes, together 38 percent of national generation, found they produce about 84 percent of what the water running through them could generate with modern turbines and rational dispatch. A spot market that rewards withholding water accounts for much of the gap.
The Crown holds 51 percent of Meridian, Mercury and Genesis. The government is the majority shareholder in three of the four companies profiting from the prices it says it wants to bring down.
There is the answer, and it is not complicated. A genuine return to average-cost pricing would reprice the sector from oligopoly earnings multiples to regulated-infrastructure multiples. The loss would land on the Crown’s balance sheet, on every KiwiSaver fund holding NZX50 stock and on every investor who bought in at the 2013 and 2014 partial floats — on my own estimate, at least $20 billion, along with thousands of jobs and a visible share of the advertising revenue that keeps New Zealand’s media companies solvent.
So no government of any colour triggers it. They announce reviews. They announce level-playing-field measures between gentailers and independents. They send out spokesmen who run the same script and never answer on the number. Then they wait until the issue stops leading the news.
This is Benn’s third step performed deliberately rather than stupidly. The trouble was found. It was diagnosed correctly, repeatedly, by officials and by the OECD. The remedy is known and costed. It is not applied because the people who would bear the cost of applying it are the same people who own the problem.
Health: ACC runs the private system, the public one runs on fumes
Health is the other case where the structural problem is well understood and neither party will name it.
New Zealand does not run one health system. It runs at least two, with different funding channels and opposite incentives. The public system is funded from taxation and rations by waiting list. ACC is funded by levies, does not ration the same way, and buys treatment on the open market — it has long been a mainstay customer of the private hospitals for planned surgery.
The demarcation is the whole problem. ACC covers accidents. It does not cover illness, degeneration or gradual wear and tear. Two patients with the same knee, the same surgeon and the same operation are funded through entirely different systems depending on how the cause is characterised, and only one of them waits.
When the accident channel is funded and the illness channel is rationed, the rational move for everyone in the system is to make the problem look like an accident.
That incentive is not theoretical, and it cuts both ways. I set out a case in the NZ Herald in 2018: a pensioner with a broken ankle sent by ACC to a succession of its own specialists looking for a reason to decline cover, which found one in “degeneration”, withdrew it on review, and left the patient more than nine months in a temporary cast before the ankle was fused at the DHB’s expense with permanent impairment as the result. ACC and the private insurer each spent more money avoiding the operation than the operation would have cost. The full column is here; the demarcation it describes has not moved since.
Meanwhile the state is buying private capacity at undisclosed prices. Health New Zealand has been directed to award ten-year contracts to private hospitals for elective procedures such as cataracts and joint replacements, and has refused to disclose what it is paying. Budget 2026 funded an additional 24,000 planned care treatments for 2026-27, much of which the private hospital sector expects to deliver under outsourcing arrangements. Private hospitals already perform more than 20,000 procedures a month, around 3,000 of them outsourced from the public system.
Against that, the election offer is a co-payment argument. Labour’s Medicard promises three free GP visits a year, free prescriptions, free cervical screening and free maternity scans from 2027-28, funded by the capital gains tax and ring-fenced. National has not matched it and instead criticises the affordability of what it calls an unfunded cascade of free services, without offering a primary-care policy of its own. Underneath both sits a balance sheet neither wants to discuss: the Ministry of Health’s quarter two monitoring report records Health New Zealand revising its forecast deficit up to $300 million, with 90 percent of the risks identified in an independent review having materialised.
The remedy has been on the table since at least 2018, and it is not radical: a single health and income protection scheme covering accident, illness and disability, which is broadly what the 1938 Social Security Act delivered before the system fragmented into ACC, district health boards, Pharmac, private insurers, charities and the rest. Nobody is proposing it. Both major parties are arguing about the price of a GP visit.
Mental health shows the same gap at its widest. Te Hiringa Mahara, the commission He Ara Oranga itself recommended creating, reported in June 2026 that the system is improving in places but losing ground for the people who need it most, with rising need among young people and Maori going unmet. Budget 2026 contained no new explicit investment in mental health and addiction services.
Reform by rebrand
What happens instead of implementation is restructuring, and restructuring is where ideology does its work.
Resource management is the clearest case. Randerson reported in 2020. Labour passed the Natural and Built Environment Act and the Spatial Planning Act in August 2023. The incoming coalition repealed both under urgency that December, four months later, without a regulatory impact statement. In December 2025 it introduced the Planning Bill and the Natural Environment Bill as replacements, and the select committee reported back in July 2026 recommending both pass with the core unchanged. Transitional arrangements run out to around 2031.
Six years after a review every party accepted, the country still operates under the Act the review said to replace, and the rules that will actually apply on the ground will not be settled this decade. The government estimates the new system will save $13.3 billion over 30 years and lift GDP by 0.56 percent a year by 2050. Labour has not said whether it would keep it.
Health ran the same pattern in the opposite direction. Simpson said reduce 20 boards to eight or twelve over five years. Labour abolished all twenty at once. The coalition then sacked the Health New Zealand board and installed a commissioner in July 2024, citing overspending of about $130 million a month, and began devolving functions back to the regions. Two governments, two opposite remedies, one unchanged diagnosis.
The machinery itself is not exempt. The Productivity Commission — whose entire statutory job was working out why New Zealand is poorer than it ought to be — was disestablished under urgency in February 2024, its funding redirected to a new Ministry for Regulation. During the debate, MPs from every party praised the work of the body they were abolishing. On 1 July 2026 four more agencies were merged into the Ministry of Cities, Environment, Regions and Transport, alongside a programme to cut close to 9,000 public service jobs.
Abolishing the Productivity Commission to pay for a Ministry for Regulation is not a policy. It is a brand repositioning with a redundancy schedule attached.
The lunchbox test
Benn’s full sequence can be watched in miniature, over eighteen months, in a lunchbox.
The problem was children arriving at school hungry. The remedy was to centralise the free lunch programme under a single national supplier and cut the cost of a meal from about $8 to roughly $3. The saving is real. The Audit Office put it above $100 million; the associate education minister puts it at $360 million across the life of the programme.
Then the Auditor-General examined the outcomes. Only about half the meals assessed between May and December 2025 met the programme’s own nutrition standards. Surplus — meals delivered and never opened — averaged 10.39 percent across 2025, above the contracted maximum, and had risen to an estimated 17 percent in 2026, close to 20,000 uneaten meals a day. The Ministry of Education could not show it was delivering value for money, because while it was saving money it was not meeting the other goals it had set itself.
David Seymour’s response was that the report favoured process over outcomes, and the disgruntled over reality. Labour’s response is to restore the old model.
Neither answer engages the diagnosis. A cheap meal in a bin is not cheap. An expensive meal that is eaten is not extravagance. The measurable question — how many children are fed, to what nutritional standard, per dollar — is the one question neither campaign is willing to put to an audit.
Legislating a principle instead of fixing a problem
The Regulatory Standards Act 2025 came into full effect on 1 July 2026. Every government bill and new regulation must now carry a consistency accountability statement, and a board may inquire into existing law, though it cannot strike any of it down.
The Ministry for Regulation’s first consultation drew about 23,000 submissions, roughly 88 percent of them opposed. The select committee process drew around 159,000 submissions, of which 98.7 percent opposed the bill. The Waitangi Tribunal found a Treaty breach. Legal academics, unions, health bodies, environmental groups and Maori organisations lined up against it. Seymour’s account of that opposition was that 99.5 percent of the submissions were generated by bots. The bill passed anyway.
Labour has promised to repeal it.
So the full arc is: an ideological instrument, near-universal opposition, passage regardless, and a scheduled reversal the moment the numbers change. Somewhere in that arc sits the money, the parliamentary time and the official capacity that might instead have gone to electricity prices — the one structural priority the OECD put above all others for this country.
Roads of National Significance: the ribbon-cutting outruns the arithmetic
Roads of National Significance is now a 15-project, multi-billion-dollar pipeline, with $1.2 billion confirmed in October 2025 alone. Puhoi to Warkworth opened in 2023 at a final cost of $880 million, well above its original budget. Warkworth to Te Hana, the old Wellsford project, is being pushed through the Fast-track Approvals Act rather than the standard consenting process, after the previous government redirected funding into Dome Valley safety works, median barriers, speed cameras and years of roadworks that infuriated Rodney motorists rather than delivering the four-lane bypass they were promised.
A route Simon Bridges himself admitted in 2017 returned 25 cents of benefit for every dollar spent is now being fast-tracked, not reassessed.
The pattern predates this government: low benefit-cost ratios, construction defects requiring costly repairs, and a Wellington flyover abandoned after a Board of Inquiry rejection in 2014 at a cost of $12 million in sunk design fees. Money keeps being found for announcements. Whether it keeps being found for delivery, at a defensible benefit-cost ratio, is the question voters in growth corridors are still waiting to see answered rather than announced.
Tax: the report that was buried, and the three bills now on offer
The country has already had this argument once, with better evidence than it is getting now. The Tax Working Group chaired by Sir Michael Cullen reported in February 2019 with close to 100 recommendations, at a cost of about $2 million, proposing a broad capital gains tax it estimated would raise $8 billion over five years. In April 2019 Jacinda Ardern ruled it out, citing the absence of Cabinet consensus. Cullen said plainly that New Zealand First had vetoed it.
Seven years on, Labour’s centrepiece is a flat 28 percent capital gains tax on profit from selling residential investment and commercial property, effective 1 July 2027 and ring-fenced for health. The family home, farms, KiwiSaver, shares, businesses and inheritances are excluded, and it applies only to gains accrued after the start date. It is not indexed for inflation. The Greens go further with a wealth tax and a ten-year bright-line test; the Opportunity Party goes further again with a land value tax funding a universal Citizen’s Income. KPMG’s tax tracker notes that any Labour-led coalition would mean a broader structural reset than the 28 percent headline rate alone.
Deloitte’s analysis of the Green and Opportunity packages flags that a land tax could squeeze asset-rich, income-poor owners, particularly in farming and forestry, and put upward pressure on rents. National’s own record complicates its attack lines: it once dismissed Working for Families as communism by stealth and KiwiSaver as a waste of time, and has since adopted both.
What nobody is defending is the analysis. The 2019 work was the most comprehensive look at the tax base in a generation. It was commissioned, delivered and abandoned for coalition arithmetic, and no party proposes going back to it.
Superannuation: the fight nobody is having
Superannuation has been taken off the table by arithmetic rather than conviction. New Zealand First has made keeping the qualifying age at 65, indexed to wages, a bottom line in any coalition talks, and neither Labour nor National can yet rule out needing it. The Opportunity Party is the outlier: it would replace superannuation with its universal Citizen’s Income, a change critics on the left have called a de facto benefit cut dressed as simplification.
So the largest single line of long-term Crown expenditure, in a country whose demographic profile everyone can read, is not being debated at all. That is itself a choice. It just is not one appearing on any ballot paper.
Welfare: sanctions in place of a plan
The welfare settings inherited from 2023 are still the frame both major parties campaign within. National’s reforms increased sanctions for jobseekers on benefit for more than three months and funded job-coach matching at a cost of $122 million over four years. Labour promised to keep benefits indexed to wages and lift the Working for Families abatement threshold to $50,000; National ultimately matched both that and the $25-a-week in-work tax credit increase, a convergence neither party advertises. The Opportunity Party proposes the sharpest break: a Guaranteed Minimum Income of $325 a week, a Universal Child Benefit of $100 a week for under-threes, and a simplified credit replacing Working for Families outright.
None of it is built on the 2019 evidence. The Welfare Expert Advisory Group said the system was structurally inadequate and needed roughly $5.2 billion a year more. Successive governments have argued about sanctions instead, because sanctions are cheap, visible, and photograph well.
Mining, fisheries and the handbrake turn
The 2018 offshore oil and gas exploration ban was reversed by the Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2025, reopening tenders across roughly 100,000 square kilometres in 22 permits. Labour has committed to reimposing a ban on new permits while honouring those already granted. New Zealand First’s pitch is a $1 billion National Subsurface Development Survey. On conservation land, a fast-track drafting error has opened what Forest and Bird and Newsroom both describe as an unintended Coromandel mining loophole, still unclosed despite cross-party pressure.
Fisheries is where the sharpest divide sits. The Greens have proposed ending bottom trawling on seamounts, set netting and dredging, protecting 30 percent of New Zealand waters and reviewing the Quota Management System, after scientists warned east coast tarakihi stocks were close to collapse. Luxon’s immediate response was that a broad trawling ban would be very difficult, citing roughly 9,000 fishing-sector jobs. National, ACT and New Zealand First have no comparable fisheries reform on the table.
Whichever way the election goes, the resource settings will be reversed again. Every investor, farmer, fisher and council planner now prices that in. Policy instability has become the policy.
Housing: fast-track and the backlash
Fast-track consenting for housing has produced a backlash the government did not anticipate, from its own side of politics as much as from the opposition. I have tracked that dynamic, and the property lobby’s influence over planning outcomes, in New Zealand’s Property-Industrial Complex and in the “I know a guy” threshold, and will not restate it here.
What matters for this election is what is absent. Labour’s housing contribution is almost entirely fiscal rather than regulatory, funding its health package through the capital gains tax rather than proposing new planning settings. That leaves the fast-track framework as one of the few pieces of infrastructure policy nobody is seriously proposing to repeal, however loudly individual mayors object. The diagnosis — that New Zealand cannot build houses at the rate or price its population requires — is not contested by anyone. The remedies on offer are a consenting shortcut and a tax.
The rules of the game
When a political system stops offering remedies, it starts adjusting the rules about who gets to complain. The Electoral Amendment Act, passed with National, ACT and New Zealand First votes and largely in force from December 2025, closes enrolment 13 days before election day, reinstates a voting ban for prisoners serving under three years, and creates new offences around influencing enrolment choices. The stated aim is timeliness and integrity.
The arithmetic is not in dispute. In 2023 the Electoral Commission processed roughly 450,000 enrolments or updates during the early voting period, including 110,000 on election day itself. None of that is possible this year. The commission has estimated that around 55,000 party votes and 73,000 electorate votes could be disallowed as a result. A Scoop analysis argues those voters will be disproportionately young, Maori, Asian and Pacific.
Set against that, the enrolment figures are their own indictment. As at 31 August, 89.75 percent of eligible voters were enrolled — 3,636,524 people — but enrolment among 18 to 24 year olds has fallen to 53 percent, a sixth consecutive election-year decline, down from 70 percent in 2011 and 60 percent in 2023. Around 440,000 eligible people are not enrolled at all, nearly half of them under 25.
And enrolment is not turnout. In 2023, 94.7 percent of eligible voters were enrolled and only 78.2 percent of them voted. A quarter of the people who had done the paperwork could not see the point of the ballot.
Roughly one in four enrolled New Zealanders declined to choose last time. That is not apathy. It is a verdict on the menu.
A separate boundary bill has drawn a sharper accusation from Te Pati Maori, whose co-leader Rawiri Waititi argues the Maori roll already has the numbers for an eighth seat, while a review delayed to 2032 will hold the total at seven for two more cycles. On the ground the Maori roll is gaining voters faster than the general roll this cycle, which is precisely the growth the boundary formula is accused of failing to track.
The promise nobody keeps
New Zealand’s slide down the Corruption Perceptions Index, and the case for an independent anti-corruption commission, is ground I have covered in full and will not restate; the argument is on klaut.media. What matters here is the pattern. New Zealand First was founded in 1993 on the promise of such a commission and has now sat in government four times without delivering one. The Greens and the Opportunity Party have both called for one. None of it has survived a coalition negotiation, including the agreements that installed the current government.
Transparency International New Zealand has separately flagged the growing use of parliamentary urgency, under this coalition and the Labour government before it, as a transparency risk in its own right — a rare point of continuity between administrations that agree on very little. The revolving door between ministerial offices, lobbying firms and industry bodies remains almost entirely self-regulated, there is still no lobbying register, and the public record catalogues more than a decade of commentary on what one NZ Herald columnist called a chumocracy of political appointments and access.
The money that makes the branding work
Branding is expensive, and one party can afford more of it. National declared a $6.275 million donation haul for 2025, nearly $4 million more than Labour, and RNZ’s donations tracker shows the gap widening through 2026, with more than $1 million from business and no union money offsetting it.
A war chest that size buys the ability to define an opponent before that opponent has finished writing its policy. It is cheaper to attack a tax that does not take effect until mid-2027 than to answer for an Auditor-General’s report tabled in June 2026. And the money does not stop at advertising: it funds the pressure groups, the polling and the commentary that set the terms of the argument in the first place, a network I traced in The octopus that turned on National.
A governing party does not need to explain its own record if it can spend enough money explaining, and exaggerating, somebody else’s risk.
What you actually lose
Vote Labour and you keep the fast-track consenting framework, the reversed gas exploration ban stays under review rather than being torn up for existing permit holders, and you underwrite a health package with a tax that will not be tested until 2027-28, on the promise that nine in ten of you will never pay it. Vote Greens as well and add a wealth tax, a ten-year bright-line test and the end of landlord interest deductibility, alongside a bottom-trawling ban the fishing sector says costs jobs. Vote Opportunity and you trade Working for Families and, on current settings, superannuation itself, for a flat Citizen’s Income and a land tax whose distributional effects even sympathetic reviewers flag as uncertain.
Vote National and you keep the fast-track, the reopened permits, the school lunch contract, the Regulatory Standards Act, the ten-year private hospital contracts at undisclosed prices, and a resource management system whose operative rules will not be settled this decade. Law and order remains the coalition’s strongest retained ground in every published policy comparison, built on gang patch bans, tougher sentencing and increased police numbers. Nobody has released costed reoffending or rehabilitation data to support any of it.
And whichever box you tick, your power bill is set by the same mechanism it was set by last year, and the year before that, and in 2013 when I first wrote about it.
Party policy summary
The table below draws together the positions set out above. An empty cell means that party has not released a costed or detailed policy on that issue for this election, not that it has no position at all.
Policy area | National | Labour | Greens | NZ First | ACT | TOP | TPM |
Electricity market structure | Level playing field measures | Review | Break up gentailers | Subsurface survey | No change | No change |
|
Capital gains / wealth tax | No change | 28% CGT on property, 2027 | Wealth tax + 10yr bright-line |
|
| Land value tax |
|
Superannuation | Age 65, indexed | Age 65, indexed |
| Age 65, bottom line |
| Replaced by Citizen’s Income |
|
Welfare / Working for Families | Sanctions up, $122m/4yr | WFF threshold to $50k |
|
|
| GMI $325/wk replaces WFF |
|
Health funding | Private outsourcing | Medicard: 3 free GP visits/yr |
|
|
|
|
|
ACC / accident-illness split | No change | No change | No change | No change | No change | No change | No change |
Roads / infrastructure | $1.2bn RoNS pipeline |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Resource management | New planning bills | Review, not committed | Opposes | Supports | Property rights core |
| Opposes |
Mining and offshore gas | Reopened exploration | Ban new permits, honour existing | Opposes | $1bn subsurface survey |
|
|
|
Housing / fast-track | Fast-track consenting | Retains framework | Opposes |
|
|
|
|
School lunches | Retain centralised model | Restore previous model |
|
| Retain centralised model |
|
|
Regulatory Standards Act | Supports | Repeal | Repeal | Supports | Flagship policy |
| Repeal |
Police and crime | Tougher sentencing, more police |
|
|
| Harsher sentencing, less discretion |
| Opposes settings |
Environment / fisheries |
|
| Bottom-trawling ban, QMS review |
|
|
|
|
Transparency / anti-corruption |
|
| Supports one | Pledged 1993, never delivered |
| 2023: called for one | Proposed one in 2011 |
Electoral law | Enrolment closes 13 days out | Opposes | Entrench Maori seats | Enrolment closes 13 days out | Enrolment closes 13 days out |
| Opposes boundary delay bill |
Sir Ernest Benn described a politics that looked for trouble, found it, misdiagnosed it and prescribed the wrong cure. New Zealand has gone one better. It has diagnosed itself correctly, costed the remedy, worked out exactly who would have to pay for it, and gone to the country asking which of two men nobody much likes should be trusted to leave it alone for another three years.
