Success or failure likely to hinge on economic impacts

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

Opinion

New Zealand has a new Government and is in store for some major changes in direction from the previous nine years of National Party leadership.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has committed to reducing child poverty and caring for vulnerable children as her Government’s top priority, so policies and progress in this key area will be closely watched. Hopefully the many good elements of the previous government’s social investment focus will be retained.

Climate change will rocket up the agenda, with platitudes and mostly ineffective policy replaced by a constructive and incentivised approach to this most important of issues for future generations. Green Party co-leader James Shaw, the new Climate Change Minister, will need to meet the high expectations now resting on him.

Schooling will return to the hands of educationalists, for good and bad, and the nation will start fully sponsoring the tertiary education of our future well-off citizens.

Health and especially mental health will get more funding and new approaches that the country needs to be effective. Labour will be judged harshly, especially by our Parliament’s strongest ever opposition, if this is not the case.

But it is the twin “demons” of the campaign, high immigration and unaffordable housing, where the new Government’s success or failure is most likely to hinge.

While straining the country’s infrastructure and services, and handicapping non-homeowners, they have also fuelled New Zealand’s strong economic run of late — so policies will need to be carefully calibrated. Many immigrant builders, for example, will also be needed in the short-to-medium term to fulifil Labour’s KiwiBuild programme.

New Zealand’s two single-term governments, both of which were Labour governments, were rejected in part over economic headwinds.

That accounts for the ominous warning, quite removed from the reasonably healthy global and local economic environment, that Winston Peters laid out before announcing NZ First was installing Labour as our next government.