Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues, with a focus on Auckland. He joined the Herald in 2018.
Everyone got a hug, the women a kiss as well, and Kaiapoi MP Matt Doocey, a Luxon lookalike with his blue suit and shiny scalp, scored a friendly head rub. You sensed it wasn’t the first time.
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Happy days. It was the National Party’s first annual conference since regaining power and the mood was universal: things do not get much better than this.
The agenda didn’t touch the Treaty of Waitangi, Māori wards or other race flashpoints. Instead, Cabinet minister Tama Potaka and 2023 election candidate Dale Aotea Stephens began the conference in te reo, and during the weekend most speakers used at least some kind of greeting in the language.
Finance Minister Nicola Willis kicked off her speech on Sunday with: “E ngā mana, e ngā reo, e rau rangatira mā. Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.”
These might not seem like big things and they are common enough around the motu. But in my experience they have not been common in the National Party. This was new.
It felt like they were saying, “We’re not scared of this, we’re relaxed about it and we’re happy it’s normalised”.
Sir John Key with Prime Minister Christopher Luxon at the National Party conference over the weekend. Photo / National Party
Not that they’re becoming too touchy-feely. Luxon delivered two speeches over the weekend and the top agenda item in both was “tough on crime”.
“I’m sick of being told the real victims are the people who smash into a shop, or peddle meth, or brutally assault mums and dads working in the dead of night,” he said on Sunday. “It couldn’t be further from the truth.”
But nobody says that. Everyone understands that violent robberies and peddling meth are crimes that should be stopped and that the people they harm are victims who deserve unequivocal and practical support.
Does that make it nothing “further from the truth” that some of the people who commit such crimes are also victims?
I spent the whole weekend curious to hear how the report of the Royal Commission into Abuse in Care has advanced the party’s thinking about punishment, poverty, and emotional deprivation. No one mentioned it.
That inquiry told us that 200,000 children have been brutalised, in our name, by the institutions they should have been able to turn to for help. And it is still happening. And one entirely predictable outcome has been to turn many of those children into criminals.
That knowledge didn’t seem to factor into anything. Luxon was happy to keep the debate at the level of “We are ending the era of lawlessness ushered in by Labour and the Greens”.
Two things. Firstly, it’s simply wrong to say we live in an era of lawlessness and I imagine the police themselves would have been horrified to hear it suggested.
Secondly, no Government in our lifetimes, including Luxon’s, is exempt from responsibility for the tragedy of abuse in care.
And yet, despite the chest-thumping, a different approach is also in play. Police and Corrections Minister Mark Mitchell told the conference: “This is the philosophy of the Government: let’s identify what is working, what is delivering results and what isn’t.”
What works in Corrections tends to be practical help and wraparound care programmes, and Mitchell knows it. He wants more housing for released inmates and rehabilitation programmes for prisoners on remand.
Not all his colleagues share this enthusiasm for “what works”. Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith agreed with a delegate that the Alcohol and Other Drug Treatment Court has been very successful in helping people manage their addictions. But he dissembled about whether they would be expanded, saying his focus was elsewhere.
Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith speaks to the National Party conference with MP James Meager (left) and Police Minister Mark Mitchell. Photo / Claire Trevett
Sometimes it even gets pushed into third place by silly sloganeering. Goldsmith, who is also Arts Minister, couldn’t stop himself from complaining that Auckland Transport’s parking rules mean orchestra fans can no longer drive into the city for a concert.
He must know this is nonsense. As they have done for decades, most patrons at the Aotea Centre, town hall, Civic, and Q Theatre routinely use the massive carpark beneath Aotea Square.
Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop was also engaging in silly sloganeering when he declared: “It should not take eight years to consent a wind farm but only one year to build it.”
Bishop told the conference the Government is open to the pleas of the infrastructure industry for cross-party strategic planning. But is he?
He went on to say: “Labour and Greens will have to get over their fixation that all roads are bad, because we are going to build highways and they will have to get on board with that.”
The triumphalism of a winner, eh. Labour did the same with its Auckland Light Rail project. But long-term non-partisan planning requires winners and losers to put all that aside.
I don’t know anyone who thinks all roads are bad. What would be more useful at this point is to agree on some criteria for a non-political infrastructure plan.
They might include strong business-case analysis, economic efficiency, emissions reduction, social good, environmental care, Treaty obligations and long-term resilience. Get all that ticked off, and then see how roads, rail and other projects fit in.
Now he’s decided that schoolkids are no good at numbers. “It’s a total system failure,” he said, revealing that 50,000 kids are a year or more behind in maths when they start high school.
He’s right that this is bad. He’s right to treat the matter with urgency. But it’s not clear if he and Education Minister Erica Stanford are right that “structured mathematics” is the best response. It wasn’t one of the 14 recommendations made by an expert working party in 2021.
If this really is a crisis response to a “total system failure”, wouldn’t it have been valuable to include the teacher groups in it?
There’s more. It’s unlikely that a single pedagogy, or teaching method, will be best for all children. And pedagogy isn’t the only thing that determines classroom achievement. The Government has rightly targeted attendance as well, but even that is not an end to it.
To do well at school, kids need a warm, dry, safe home.
The Government has called time on almost the entire social-housing programme, is pulling resources away from family harm, has cancelled the warm homes subsidy, kept benefits low, reduced the school lunch programme, restricted early childhood support, put new school builds on hold and overseen a growing crisis among primary healthcare providers.
So yes, let’s get serious about improving educational achievement. But let’s not get suckered into thinking the problem is simply that teachers haven’t been doing it right.
Government cuts to frontline and back-end services everywhere are ravaging its ability to act effectively.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon on stage with National Party MPs and the party president Sylvia Wood at the party conference over the weekend. Photo / Claire Trevett
Favourite moment? In the housing session, an elderly delegate got up to say that words matter, so could they stop talking about “granny flats”? She suggested “senior citizen homes” or similar.
Building and Construction Minister Chris Penk, perhaps thinking the hugs and kisses vibe might be getting out of hand, reminded her that National is not a party of the woke.
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