Minister of Foreign Affairs Winston Peters has placed travel bans on some Iranian ministers.
New Zealand First leader Winston Peters has celebrated the end of the quarterly action plans of which Prime Minister Christopher Luxon was so fond.
“Thank heavens for that,” the chuckling Peters told Ryan Bridge TODAY.
Meanwhile, National minister Chris Bishop responded to a social media post about theplans coming to an end by saying, “I believe the correct term is ‘goneburger’”.
One person not celebrating is deputy Prime Minister David Seymour, who said they were a “great platform for Act to show its disproportionate policy influence on this Government”.
“All I would say is when you have more policies to put in them, you quite enjoy them as we did.”
The quarterly plans typically contained about 30 to 40 actions the Government intended to complete in the three-month periods. Many of the actions were simply to “take Cabinet decisions” or “pass legislation” that was already close to completing the legislative process.
The plans have now been shelved. Almost two-thirds of the way through the first quarter of 2026, no action plan has been released.
While speaking to Peters this morning, Bridge said the Government had dropped the plans, which he knew Peters didn’t like.
“How do you know that?” Peters said, smiling.
Bridge said Peters had told him that. Peters responded, “Oh.”
The NZ First leader said that, under the previous Government, “these quarterly plans up on the dashboard and all this action, and I thought ‘No, there are fundamentals in this business where our job is to take those fundamentals that the people are most concerned about and fix them”.
“The dashboard was never going to do that.”
Bridge asked whether it was a good thing they were now gone.
“Yeah, thank heavens for that,” Peters responded.
Winston Peters has previously called out "dashboard crap" such as quarterly plans. Photo / Mark Mitchell
“I don’t have this sort of dashboard crap that I see other people perform on and a 50-point plan, or a 100-point plan, or a quarter-year plan.”
He later said he was referring to dashboards from the previous Labour Government, but wouldn’t give his opinion on the quarterly actions produced by his Government.
Luxon said at the time that his Government was trying to “turn New Zealand around”.
“When you’re doing a turnaround, you’ve got to be very, very focused on what you’re gonna do, what you must do versus the nice to do, and we need to focus the public service, and we need to focus the new coalition Government.”
He said he was “proud of the way they work because they actually focus our public service and they focus the Government”.
Jamie Ensor is the NZ Herald’s Chief Political Reporter, based in the Press Gallery at Parliament. He was previously a TV reporter and digital producer in the Newshub press gallery office. He was a finalist in 2025 for Political Journalist of the Year at the Voyager Media Awards.
