This is an online exclusive story.
Analysis: It sometimes seems like a physical law of New Zealand politics – locked in since the formation of the universe – that voters trust the National Party more on economic issues, Labour on education and health. But the law is breaking down. In 2020, the Ardern government’s handling of the early stages of the Covid pandemic meant the public trusted it more on every issue, with the exception of climate and pollution, where they trusted the Green Party.
Three years later, this situation has reversed. The September 2023 Ipsos Issues survey shows that of the top 10 issues that matter to voters (inflation, crime, housing, healthcare, economy, climate, petrol prices, poverty, education and taxation), voters trust National more than Labour on everything but poverty – but, again, they trust the Greens more on climate.
Labour will be devastated by this. One of its deepest convictions and most persistent attack lines against National is that the Key government “gutted the health system”, leaving the country inadequately prepared for the Covid crisis, and that Labour had to spend the last six years dealing with the consequences and cleaning up the mess.
There’s some truth to this. Sort of. National increased health funding every year it was in government – but it didn’t adequately adjust for inflation, population growth or the increasing cost burden of an ageing population. That’s hardly gutting it, but Labour has been playing catch-up. Under its watch, salaries in the sector have risen significantly – although the largest gain was the pay-equity deal for nurses, only settled in the middle of this year, and now senior doctors and dentists are striking for more pay.
National’s core attack line against Labour is that the increased spending hasn’t led to better outcomes. Labour’s first health minister, David Clark, quietly scrapped the Key government’s health targets, which set metrics around surgeries, childhood immunisations, emergency department (ED) wait times, cancer treatment, smoking rates and school checks. The health system’s performance around many of these metrics seemed to deteriorate rapidly, even before the Covid pandemic. Earlier this year, Health Minister Ayesha Verrall corrected a statement to Parliament regarding her staff holding back embarrassing health data around ED wait times.
Labour’s key health policies are free dental care for under-30s and an increase in the number of doctors and nurses. The dental policy would be rolled out to 18-25-year-olds in 2025 and extended to 30-year-olds in 2026. The additional health workers would be trained here – Labour intends to rapidly scale up the number of doctors trained/year and the clinical placements for nursing students. It would also keep the $5 prescription co-payment it introduced in this year’s budget, which National plans to scrap.
Winners: Me: the prescription co-payment, since it is one of the very rare government handouts for which I’m eligible. The major winners would be the younger recipients of the free dental care. Although it is very easy to imagine a Prime Minister Hipkins in 2026 defending his failure to deliver the policy by insisting his government had challenges, but it’s now on track for 2029.
Losers: Low-income earners who would greatly benefit from free dental, but are over the age of 30.
National has a lot of policy in this space. It would bring back the health targets and scrap the $5 co-payment, using the money to fund a number of high-cost cancer treatments. It would also build a new medical school at the University of Waikato, create a cancer agency, and ensure elective surgeries took place within four months. It would scrap Te Aka Whai Ora, the newly created Māori Health Authority, and fire the large number of comms staff in the health bureaucracy. It would abolish the use of ethnicity as a criteria for prioritising healthcare.
Winners: Anyone presenting to an ED who doesn’t want to wait for 12 hours.
The University of Waikato would get funded to build a new medical school. RNZ recently published a story revealing a very close relationship between National, Waikato’s vice chancellor, and former National minister Steven Joyce, whom the university paid nearly $1 million in consulting fees. During the debate, Chris Hipkins pointed out that building this new school would cost more and take longer than simply scaling up the existing schools.
There would be considerably more resources for cancer treatment.
Losers: I would lose the $5 prescription co-payment. Māori Health Authority staff would lose their jobs.
It’s less surprising to see National overtake Labour as more trusted on education. Erica Stanford is one of its strongest performers and Jan Tinetti is one of Labour’s weakest ministers. Earlier this year, she was forced to apologise to Parliament for misleading the House, after her staff held back school-attendance data. Truancy rates have been very high since Covid (there’s some evidence they’re finally trending down). NCEA achievement rates are falling and fewer school leavers are enrolling in tertiary education. And the tertiary sector is a disaster zone, with the polytechnic merger bleeding money and staff while the universities impose sweeping redundancies.
Labour has barely any education policy – the education tag on its website hasn’t been used since 2020. The party recently announced it would make financial literacy a compulsory subject, and National quickly announced it had the same policy. Labour also pledged to make reading, writing and maths “core teaching requirements”, near identical to the policy National announced at the start of the year.
National also wants to bring in regular standardised testing – twice a year – with reporting to parents. As in health, it wants to set targets: 80% of students at or above the expected curriculum level for their age by 2030, and our students ranking in the top 10 in the global PISA rankings. This is realistic for reading and science: the latest rankings from 2018 had us at 13 and 11, respectively. But we were 28th in maths. A recent report found many primary teachers lack mathematics skills, so they underteach the subject.
National would also try to resurrect the international student sector – devastated by Covid border closures – by increasing work rights for overseas students, fast-tracking visas and diversifying the number of countries our sector draws on.
Winners and losers: The major parties’ policies are superficially similar, so in theory, the winners and losers are the same. But, given the state of the sector, it’s hard to disagree with the public’s assessment in the Ipsos survey: that Labour’s management of education has been poor. If Labour somehow finds itself the winner on election night, it will need to come up with a lot more than financial literacy lessons to redeem itself. When the education system fails, the entire nation loses.
