Online exclusive analysis:
Friday
Further allegations emerged around Justice Minister Kiritapu Allan and her behaviour towards staff and public servants - described by one source to Stuff as “yelling and screaming”. The story put the Prime Minister in an impossible position: Chris Hipkins could suspend one of his most senior ministers pending the outcome of an investigation, strengthening the perception that his Cabinet is falling apart. Or he could back Allan, hope that nothing else came out and that the story would quietly die a natural death. Hipkins opted for the latter: both he and Allan repeatedly insisted that there had been no “formal complaints against her”.
Saturday
A suite of new regulations and subsidies came into effect on Saturday, July 1, while others ended. The fuel tax exemption expired but child support payments rose. No more half-price public transport - unless you’re under 25, and it’s free for under-13s (which, given the dire nature of public transport in our metropolitan areas, still feels like they’re overcharging). There’s a new ban on single-use bags, plates, cutlery and straws. You’ll no longer be charged a $5 copayment for pharmacy prescriptions. So go wild with the SSRIs and antibiotics, New Zealand. You’ve earned it.
Sunday
The Green Party launched its housing policy, promising rent controls, a warrant of fitness for rental properties, a national register of landlords and a massive government construction programme - a policy Labour campaigned on in 2017 and famously failed to deliver. Greens co-leader Marama Davidson described New Zealand’s current housing market as a “get-rich scheme for a lucky few” and a “source of misery” for hundreds of thousands.
Economists often complain that politicians fail to consider the “second-order effects” of their policies, and rent control is a canonical example of this. A political party wants to change the law to modify someone’s behaviour, ie, they want landlords to stop raising rents. But they don’t consider how that change will then trigger other behaviour changes, like a sequence of dominoes. Most rent-control policies reduce the supply of new dwellings because they reduce the financial incentive to build a house and rent it out. Berlin introduced rent control in 2020 and this certainly benefited existing renters but also reduced the supply of new builds, thus deepening their housing crisis. The law was struck out by Germany’s constitutional court.
Monday
The Productivity Commission released a report on New Zealand’s most persistent economic problem: low productivity growth. The northern European states we often look to emulate - Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands etc - have highly skilled, well-paid labour forces which generate enormous value while working comparably few hours. Workers in the less developed OECD nations - Mexico, Columbia, Costa Rica - work long hours while generating less value and earning less money. New Zealand has spent the last 50 years drifting towards the long hours, low value and low pay economic model. The report concludes with the standard finding: that we need politicians to take a long-term view and deliver proper investment in research and innovation. Good luck with that, guys.
The PM usually has some positive news to announce at the post-cabinet briefing, especially in an election year, and this week it was a co-announcement with Health Minister Ayesha Verrall. The government was extending the eligibility for cataract surgery. But Hipkins seems doomed to spend his media appearances defending the odd antics of his cabinet and caucus rather than promoting his government. He explained that his justice minister had gone on leave again, despite returning from mental health leave only the previous Thursday. (Allan elaborated on Twitter that she was taking childcare leave over the holidays). And then one of his Dunedin MPs - Ingrid Leary - accidentally attended a Mongrel Mob hui because she thought it was a meeting hosted by the Electoral Commission.
Tuesday
Roy Morgan released a new poll showing Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori able to form a government, but barely. It would take only a small shift to deliver a National-Act coalition. More significant, perhaps, is the trend of major party decline. Over the past 25 years roughly 80% of voters have supported National and Labour but over the past 18 months, their combined vote has declined to 60%. That’s a level last seen back in the 1990s when widespread dissatisfaction with the major parties saw the rise of New Zealand First, Act and the Alliance (a coalition of left-wing parties that fragmented in government in the early 2000s: the Greens are its only survivors).
The Labour Party is trying to capture median voters off National; they seem content to cede left-wing voters to the Greens, and Māori votes to Te Pāti Māori, knowing that neither can form a government without them. But National’s primary adversary this year seems to be Act; a lot of their rhetoric and policy is aimed at capturing conservative and/or contrarian voters: a zero-sum exchange for the centre right. There’s a theory that National’s goal is to capture enough Act votes to market itself as a large majority party. It has been revealed that National has set itself a target of 45% at the election - that means it can govern with a single small and rather powerless coalition partner, in contrast with the Labour-Green-Māori “coalition of chaos”. They hope that this proposition will then win over centrist voters. If that’s the plan it doesn’t seem to be working: this latest poll has Act on 15%.
Chris Hipkins ruled out the Greens’ rent-control policy. It was a wild ride while it lasted.
Wednesday
The draft NCEA science curriculum has leaked and science teachers are furious, noting to RNZ that it doesn’t seem to teach children very much science and contains no references to physics, chemistry or biology. The authors of the draft defended it on the grounds they were exploring a “holistic approach to how the different science concepts interact with each other”. You’d like to think the national science curriculum would be evidence-based - scientific even - but the approach taken here sounds more like that of a free-form jazz band or an experimental art collective exploring radical new conceptual spaces. The Ministry of Education has emphasised that the curriculum is a work in progress.
Last Monday was recorded as the planet’s hottest day on record with a global average of 17.01C, and in ominously related news, a report from NIWA and the University of Auckland found 12% of New Zealand’s housing lay in flood hazard zones, most of it in our major cities. The estimated replacement cost of the dwellings is $218 billion. You might worry that we’re not doing much to solve this problem, but the situation is worse than you think: we’re still building in these zones.
Thursday
At least 11 Oranga Tamariki staff have been stood down in response to allegations that staff at some of their youth care facilities have been hosting fight clubs and filming them. The mother of one teenager who resided at an Oranga Tamariki facility told TVNZ’s Breakfast that boys were made to “fight until they dropped”. It comes two weeks after separate allegations of sexual misconduct by Oranga Tamariki staff.
Late last year, Dame Karen Poutasi noted in her review of Children’s Sector Response to Abuse that there had been at least 33 government reviews into child abuse and youth care over the last 30 years. The Minister for Children Kelvin Davis has responded to these latest problems by announcing a review.
It’s 99 days until the election. The Prime Minister leaves for Europe today to sign a free trade deal with the European Union and attend a Nato summit, and leaves behind a caucus that will be subject to intense scrutiny during his absence.
