The Spinoff: Note to ministers: cutting services doesn’t make need go away

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When even employers are complaining about public service cuts in the National Business Review, the organ of the country’s corporate elite, it’s a sign that the shortcomings of the government’s cost-cutting agenda are spreading far and wide.

Under the headline “Lengthy mediation delays forcing employers to go private”, the NBR reported that “extensive funding cuts” at the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE), combined with increased demand, were causing “a lengthy backlog to access the country’s employment dispute resolution service”. And it’s a similar story across the country.

The number of people in emergency housing declines; the number of people sleeping on the streets increases. Emergency grants from Work and Income become harder to get; charity-run foodbanks have to hand out more parcels. State-funded social services retrench more generally; everyone else has to pick up the slack.

As the government is rapidly discovering, cutting back public services does not – astonishingly enough – make the need for those services go away. It simply shifts that need somewhere else.

National’s push to end emergency housing, for instance, has genuinely seen hundreds of people settled in state homes (that Labour built). But it has also driven more people onto the streets. In Wellington, the Downtown Community Ministry, which works with local homeless people, says the number of people rough sleeping in December 2024 was up by one-third compared to the year before. The ministry’s Natalia Cleland told RNZ that the criteria for getting emergency housing had been toughened so much that people had even “stopped asking”.

Another charity worker, Cindy Kawana from Auckland’s E Tipu E Rea Whānau Services, said she knew of one young couple using a hospital as a night shelter. “Them and their baby were sleeping in the emergency waiting room at night, so they had a roof over their head and it was safe and warm, and were in the park during the day, and they couldn’t even get onto the housing register.”

The government’s cutbacks are an attempt to shrink our sense of what constitutes the public good – the set of interests we share as citizens, as opposed to the varied and individual interests we pursue in private. This seems deeply misguided.

Being able to access publicly provided mediation services, for instance, certainly delivers a private benefit to employers and employees, but it is more fundamentally a public good – something that is in all our interests – for such disputes to be resolved with relative ease and speed, without a long and costly court process. Ensuring everyone has enough to eat, including via foodbanks if need be, is also a basic public good: we are all diminished if others go hungry, and we pay the long-term costs – in rising ill-health and falling productivity – when they do so. (Of course it would be better if paid work and welfare benefits covered people’s grocery shopping in the first place, so that foodbanks were not needed.)

Note that this is a question of funding, not service devolution. The government could legitimately take the view that some charities are better placed to deliver than central government agencies, and shift funding accordingly. But that is not what is happening. Funds are simply being removed.

Nor is this an issue that solely affects the poor and the weak: it has consequences for the middle classes. In opposition, National promised it would “co-invest” alongside councils to deliver new water infrastructure as an alternative to Three Waters. The government having backtracked on that pledge, councils are being left to bear more of the cost themselves: hence, in part, why rates bills are rising so rapidly. (Decades of under-investment are, of course, the principal villain – another example of costs being illegitimately shifted, in this case from one generation of ratepayers to the next.)

It’s the same story with items like vehicle registration fees (increased by $50 by National) and drivers’ licence re-sit fees ($89, removed by Labour but reintroduced by National). Your taxes may be lower than they would otherwise have been, but your user charges will be higher. Again, this goes against the public good: registering a car and re-sitting a test undoubtedly bring private advantages, but by far the most significant benefits – safe cars and safe drivers – are to the public as a whole.

The sad thing is that National could probably have reduced spending without harming public services. One public servant recently told me that, because there certainly was wasted spending, her department could have cut around 5% from its baseline had it been allowed to carry out a considered search for efficiencies over a year or so. Instead it got hit with a blunt 6.5% reduction target delivered at breakneck speed.

The same has been true across the public service, hence the cuts – proposed or actual – to climate change modellers, officials who help track down child pornographers, and countless other valuable staff and programmes. The vast majority of health-sector workers (in an admittedly self-selecting poll) recently said they had seen service cuts – something that is, of course, forcing people to turn to the private sector. Cutting the police’s backroom staff just means frontline officers have to spend more time filling out paperwork.

None of this generates productivity, efficiency or service improvements. It doesn’t make need go away. It just shifts the burden onto other people – often those least able to bear it.

The Post: The economic recovery should start at home

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“I care little for the mere capitalist.” Such were the stark words of John Ballance, newly elected prime minister in 1891, as he faced down parliamentary criticism of his economic policy.

He told the House: "I care not if dozens of large landowners leave the country. For... the prosperity of the colony does not depend on those classes. It depends upon ourselves, upon the rise of our industries and upon markets being secured in other countries, and not upon any such fictitious things as large capitalists or large landowners remaining in or leaving the colony.”

History, as they say, doesn’t repeat but it does rhyme. And it’s hard not to hear echoes of that century-old debate in our current politics.

Last week’s much-touted “investment summit”, in which the Government sought foreign investors for our infrastructure projects, cemented an impression I had long been forming. Too much of the coalition’s economic pitch, I think, consists of this point: “We need overseas heroes to save us.”

Of course that’s not all there is to it. Reforms in schooling and land zoning, for instance, will lift skills and help shift investment away from residential property.

Nonetheless the appeals to foreign investors are constant. It’s not just the investment summit: we’ve also seen visa reforms for overseas financiers, changes to the Overseas Investment Act, and a drumbeat of support for public-private partnerships.

Foreign investment makes good sense where it brings otherwise unobtainable skills and knowledge into Kiwi firms. But that’s not what will necessarily result from reforms that allow overseas investors to just park their money in government bonds. Foreign investment can also see profits sent offshore, or control of strategic assets lost.

Nor are those investors a magic money tree: they always have to be repaid somehow. And if, as is generally the case, they face higher borrowing charges than do governments, we’ll end up paying more in the long run.

Such deals make even less sense when – as Kiwibank’s Jarrod Kerr points out – the government could double its currently low debt levels without troubling the markets.

National is, more generally, prone to implying that our economic success hinges on a handful of “self-made” entrepreneurs. All of which creates an opportunity for Labour. To draw a contrast with this adoration of millionaires, the party could rest its faith on something humbler and more home-grown: the country as a whole.

What if, after all, we slashed our child hardship rates, currently sitting at 13%, to just 4-5%, as in the Netherlands and Finland? Socio-economic status, the evidence shows, is by far the biggest factor in school attainment. It’s hard to succeed in a cramped, dangerously mouldy house, with insufficient food and nowhere quiet to do homework, and with parents experiencing the toxic stress of unpaid bills piling up.

Just think how many more entrepreneurial talents we would unleash if we lifted all those children out of poverty. Think, too, how many more world-leading companies Kiwis would launch if the government doubled funding for blue-skies research and development, lifting it to the OECD average.

Think, finally, of all the extra people who could contribute economically if we provided better skills training for welfare recipients wanting paid work. This is, again, an area where we spend half as much as our developed-country counterparts.

The prize, in short, is an economy based on backing one another, on believing that if we invest enough in the vast mass of ordinary New Zealanders, innovation and dynamism will spring up. This is what Ballance meant when he said our economic future depends “upon ourselves”.

You could call it investing in people; some call it bottom-up or middle-out economics. It’s an approach that doesn’t close the door on beneficial foreign investors, but which holds that the largest difference will come from uplifting the people already here.

Where would we find the money to invest in ourselves? Close to home, again. We could build pools of national wealth through a Kids KiwiSaver scheme, in which the state enrols every child at birth and matches small contributions from parents. We could increase adults’ KiwiSaver contributions. Or we could, as Winston Peters suggests, create our own sovereign wealth fund.

Speaking of New Zealand First: a little bit of progressive economic nationalism – as opposed to the ugly Trumpian kind – would help Labour cosy up to Peters’ party, should it want more potential coalition partners.

Could this agenda succeed politically? Ballance would have said so. By 1891, he had introduced the country’s first taxes on income, much as Labour is now gearing up to propose a capital gains or wealth tax. This helped fund his drive to build the economy from the bottom up, using state money to assist ordinary people to acquire small farms.

All this “met with considerable criticism both at home and overseas”, Ballance’s biographer Tim McIvor wrote. But, he adds: “This was largely silenced when the premier announced a record budget surplus in 1892.” Having helped lift the country out of its long years of depression, Ballance was – in our drought-prone country – known forever after as “the Rain-Maker”.

The Spinoff: Luxon’s epic unpopularity in one chart

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Everyone knows Christopher Luxon is unpopular. National’s polling is poor, and his preferred prime minister rating is now below that of his opposite number, Chris Hipkins, despite the latter’s deliberate strategy of being largely invisible for the last 18 months. There is even talk – although no more than that – of a challenge to Luxon’s leadership.

The extent of the PM’s unpopularity, however, has never been more clearly revealed than in the graph below, supplied to The Spinoff by polling firm Talbot Mills Research. It charts the net favourability – the percentage of voters who have a favourable impression of the prime minister, minus the percentage who have an unfavourable one – of our last four leaders during their initial term in government, from Talbot Mills/UMR polling over the years. While Helen Clark, John Key and Jacinda Ardern were mountaineers scaling the peaks, Luxon is plumbing new depths.

Every leader has their challenges, of course. Clark’s popularity dropped away in her first year, owing perhaps to the business revolt sometimes dubbed the “winter of discontent”, before recovering strongly. Ardern’s rating fell spectacularly amidst the failure to deliver the much-touted “year of delivery”, her status rescued only by a successful response to the pandemic’s initial onslaught. Even Key, largely serene, had a mid-term dip. Still, the paths of those three leaders could not be further from the one Luxon is treading: he started out unpopular, and has only become more so over time.

Everyone has their own theory as to why this is, but one common thread in the criticism is Luxon’s inability to articulate clearly what he stands for or what, at its best, this country could be. This leaves voters unmoved, their emotions detached from the prime minister and his prospects. As Duncan Garner recently pointed out, in a column predicting Luxon would be rolled before the next election, previous leaders have always had at least one group of hardcore fans. “Luxon can point to no such base of support,” Garner wrote, “even among the business community who must surely be wondering when [he] is actually going to do something.”

The point is borne out by new data from the Acumen Edelman Trust Barometer, which shows high-income Kiwis dramatically losing faith in the coalition. (Their low-income counterparts remain stubbornly distrustful of all governments.) This decline in trust appears to be evenly split between left-wing and right-wing elites, suggesting the latter are indeed disappointed with Luxon’s performance. While one can only speculate as to their reasons, they may include a distaste for the culture wars that the prime minister is allowing his coalition partners to pursue, a sense that his government has few real solutions to New Zealand’s long-term productivity problems, and the above-mentioned absence of vision.

All leaders, of course, eventually lose their shine. Some commentators perpetuated the myth of Key’s “incredible” popularity, but by the time of his resignation he had ended where Luxon began, at net zero, his detractors just as numerous as his supporters. The flag referendum debacle, the bizarre ponytail-pulling incident, the fact that leadership strengths inevitably turn to weaknesses: all these factors, and more, eroded his public favourability. Only the perceived unpalatability of his opponents, Phil Goff and David Shearer among them, propped up his preferred prime minister rankings. 

Clark, supposedly less charismatic than Key, in fact stayed popular for longer than her successor did. But even she was near net zero by the end of her prime ministership.

Luxon’s defence, if there is one, is that the process of popularity decline is being hastened worldwide by an increasingly disgruntled, restive and febrile electorate. Britain’s Keir Starmer has barely got his feet under the table but already suffers catastrophically bad ratings. Across the ditch, Anthony Albanese could be about to lead the first one-term Australian government in a century.

Closer to home, and further back in time, Ardern’s popularity in her second term was – as has been extensively canvassed – in freefall. Like Clark and Key, she reached net zero, but within two terms rather than three. In democracies, public unhappiness now operates at something close to warp speed.

Arriving onto this increasingly chaotic stage, Luxon has, in one sense, been dealt a tough hand. Nonetheless he has not played it well, at least in the public’s opinion. Can he recover? In politics nothing should ever be ruled out: a recovery in the economy and improvements in public services – assuming either materialises – would certainly help, as would a bit more of what the first George Bush called “the vision thing”.

Trust, though, is famously hard to establish and easy to lose. What prospects, then, for a man who never had it in the first place?

The Post: The dismal revelations at the heart of Wellington Water debacle

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If you have tears of rage, prepare to shed them now. This week’s reports into the Wellington Water debacle contain some of the most infuriating, dismaying and jaw-dropping details of public-sector weakness this country has seen in some time.

Owing to the deals that Wellington Water entered into with a handful of contractors, ratepayers have – according to investigations by infrastructure consultants Aecom and the business consultancy Deloitte – been paying three times more than they should for repairs. Understandably outraged, local councillors are calling for a forensic audit of any potential “price-gouging”.

The reports reveal that Wellington Water – a utility owned by the region’s councils – was far too close to, and indeed calamitously reliant upon, the contractors it was supposed to oversee.

Rather than tender each piece of work to a full field of companies, Wellington Water created “panels” of three pre-approved teams of contractors, among whom the work was allocated. A further “maintenance alliance” effectively embedded another contractor, Fulton Hogan, within the utility.

Accordingly, Deloitte found, Wellington Water focused on “trust” and “partnership” with its contractors, rather than trifling things like competitive tension. Effectively, this “prioritise[d] … consultants and contractors over ratepayers”.

And it gets worse. As Wellington Water’s new chief executive, Pat Dougherty, has admitted, the utility had “consultants managing other consultants”. Some consultant managers were – unbelievably – asked to oversee the work of their own firms.

Before seeking bids, the utility sometimes told contractors exactly how much money was available for projects. How astounded its staff must have been, then, when the bids kept coming in high rather than low!

Ominously, Deloitte also noted concerns that the main contractors were not just charging Wellington Water their own overheads but also requiring the utility to pay the overheads of sub-contractors – effectively a form of double-charging. Local councillors suspect this is happening on other big projects.

And if you think you’ve seen this movie before, you’d be right. Two decades ago, a wastewater project in Kaipara blew out spectacularly, costing locals tens of millions of dollars. One of the failure’s root causes, the Auditor-General found, was a local council so short-staffed, so reliant on consultants, that it could no longer even manage its own contracts.

Likewise Wellington Water, which didn’t have its own system for managing pipes and other assets, but instead used systems supplied by, among others, Fulton Hogan, the very firm it was supposed to oversee. This, as Dougherty told local councillors last year, became an obstacle to pushing contractors for savings: “It is a little bit difficult to have terse conversations when we are absolutely reliant on their goodwill.”

This whole sorry saga is yet another indictment of the belief that paring back public bodies generates efficiency and saves money. By rendering those bodies hopelessly dependent on contractors, it does exactly the opposite.

The hollowing-out of Wellington Water ultimately stemmed, some argue, from underfunding by its shareholding councils. But given how the utility was run, why would they have coughed up more cash?

Either way, the obvious first step for Wellington Water – and any successor organisation – is to rebuild its core capabilities, and to treat contractors not as trusted “partners” but as what they really are, profit-hungry entities to be kept on a very short leash.

Whether the utility can do so under the leadership of its current chairperson, Nick Leggett, is another question. With some honourable exceptions, strikingly few people have noted Leggett’s conflict of interest.

In his other life as the chief executive of Infrastructure New Zealand, a body that lobbies for a bigger role for its corporate members, Leggett has his salary paid by – among others – Fulton Hogan. Not only that: the board to whom he reports includes Ben Hayward, chief executive of Fulton Hogan.

Other Infrastructure New Zealand members, including the engineering firm Beca, have had contracts with Wellington Water. Yet these are the firms whose work Leggett is supposed to control.

Some minor conflicts of interest can be handled by an individual “leaving the room” during specific decisions, but in this case, the issues with contractors – Fulton Hogan in particular – are threaded right throughout the organisation.

Leggett said this week that he had been managing the conflict of interest, and he was not involved in contractor discussions. But with all due respect to him, the conflicts of interest here look unmanageable – yet another instance of New Zealand not being tough enough on such relationships.

Leggett has, to his credit, acknowledged Wellington Water’s failings this week, and is putting more work out to open tender. But this is rather late in the day. A board member since April 2022, he was present in 2023 when the utility was warned of many of the above problems but dismissed them as, in the words of its then-chief executive, “a distraction”.

In its pursuit of better value for ratepayers, Wellington Water urgently needs to reset its relationship with contractors – and to have the public’s confidence that it has done so. It is hard to see how this can be achieved by an organisation helmed by someone who is paid by, and reports to, those very same contractors.

The Spinoff: We need to stop shadow-boxing on competition

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When, earlier this month, finance minister Nicola Willis warned our uncompetitive supermarket duopoly that they had been put “on notice”, Foodstuffs and Woolworths must have been trembling with fear. Indeed they can barely have recovered from the shock incurred the last time they were – according to RNZ – put “on notice”, in August last year, for routinely over-charging customers. This came on top of the mortal peril of – you guessed it – being put “on notice” in 2022, this time by Labour’s David Clark.

During his 2022 press conference, Clark insisted that the supermarkets’ uncompetitive behaviour “can’t be kicked down the road”, while in the same breath announcing “another review of competition in three years’ time”. Black comedy aside, the wrenching incompatibility of these two statements hints at the reason why our supermarket giants may not, in fact, have collapsed in terror. They have correctly deduced that all this half-hearted making of threats, all this putting “on notice”, amounts to nothing whatsoever.

In a similar boat are our cartel-like banks, who have somehow mysteriously survived being put “on notice” not only by the current government (the National Party in December last year: “The big banks are on notice”) but also by its predecessor (Kris Faafoi and Grant Robertson in November 2018: “Banks [are] on notice to lift their game”). The banks have also bravely endured the finance minister’s rapier-sharp wit, shrugging off her carefully crafted description of their industry as “a cosy pillow fight” where other firms might have crumpled under this near-mortal blow.

Customers, meanwhile, await action. The Commerce Commission has calculated the supermarket duopoly extracts $1m in excess profits every day – profits, in other words, above and beyond those they would make in a competitive market. That $1m a day comes straight out of shoppers’ wallets. Kent Duston, the convener of the Banking Reform Coalition, estimates that another $10m a day in “unearned and unjustified profit” is extracted from us by the four big Australian-owned banks. A small handful of firms likewise dominate – and earn excess returns from – electricity generation, building supplies and other markets, many of which have also been put “on notice” to equally little effect.

Why is there so much shadow boxing, and so little action? One major culprit is the hands-off approach to regulation that has haunted the English-speaking world for decades. Anti-monopoly regulations should theoretically be popular even among small-government types: competition is, after all, the only thing that makes markets work. Monopolies, duopolies and oligopolies – the latter denoting market dominance by a handful of firms – are a menace to consumers, raising prices and squashing innovation. But even pro-competition regulations have long been deemed suspect.

The dominant view has instead stressed the economies of scale that – in theory – accumulate in larger firms. The mere possibility of competition, what’s more, is supposed to put a check on monopolistic behaviour. Obviously this latter idea is self-serving – or, rather, big-business-serving – nonsense, but it has nonetheless been hugely influential. Hence New Zealand has long tolerated two supermarket chains having over 80% market share, while further afield Facebook was – to take just one egregious instance – allowed to buy up both WhatsApp and Instagram.

Overseas, the grip of this laissez-faire view is weakening: witness the US Justice Department’s determined prosecution of Google’s monopolistic behaviour, and the tougher approach to anti-competitive activity crystallising within the European Union. Even in sleepy old New Zealand, everyone can feel the pressure build. It is not hard to guess why Willis has started talking a good game on competition: people don’t like the banks very much, and they really don’t like the supermarkets. Having a go at those firms – and their uncompetitive colleagues the electricity gentailers – is a free hit.

Our current politicians have, however, an immense fear of taking risks. No matter how angry the public gets over excess profits, there is far less peril in making big-sounding statements – and taking small, ineffectual steps – than in implementing the weighty structural reforms that would actually drive change. Decisively shaping markets feels like a step into the unknown; the possibility of a botched effort looms large. Hence, when it comes to the supermarkets, Willis has done nothing more than talk vaguely about removing “unnecessary regulatory hurdles that discourage new entrants”, whatever those may be, and taking further steps that “could” – note the hesitant conditional tense – include helping new entrants access suitable land.

It doesn’t help that there is no clear consensus on the exact remedies for anti-competitive behaviour – which may vary from sector to sector – nor much detailed academic work on how to implement them. Several influential figures have called for the gentailers to be broken up, so that they can no longer exploit the commercial advantages of being able to both generate and retail electricity, but it is unclear just how much good this would do.

When it comes to the supermarket duopoly, a third competitor might be encouraged – but how? Some credible thinkers – among them the Australian competition expert Lisa Asher – argue New Zealand is badly under-served with supermarkets. Others, such as 2 Degrees founder Tex Edwards, believe that on the contrary New Zealand is “oversupplied”, and that the only solution is to force Countdown and Woolworths to divest 140 of their existing stores to a new entrant. Other thinkers on the progressive left are arguing, at least in private, that tougher regulation of the current supermarkets – rather than a new competitor – is the way to go.

Questions abound, too, about whether our entire legal framework on competition is fit for purpose. Clarity on all these points will be needed before the next election. Because right now, when it comes to tackling anti-competitive behaviour, New Zealand politicians are locked in a pointless cycle of empty words and signals of virtue. For the sake of the consumer, they may need to stop handing out “notices” that are about as threatening as a wet wipe, and start taking action.

The Post: Labour’s patchy poverty record eases pressure on National

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Not met. Not met. Not met. The rollcall of verdicts on the last Labour government’s progress against its child poverty targets, released by Statistics New Zealand on Thursday, was unsparing. The party didn’t meet a single one of the goals it had set for its first – and, as it turns out, only – two terms in government.

Labour had, of course, a hard road to travel. Although some measures of hardship fell under John Key, his National government had spent much of its time claiming it couldn’t even measure poverty, let alone tackle it.

But determined campaigning by NGOs, amplified by hard-hitting reportage, had sparked public concern by filling TV screens with images of children growing up in mould-ridden houses where the heating was switched off to save money – homes where fridges were empty and hope in short supply.

In the 2017 election, Bill English and Jacinda Ardern vied to outbid each other on tackling hardship. And when she won power, one of her first moves was to pass the landmark Child Poverty Reduction Act.

Confronting a situation where, depending on the measure, somewhere between 150,000 and 250,000 children lived in hardship, Labour set itself the goal of cutting those rates by one-third by 2024 – and by as much as two-thirds by 2028.

So, what went wrong? Initially, not much. The party addressed the issue with seriousness, rigour and compassion.

In its first term, the Families Package put $1bn extra a year into the pockets of poor and middling households, via higher benefits and Working for Families tax credits. Poverty dropped sharply, and the number of households unable to regularly afford food fell from 20% to 13%.

Even in the pandemic, Labour achieved the remarkable feat of keeping poverty levels flat or falling, partly through continued benefit increases and wage subsidies. The problem was everything after.

To maintain progress on its chosen path, Labour would have needed another $1bn-a-year Families Package. But none was forthcoming, largely because there was no capital gains tax – or reprioritised spending – to free up the required funds. Compounding the problem, the cost-of-living crisis drove Labour to focus increasingly on the “squeezed middle”. It took its eye off the ball.

The ultimate verdict, as delivered on Thursday, was that Labour cut child poverty by just 30,000-50,000 on two of its key measures (and not at all on the remaining one). It missed its 2023-24 targets by about as much again: a job half done, in short. As many as 150,000-200,000 children remain in hardship.

There were wider failings, too. Labour’s goals were couched in impenetrable policy-speak: I defy any layperson to tell me what “50% of equivalised median household disposable income” means. Even Cabinet members couldn’t have explained targets that, unsurprisingly, had next-to-no public support.

Labour’s agenda also relied too heavily on benefit and tax-credit increases. These are important policies, but should the state’s coffers really have to do so much heavy lifting? If work paid better, employers would rightly shoulder more of that burden.

Alongside benefits and wages, a third big lever for tackling child poverty is housing, and here Labour’s record was once again mixed. State house-building, revived after lying dormant under National, added over 14,000 homes, while ramped-up infrastructure investments and zoning reform began clearing the way for increased affordable housing. More, though, was needed.

So where to from here? The pressure is, for the moment, pretty well lifted from National, which can use Labour’s mixed record as a get-out-of-jail-free card. And until middle-class families feel their living standards have recovered, they may have little compassion to spare for others.

Our best hope is that, if the economy can recover, so too will our reservoirs of sympathy. Pressure can still be applied to National to meet its own unambitious targets for 2027, which involve either maintaining the current rates or lowering them by just a few percentage points.

A new drive to halve child hardship – to lift out of poverty roughly 75,000-100,000 of the remaining 150,000-200,000 children – could be pencilled in for, say, 2035. Those targets would, though, need to be couched in one readily comprehensible measure, not to mention a wider national mission and sense of purpose that would excite public support.

We need, above all, a rethink of our social and economic systems, one based on acknowledging our responsibilities to each other – to poor children, in particular, who are blameless in their situation – and recognising that growth is best built from the bottom up. The only way to fix our productivity problems is to ensure that each of us is capable of paddling our collective canoe as fast as it can go. And that, in turn, will require us to make the collective investments – in health, in education, in housing, and in incomes – that will equip every child to play their part in that mission.

The Post: Government undermining house-building efforts of Labour regime

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It was, in the words of one visitor, “kind of secret squirrel”. Although the Christchurch office building belonged to the Homes and Communities Agency, Kāinga Ora, no external signage acknowledged this fact.

Inside, staff had to switch off phones and emails. “I felt like I was entering MI5 or something,” this visitor tells me. Instead they found a room stuffed with every kind of housing professional – from architects to resource-consent experts to engineers – all plotting the delivery of state housing projects. On the walls, a stream of Post-It notes, each one representing a different stage of house-building, moved from left to right, the whole process designed to create a seamless, delay-free flow of tasks.

This work, carried out under the sci-fi-esque title of Project Velocity, became the more soberly named Housing Delivery System (HDS). But the goal remained: slashing the time and cost taken to build homes for the country’s most vulnerable residents.

It seems to have worked, too. The pilots reportedly cut construction costs by 40-60%, thanks to getting everyone in the same room at the outset, minutely planning workflows and avoiding ordering the wrong materials.

The usual building-site inefficiencies – notably, waiting for the right tradies to turn up at the right time – diminished sharply. Kāinga Ora claims labour productivity “doubled”, and former board member Philippa Howden-Chapman says the time between design and consenting fell from 17 months to just six weeks.

All this matters intensely in a week when the government launched a “turnaround” plan for state housing that looked more like “Project Managed Decline”. After completing Labour’s project pipeline, the government will cap the number of Kāinga Ora homes at around 78,000.

As the population – and thus housing need – increases, the proportion of that need that Kāinga Ora meets will slowly fall. Meanwhile NGOs – the other main provider – have funding to build just 500 homes annually for the next three years. Contrast this with Labour’s six-year tenure, when nearly 18,000 houses were added at an ever-accelerating pace.

National’s attempt to undermine this success takes two forms. The first is to complain about Kāinga Ora’s debts. But as Howden-Chapman noted last year, “Has anyone ever bought a house or built a house without doing any borrowing?”

The increased debt largely represents increased ambitions. It guarantees that future generations will pay their share of the investment in ensuring vulnerable people are housed. (Which, incidentally, saves a fortune in health and other avoided costs.)

Some of the debt, of course, might have been incurred because Kāinga Ora was inefficient. Finance Minister Nicola Willis claimed as much last year, saying its build costs were 12% higher than in the private sector.

But even National’s anointed Kāinga Ora chair, Simon Moutter, noted that private developers can “pick and choose” their sites, while his agency must work with awkwardly situated land. It also builds many disability-friendly homes and has sought the highest environmental ratings.

On an apples-for-apples basis, Kāinga Ora’s costs may be roughly the same as those of private developers. Of course, given its economies of scale and opportunities for learning-by-doing, Willis is right to say the state agency’s costs should be far lower. But HDS was starting to address that, and Moutter has a target to cut costs another 20%.

We must also remember that Kāinga Ora had to start almost afresh. Under the previous National government, more state houses were sold than built; a deficit of about 14,000 homes – relative to population growth – accrued, deepening the catastrophic sales under Jim Bolger in the 1990s. John Key’s government also did “almost no” renewals of ageing stock, according to Kāinga Ora.

Labour, in short, inherited a massive maintenance backlog and a state agency that had lost all knowledge of how to build at scale. This is one reason why left-wing governments often look “inefficient”: they have to restore so much depleted capacity before anything else happens.

In growing Kāinga Ora’s capacity ten-fold, and at high speed, Labour may have made mistakes, setting its remit too broad and creating a behemoth often unloved by local communities and even the more socially minded developers. But the party was responding to an appalling deficit in social housing, which is still just 4% of our housing stock when the developed-country average is 7%.

We need over 40,000 more social homes simply to reverse the cuts of the last 30 years and to house the 112,000 people living on the streets, in temporary shelter and in overcrowded dwellings. Curbing Kāinga Ora does nothing to solve those problems.

Still, even National’s steady-state solution involves building 1500 homes a year (counterbalanced by sales and demolitions). Selected staff including Caroline McDowall, the head of housing delivery, have been retained.

The best-case scenario, in short, is that Kāinga Ora maintains – or even sharpens – its capacity for delivering high-quality housing efficiently. Then it won’t be so painful for the next Labour government to scale it up again.

The Spinoff: My ancestors were colonisers

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Charles Wilson Hursthouse I

It is a beautiful object, and yet it holds something ugly. The tattered leather notebook, roughly the size of my hand, flips open to reveal a lining of silver stars on a deep blue background. Further inside is a jumble of surveyor’s notes, made in pencil: a sketch of a road cutting; a measurement set down as “South 332˚ 0 – North 201˚ 30 – arc of height”; the cost – twenty-four pounds, ten shillings and sixpence – of hiring a wagon for two months. And then, over the page, a translation, from te reo Māori to English. 

The translated material comes from two speeches by the prophets Tohu and Te Whiti, the leaders of the Parihaka community that peacefully resisted the theft of indigenous land in the late 19th century. The translator is someone else entirely. He will later be criticised in court for the errors in his renderings; more seriously still, he assists in the confiscation of Taranaki land, and serves as the interpreter for the invading forces when Parihaka is sacked in 1881.

This translator, and sometime surveyor, is my great-great-great-uncle Charles Wilson Hursthouse. His notebook is held in the New Plymouth library, Puke Ariki, and I am seated in its reading room, turning the faded pages and pondering three intertwined questions. What led Charles Wilson, and indeed his wider family, to perform actions that we now so severely condemn? How do I absorb this inheritance of memory? And what relevance does it have, right now, amidst the rekindled debates about how settler and indigenous peoples can abide with each other?

Mob I

My ancestors, Englishmen and women who settled in Taranaki from 1843 onwards, were unusual migrants. A mixture of highly literate professionals and small-scale landowners, they were “gentry … although in reduced circumstances”, according to one of their biographers, the historian Frances Porter. They had come to New Zealand less for personal advancement – though there was that, too – and more because they sought better health, a closer connection to nature and the chance to build a fairer society. New Zealand, Porter wrote, offered “the opportunity … for stretching mind and limbs”. During their emigration, my ancestors’ three distinct families – Hursthouses, Richmonds and Atkinsons – became tightly wound, by marriage, co-location and emotional sympathy, into one larger clan. Their fond nickname for each other was “the Mob”.

Rapidly pressed into service in the colony’s nascent political scene, the Mob soon numbered in their ranks a prime minister (Sir Harry Atkinson), a minister of native affairs and later supreme court judge (C. W. Richmond), a minister of lands (William Richmond Hursthouse), another minister of native affairs (J. C. Richmond), and sundry newspaper editors and regional politicians. The women of the family, though ineligible for high office, immersed themselves in the intellectual, spiritual and political debates of the day. The Mob were, in the view of the Nelson Colonist, “the most prominent of the governing families of New Zealand”.

Sometimes, within their settler world, my ancestors were a force for social progress. As a Taranaki farmer, Sir Harry had long stressed the virtues of individual self-reliance, hard work and thrift, but later came to realise that these virtues did not, by themselves, offer sufficient protection against economic shocks. Witnessing the poverty unleashed by the Long Depression of the 1880s, he became one of the first advocates of state support for those in dire need. His proposal to levy an early form of income tax – and use the revenue to assist widows, orphans, the elderly and the sick – was decades ahead of its time. 

Outside parliament, the family made useful contributions. In a court case concerning the Irish freedom fighters known as “Fenians”, an oppressed minority in colonial New Zealand, C. W. Richmond delivered a judgement of relative leniency and tolerance. His daughter Mary helped found New Zealand’s kindergarten movement, and the Mob’s women were influential advocates for temperance and female education. Unlike many of their contemporaries, the family’s politicians believed in public service for its own sake, rather than as a means to get rich. The Mob’s members read widely on philosophy and religion. They were scientific investigators. They held an intense curiosity about the world. And they singularly failed to apply these values to their dealings with Māori.

C.W.H. II

During his 70 years of life, Charles Wilson Hursthouse found himself at the scene of an improbably large number of historical events. Entering adulthood in 1850s Taranaki, he turned his hand to various frontier occupations, first of all surveying, a profession whose “naming, taming, marking out and mapping of the land” were, in the words of the historian Giselle Byrnes, “assertions of colonial power”. 

One of his first tasks was to help survey the Waitara “Purchase”, a large expanse of prime Taranaki land acquired in dubious circumstances. Charles Wilson’s older cousin C. W. Richmond had helped authorise the land’s sale by a minor chief, Te Teira, even though the latter had no right to dispose of it. Kuia from the local iwi, Te Ati Awa, responded with non-violent resistance, repeatedly pulling up the surveyors’ measuring pegs. 

The Crown’s attempt to quell this resistance formed the opening salvo of the New Zealand Wars. At Waireka, on March 18, 1860, the Taranaki Rifle Volunteers and Militia became the first colonial unit to take the field against Māori. Sergeant W. H. Free “had the honour”, as one settler historian put it, of firing the first shot; Charles Wilson fired the second.

Although this phase of the war ended in ceasefire less than a year later, Charles Wilson continued his dual life as surveyor and militia-man. He did so throughout the 1860s and 70s, the main phase of the New Zealand Wars, as the colonial government – acting on trumped-up pretences – invaded and then confiscated large swathes of the central North Island. When the Waikato iwi retreated to their stronghold in the King Country, a new centre of Māori resistance emerged at Parihaka, the village where the followers of Tohu and Te Whiti had gathered, halfway between Mt Taranaki and the sea.

By 1880, Charles Wilson had risen to the rank of lieutenant, and served briefly on the Taranaki Provincial Council. He had also become the council’s resident engineer, and it was in this capacity that he was charged with pushing a road through the fields used by Parihaka’s inhabitants. Once again, his survey pegs were pulled up.

Charles Wilson nonetheless became a frequent visitor to Parihaka. Drawing on language skills acquired during two decades of contact with Māori, he sent numerous translations of Tohu and Te Whiti’s speeches to politicians and the press. (Hence the notebooks held at Puke Ariki.) Meanwhile settler anger over Parihaka, a symbol of indigenous resistance, grew with each passing month. 

When, in 1881, the colonial government sent troops to attack the village, Charles Wilson acted as their interpreter. In an event later known as Te Rā o te Pāhua, the Day of Plunder, around 1,600 troops marched on Parihaka, only to be greeted by children singing and adults seated silently. As the Crown has subsequently acknowledged in its formal apology, the troops began “forcibly evicting many people who had sought refuge there, dismantling and desecrating their homes and sacred buildings … and systematically destroying their cultivations and livestock”. The apology also notes “the rapes committed by Crown troops in the aftermath of the invasion”, acts that caused “immeasurable and enduring harm … to the women of Parihaka, their families, and their descendants until the present day”. 

In the aftermath of the invasion, the land around Parihaka was either confiscated or removed from its owners’ control, while Tohu and Te Whiti were held without trial for 18 months. Charles Wilson’s translations, which had formed part of the government’s pretext for invading, were later deemed suspect. Casting the prophets’ speeches as more bellicose than they really were, his interpretations had been, historian Hazel Riseborough judged, “full of … inconsistencies”.

The Mob II

In their pursuit of settlement, and their indifference to its effects on Māori, my ancestors were well within the mainstream of colonial opinion. Some dissenters sought to preserve indigenous rights: the missionary Octavius Hadfield, for one, correctly described the Waitara Purchase as “a flagrant act of injustice”. But few settlers felt the same way; certainly not my ancestors. They never questioned their belief that, as Porter put it, “in the North Island of New Zealand were thousands upon thousands of acres of unoccupied, untilled land simply awaiting the axe, the plough, and European occupancy”. 

Māori, as has been well-documented, saw their land quite differently. Viewing it as a collective possession, they claimed “exclusive rights in their gardens, hunting grounds and fisheries”, as the anthropologist Atholl Anderson put it in the 2014 book Tangata Whenua. They had also formed themselves into political entities such as iwi and hapū, settling disputes and making binding resolutions through hui that the academic Māmari Stephens has described as an “exercise of civic decision-making power”. Detailed tikanga determined status, allocated responsibilities and ensured justice. Māori had, in short, their own structures of government, adapted to the way they wanted to live.

My ancestors, though, had little interest in understanding such facts. Among the exceptions were Sir Harry’s brother Arthur, whose creation of one of the first English-Māori dictionaries suggested some desire for cross-cultural understanding. But even he was eager to wage war against local iwi, and by and large his cousins held even worse attitudes. C. W. Richmond, in the words of historian Keith Sinclair, knew “almost nothing about Māori culture or land tenure” – and what he did know, he didn’t like. The “beastly communism” of collective landholding, C. W. once argued, must be “destroyed”. Māori should become “civilised”, adopting British habits and practices. Elsewhere in the family, Richmond Hursthouse described the people of Parihaka as “scum”, while Sir Harry thought they were a “semi-barbarous” people led by “fanatics”.

The Mob may have had a vested interest in failing to respect Māori rights: their access to land, and the renewal of their prosperity, depended upon it. But they also appear, in a manner so profound that it goes beyond mere pecuniary interest, to have been unable to reach across the barriers of culture, to recognise that different traditions – alternative ways of holding land, relating to nature, and conceiving of rights, justice and fairness – could be in any way equal to their own. And so they, in various ways, contributed to the taking of Māori land, the removal of Māori autonomy over their own affairs, and the wider attempts, under the guise of “assimilation”, to suppress all that was distinctive about Māori culture. It was on J. C. Richmond’s watch, for instance, that the government finally abandoned the idea – mooted even in early colonial legislation – of self-governing Māori districts.

New Zealand history can, as a result, be something of a minefield for people like me. The columnist Matthew Hooton once joked that whenever a political tome is published, half of Wellington rushes to Unity Books – not to read the work, but to check the index for any mention of their name. A similar effect operates with my family and works of history. “What have they done now?” I ask myself as each book appears, scanning the pages for names beginning with H, R and A. Of course they have done nothing now, my 19th century ancestors, but we are constantly discovering more about their misdeeds, and those actions resonate right into the present day.

Take the now-infamous argument that the Treaty of Waitangi was “a simple nullity”, a phrase generally associated with an 1877 declaration by the chief justice, James Prendergast.  As mere “savages”, Māori could not – Prendergast thought – have had the mental capacity to assent to such an agreement. Thus the Treaty was null and void, a convenient verdict that heavily influenced New Zealand law for the next hundred years. Bad enough, you might think. But looking up the judgment one day, I was intrigued to discover that Prendergast had had a co-author – and then horrified to find that his partner in judicial racism was none other than C. W. Richmond. 

Another time, a cousin forwarded me a story about a carved wharenui (meeting house) that had long been on display at Te Papa and, before that, the Dominion Museum. The wharenui, Te Hau ki Turanga, had been carved by the Rongowhakaata iwi but was confiscated in 1867 by the Crown. In a 2022 interview, Te Papa’s kaihautū (co-leader), Arapata Hakiwai, said it had been “ripped from the heart and roots, the umbilical cord really, wrenched from the heart of Ōrākaiapu pā”. The man responsible? C.W.’s brother J.C., “informally acting as director of the Colonial Museum”.

Seeing Clearly I

We stand at one of the inflection points that have marked the relationship between Māori and Pākehā for over two centuries. In recent decades we have witnessed a growing Māori presence in public life: more reo Māori in the media, greater biculturalism in government agencies, wider uptake of indigenous images and concepts. Māori have also begun to demand a restoration – at least in part – of the autonomy they enjoyed before European arrival. Some elements of this autonomy, including Treaty settlements and te reo immersion schools, are now uncontroversial. 

But, as has been exhaustively canvassed, the last Labour government began extending this trend to include seats for Māori on local councils, a Māori health authority, and greater Māori influence over water use. Much of this is now labelled “co-governance”. The term sometimes denotes situations where Māori and Pākehā jointly manage a major, non-separable institution like a national park. But it has come to also describe the practice of Māori running separate services for Māori and, indeed, the calls for a parallel Māori sphere of government.

Such moves have been met with a backlash that now dominates New Zealand politics. Debates about co-governance consume the airwaves. Alongside attempts to wind back Māori wards and remove references to the Treaty of Waitangi from legislation, the major flashpoint has of course been Act’s Treaty principles bill, which seeks to limit any affirmative action that might help redress inequalities for Māori. 

Clearly, some Pākehā – or New Zealanders of European descent, to use the official terminology – are uncomfortable with where things are headed. In some cases this seems to be motivated by outright racism. The Christian evangelist Julian Batchelor, for instance, claims that teaching children to speak te reo is a form of abuse, and has likened the phrase “kia ora” to “heil Hitler”. It is hard to see this as anything else but hatred of another culture.

In other cases, I suspect, something subtler is at work. Some Pākehā feel “got at”; they think they are being made to apologise for acts they didn’t commit, to condemn their own culture as defective, to feel bad now because white people have done bad things in the past. But history need not be so threatening. I don’t think that, by and large, Pākehā are being asked to feel terribly guilty, nor would it achieve anything very much if we did. Guilt, for me, doesn’t pass down the generations, doesn’t travel in the blood. But we do have a public duty to perform an act at once complex and simple: to see things clearly, and then do something about them.

C.W.H. III

By 1884 Charles Wilson, having returned once more to surveying, was helping push the Main Trunk railway line through the King Country. There, he and two colleagues were captured by members of the Ngāti Kinokahu hapū seeking retribution for the attack on Parihaka. Three pigs were given the names of the three surveyors, and were killed and eaten. Apparently on the verge of being killed himself, Charles Wilson was rescued by a party that included yet another Māori prophet, Te Kooti. 

Resuming his surveying in the King Country, which kept him away from his New Plymouth family for long spells, Charles Wilson formed a relationship with a Ngāti Kinokahu woman, Mere Te Rongopāmamao Aubrey. Their daughter, Rangimarie, later became Dame Rangimarie Hetet, a craftswoman revered for having helped preserve the art of harakeke weaving. By this stage, Charles Wilson seems, from the documents he left, to have come to better appreciate the Māori world, and regret some of his past deeds. He later moved south, to Lower Hutt, and it was there, as he lay dying in 1911, that he finally told his Pākehā family about Rangimarie’s existence. 

Charles Wilson was buried at Taita Cemetery, nestled under Lower Hutt’s eastern hills; several decades later, and just a few kilometres further south, a wharenui was built by Te Ati Awa, whose members include Rangimarie’s many descendants. The meeting house, Arohanui ki te Tangata or Love to All the People, was named in honour of Tohu and Te Whiti.

Seeing Clearly II

To see clearly is, for me, to face hard truths front-on. It also requires us to hold good and bad in tension. Although the older histories were far too kind to my ancestors, it would achieve little to swing the pendulum its full arc, to collapse their characters into one-dimensional villains. We have to be able to see in double vision. We can accept that my ancestors’ actions were in line with the dominant moral judgments of their society, while acknowledging that they would fail – catastrophically, in some cases – the moral tests we apply today. We can see them from the point of view of their time and the point of view of ours. We can see that they behaved well towards their own community and terribly towards others.

Some people object to this line of thought, fearing that the better deeds will be used to excuse the worse ones. But the good doesn’t cancel out the bad, no more than the bad erases all memory of the good. Instead, in the tension between the two, important questions open up. If my ancestors had been all bad, little could be learnt from studying them. It is only when we see their good side, the positive values they sometimes embodied within their own world, that their failures come into sharpest relief. It is ironic, given that iwi were often labelled “tribes”, that my ancestors behaved in what might be termed a “tribal” – that is, insular – manner. As the religious scholar Sharon Brous has written, “One of the great casualties of tribalism is curiosity.” My ancestors were not, at heart, curious about indigenous culture; had they been, they might have relaxed their views about their own superiority, and treated Māori as equals.

Nor is this a purely historical point. Today’s opponents of greater Māori autonomy will think of themselves as good people – and within their own sphere perhaps they are. They may be kind parents, upstanding members of their residents’ associations, the first people to volunteer to bake cakes or run sausage sizzles. Within the Pākehā world, they may stand for honesty and fair play. But, I wonder, are they applying those values and that respect to all New Zealanders or, as with my own ancestors, only to those they regard as equal members of their own community?

To ask these questions, to look at things unflinchingly, is not easy. While the exact feelings that my family and I experience, as we grapple with this history, is a matter for ourselves, it would be fair to say we find the process sometimes uncomfortable. But the history of Parihaka – and countless related events – is such that if we, as its inheritors, aren’t occasionally uncomfortable, we are probably doing something wrong. 

Clarity of sight also helps reaffirm our place here. There is a theory, in some academic circles, that the wrongs done during colonisation will always render Pākehā identity unstable. It makes us interlopers, uneasy people standing on stolen land. And some Pākehā try their best to skirt around this ugly history, to close their eyes and stop their ears, striving to avoid anything that might distress them. The writer Bill Pearson once described Pākehā as “fretful sleepers”, haunted by something at the edge of consciousness. Pearson wasn’t thinking about colonisation per se, but the point still applies. Our ancestors are part of us, and we need to be in a right relationship with them. If we don’t deal honestly with history, we will always suffer a disturbed sleep. But if we do acknowledge past wrongs, we will, as I see it, have earned the right to a stable identity.

Not that this is the sole point of the exercise, or even the main one; that would be somewhat self-regarding. Clarity of sight must be put in the service of a broader justice, one that recognises the connections between past and present. Take, for instance, Richard Shaw’s 2021 work The Forgotten Coast, which describes an ancestor who, like Charles Wilson, assisted in the attack on Parihaka’s inhabitants, and then became prosperous farming their land. Or take, with a wider lens, the Atlas of Deprivation, a publication that invites us to look at the map of the million-plus acres of Waikato farmland confiscated by the colonial state, look at the modern map of that region’s most fertile and wealth-generating land, and think long and hard about why the two charts so closely overlap.

What these accounts share is a conviction that we can’t put matters right unless we understand how they went wrong. When Pākehā try to deflect debates about history, they typically argue that the bad things either didn’t happen or aren’t relevant today. I am here, bringing with me my own family’s record in this matter, to tell you that they did, and they are.

Culture and Autonomy I

When people live in a world ordered by their own values, they may not recognise the benefits this brings, so invisible and natural do they seem. Yet these advantages exist, as I know well. When today’s members of the “Mob” are born, married and interred, we perform rituals practised for generations. We can freely speak our native language at all times, and be understood. Even the public realm – schooling, healthcare, the whole set of state services – is organised around familiar Western notions of individual responsibility and bureaucratic neutrality.

Why does this matter? Because it ensures that in almost any situation, even in public, I can be myself. Too often, though, this is not true for Māori, as their leaders have long argued. Taranaki educator Keri Opai’s book Tikanga describes its subject as “a Māori way of doing things, the customary system of practices and values that are expressed in every social context”. Hui, for instance, start with more formal introductions than do Pākehā meetings, because Māori understand the world through whakapapa, the long bloodlines connecting individuals and families. 

Opai also cites the example of tangihanga, where the ceremonials last several days, koha are expected, and attendees often commune with a deceased person lying in an open casket. These practices are required to give effect to values such as whakapapa and manaakitanga. Māori schools, likewise, typically teach a more holistic view of the world; Māori health services often involve the whole family in consultations.

Every human being, Opai says, should be able to “bring their whole selves” to a given situation. This implies that agencies delivering services to Māori must be able to follow tikanga. And that, in its turn, may require those bodies to be run by Māori. Put it another way: how well will organisations dominated by one culture ever work for another? The French would not enjoy public services organised along Iranian lines, nor would Nigerians flourish under American law. Each of those peoples has, of course, maintained its sovereignty. But then so too have Māori.

He Whakaputanga, commonly translated as the Declaration of Independence, was signed by northern iwi in 1835, and asserts exactly what its name suggests. In Te Tiriti, the reo Māori iteration of the Treaty of Waitangi, Māori guaranteed themselves “tino rangatiratanga”, the nearest English equivalent of which is “sovereignty”. Indeed it is hard to imagine why iwi would ever have ceded that power, given the tiny number of Pākehā in the colony at the time – roughly 2,000, against perhaps 80,000 Māori – and the minimal power they exerted. As the late scholar Moana Jackson argued, it requires “a profound suspension of disbelief” to think Māori would ever have relinquished “the authority to make independent decisions”.

Under international law, it is the Māori language version that holds sway. And even the English text’s assertion that the Crown had gained “sovereignty” probably doesn’t mean what we have come to think it means. In his 2023 book The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi, historian Ned Fletcher argues that, according to contemporary letters and instructions, the British drafters of the document saw “sovereignty” not as absolute, an all-or-nothing outcome, but as something eminently divisible, something that could be shared. And all that the Crown sought was sovereignty over its own settlers, disputes between them and Māori, and foreign relations. Māori were to govern their own affairs. 

In other words, Fletcher’s thesis, grounded in painstaking archival research, is that in 1840 the Crown was comfortable with the idea of co-governance. It was only afterwards, when profit motives intervened, that the dominant settler view changed. So if the colony’s Victorian founders could envisage co-governance, why can we not?

Seeing Clearly III

What that co-governance would look like is a question well beyond my compass. All I am trying to do, as a descendant of settlers, is use my own history as a means to reflect on the present moment, encourage other settler descendants to do likewise, and help lay the foundation for the redress of historical injustice. That injustice includes the loss of Māori autonomy over their own affairs; the solution, as Māori leaders have long argued, must involve some restoration of that autonomy.

I know many Pākehā worry that co-governance will lead to segregation, and I understand that fear. I don’t pretend to know exactly how this will pan out. All I can say is that segregation seems to me unlikely. There will always be countless social spaces in which different peoples mix. Māori and Pākehā will always come together in offices and on sports fields, at holiday camps and in church choirs, in all the venues and meeting grounds of daily life. Their cultural practices will continue to be influenced by each other, their lives united by friendship and marriage. 

My ideal is that both Māori and Pākehā – and, indeed, every one of this nation’s many communities – can engage warmly with the other, and do so from a firm base of security in their own culture. For Pākehā, the task as I see it is to understand the wrongs that were done, then help put them right. And this is a challenge we can all meet. If I, who would – given my family’s history – have more reason than most to feel got at or guilty, can sidestep those feelings; if I can look this history full in the face, address the facts, and encourage our country to follow the long arc back towards justice; then, I would hope, others can do the same.

The Post: Austerity kills, but it’s not the actual threat facing us

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Austerity kills. That’s the clear verdict from the latest research into British public spending cuts, which shows that the Conservatives’ savage post-GFC retrenchment led to at least 190,000 excess deaths.

Cuts to childcare centres and services sent more kids to hospital. That’s if they could even get there: in areas where health budgets were chopped, fewer ambulances turned up on time. Welfare cutbacks, deepening poor people’s misery, sparked drug overdoses and other deaths of despair.

The bleakest irony is that these clawbacks didn’t even aid the economy: living standards under the Conservatives stagnated for a staggering 14 years. Fewer jobs, shorter lives: austerity really is a lose-lose.

No wonder, then, that our own Labour Party wants to pin the “austerity” badge to Nicola Willis’ lapel, having started working the term into its political attacks. But will it stick?

Although austerity has no clear definition, one can take as a guide the British cuts, in which virtually all state agencies had their budgets slashed by around one-fifth. So far, the Finance Minister’s 6.5% cuts are not in the same league.

Willis has, admittedly, foreshadowed a further “programme of targeted savings”, a spending cap for most departments, and potentially more job losses. Meeting her target to curb government borrowing could also require sharp reductions.

But ministerial comments about not being “a slave” to the target rather suggest it will be relaxed. And while the redundancies in particular can cause great pain, none of this amounts to slash and burn.

State spending, after all, rose rapidly under Jacinda Ardern, from $76 billion in 2017 to $128b in 2023, most of it going on Covid, health and higher benefits. Adjusted for the rapid inflation of the post-pandemic era, this represented a $28b increase in annual spending.

Willis’s much-hyped 2024 Budget cuts removed just $2.5b, or one-tenth of that sum.

The public-sector redundancies are more sweeping, however. Staffing levels rose by around 16,000 under Labour; roughly 3000 have already lost their jobs, and that figure could ultimately reach 7000.

There is no doubt that Willis and colleagues want to shrink the state. The key measure here is government size relative to GDP, which tracks whether spending rises in line with increased costs and a growing volume of economic activity needing regulation. This captures, in short, the breadth of the public services the state offers us.

On that measure, core government spending will fall from this year’s 33.6% of GDP to 31.5% in 2029. That implies National will spend around $8b a year less than Labour would have done.

This, in turn, will require agencies to either become vastly more efficient or – more likely – deliver a lower level of service. But it’s worth recalling that in the dying days of the last National administration, state spending was just 27.3% of GDP. This Government may be tacking hard right on cultural issues, but in economic terms it plans to spend $16bn a year more than Bill English would have done.

Left-wingers may have been spooked by the Prime Minister’s stated desire to learn the “lessons” of Ruth Richardson and Bill Birch’s 1990s cutbacks. State spending then was cut from around 40% of GDP to 30%, while benefit levels were slashed by one-quarter.

One shudders to think how many deaths this austerity-on-steroids caused. But nothing like that is currently envisaged: the “lessons” soundbite is less a prediction than it is a rhetorical device, an invocation of figures still mystifyingly revered on the right. National’s plans are, at most, austerity-lite.

Hence the muted nature of the public’s response, outside Wellington anyway. Most Kiwis haven’t experienced sweeping cuts to services.

Not yet, that is. Willis’s gamble is that she can curb the government’s “back office” while protecting the frontline. And there are, of course, horror stories of bureaucratic waste. One former Ardern lieutenant told me about an internal comms staffer at a state agency who, during a job interview, admitted their key aim was – wait for it – to send one really good staff email each week.

By the same token, the public service possesses analysts who are – I’m told by their foreign counterparts – world experts in their field. The ideologically driven haste of the government’s cuts means many of the latter are being lost.

National this week touted its scientific credentials, but has slashed hundreds of public-sector science roles. And its cull of bureaucrats may – for instance – simply force frontline police officers to fill out the paperwork formerly handled by head office.

All this, in turn, could spell real trouble for the quality of public services in a year or two’s time, on top of the debacle that is the health sector.

The current political debates about “austerity” – and, relatedly, public-sector job cuts – are, in the final analysis, just shadow-boxing. What actually shows up on the frontline, and consequently in people’s day-to-day lives, is what matters politically.

The Post: The honeymoon’s over, but a hangover’s just kicking in

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The received wisdom is that this government never got a honeymoon – and, like much received wisdom, it’s almost certainly wrong.

Sure, the coalition parties didn’t see the usual polling bump immediately post taking office. But, according to at least one pollster I interviewed early last year, focus group participants were giving the government the benefit of the doubt.

Some things made them uneasy. Voters had sympathy for public servants losing their jobs, and sensed something slightly savage in the cuts to spending. They were also turned off by the more aggressive anti-Māori policies.

But, like all fair-minded Kiwi folk, they felt a new government deserved a chance to prove itself. That leeway – a honeymoon of sorts – was duly extended. Hence the coalition’s polling held up for much of last year.

The problem facing the government is that it has now thoroughly burnt through that goodwill. Casey Costello’s pro-tobacco shenanigans, the anti-environmental Fast-Track Bill, the relentlessly negative unwinding of Labour’s agenda: that’s quite some way to torch your honeymoon.

The divisive Treaty ‘Principles’ Bill, meanwhile, may have slightly boosted ACT’s ratings, but at the expense of driving moderate voters towards Labour and radical ones towards Te Pāti Māori. Between the 2023 election and the last five polls pre-Christmas, National’s vote slumped from 38.1% to 32.9%.

On the other side of the ledger, Chris Hipkins’ party rose from 26.9% to 29.4%, and support for the Māori radicals jumped from 3.1% to 6.5%. All of which leaves the governing parties just two percentage points ahead of the opposition.

While ACT and NZ First seem unconcerned, National’s leading lights can sense danger, and in a series of interviews late last year signalled a shift towards a more “positive”, forward-focused agenda. The problem is that it’s not clear what that would actually look like, nor if it could undo the reputational damage already done.

While National was well within its rights to reprioritise low-value spending and tackle things like the bloating of government comms teams, the mindless haste of the state staffing cuts – which could total 7000 on current estimates – seems to have registered with the public.

In infrastructure, the same story pertains. National could have sought efficiencies at the homes and communities agency, Kāinga Ora, and gradually increased the building capacity of NGO providers. Instead it has brought construction to a near-standstill, feeding its ideological animosity to state provision at the expense of actual on-the-ground progress.

The public sector and infrastructure cuts, both of which slow spending and investment, have only weakened an economy already struggling under Labour. On a per-person basis, we are experiencing a worse recession than that which followed the GFC.

This is why National so fervently insists it got inflation “under control” by cutting spending. It’s the party’s sole economic claim to fame.

But even that is bogus. Inflation has fallen only because the Reserve Bank had hiked interest rates sky-high.

Labour’s pandemic-era spending was, in any case, never a major contributor to inflation. A 2023 report showed increased corporate profits were responsible for more than half the post-pandemic spike. This chimes with global research blaming factors largely outside governments’ control, in particular corporate profit margins, but also disruptions to supply chains and oil price increases.

Post-GFC, conservative governments worldwide – notably in Britain – successfully sold the lie that the financial crisis had been caused by excessive state spending (as opposed to the actual culprit, weak regulation). But if Labour can push back against the latest lie – and all the signs are that the public isn’t swallowing it – then Hipkins and co have a greater opportunity to be heard than parties usually do after being turfed from office.

Labour’s problem, of course, is that last time round it left too large a gap between ambitious promise and underwhelming delivery. Over the next 18 months, the party will have to tread a fine line, simultaneously offering voters something positive while acknowledging – more strongly than it has so far – the mistakes made in office.

Pledges of sweeping change are unlikely to sit well with a public now sceptical that big dreams will come true. Even the 2023 promise of free dental care for under-30s, a relatively unambitious policy, was – I’m told – met with disbelief that it would ever be delivered. Some kind of mid-range change – not minute incrementalism, but tangible improvements people can see in their daily lives and their communities – may offer Labour its best hope of victory.

If, as predicted, the economy does recover by mid-2026, with growth rising and unemployment falling, National will still be favourite to win another term. The cuts may then be long-forgotten, the coalition’s tone shifted from vengeance to positivity, the approach less ideological, more practical.

And economic fundamentals matter: they are, ultimately, what cost Democrats the presidency in the US last year. But, thanks to the coalition’s failings, the political door is more open to Labour than it would normally be.