NZ Politics Daily – 22 February 2024

Feb 21, 2024

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Top “NZ Politics Daily” stories today

Below are some of the more interesting and insightful New Zealand politics items from the last 24 hours.

1) The shocking death yesterday of Green MP Fa'anānā Efeso Collins has led to several beautiful tributes to the late politician. The best of these is by Spinoff editor Madeleine Chapman – see: Ia manuia lau malaga, Fa’anānā Efeso Collins

2) The Herald’s Simon Wilson also gives a heartfelt tribute to the politician he covered on the campaign trail in Auckland – see: Fa’anana Efeso Collins was a politician of heart and soul

3) For a very good obituary and overview of Collins’ life, see Steve Kilgallon’s Efeso Collins: unflappable, cerebral crusader for social justice

4) It’s unusual these days for a sitting MP to die in office – the last was Parekura Horomia. Stuff political editor Luke Malpass explains today that “In earlier days, deaths of sitting MPs were far more common - the age of MPs was higher and the life expectancy lower. In recent decades it has become more rare” – see: What next for Green Party after Efeso Collins’ tragic death? (paywalled)

No by-election is required, as Collins came in on the list: “Dr. Lawrence Xu-Nan is the next person on the Green Party list and is expected to now be the next Green Party MP, but it is unconfirmed at this stage. Of Chinese descent from the city of Tianjin, Xu-Nan has lived in New Zealand for 26 years and has a PhD in Egyptology.” And there will be yet another Green list MP soon: “when James Shaw leaves Parliament in the coming months he will, in turn, likely be replaced by number 17 on the Green Party list, ex-Otago University Students Association president and policy adviser Francisco Hernandez.”

5) Why is New Zealand so broken? According to Danyl McLauchlan, writing for the Democracy Project, politicians of both left and right have been dogmatically following ideological prescriptions about the economy and the state that are based on myths. We have crumbling infrastructure and corruption because we have the worst of possible worlds in which there is a strong faith in the bureaucratic state together with oligopolistic free markets – see: Unjarndycing the State

6) This big problem is most evident in terms of New Zealand’s woeful infrastructure, which has been calculated to need $200bn in investment. Today Matthew Birchall of the NZ Initiative writes in the Herald that the problem isn’t so much about how much the country spends on infrastructure, but more about how we deliver it: “The New Zealand Infrastructure Commission notes New Zealand currently spends around 5.5 per cent of GDP on public infrastructure, a greater proportion than Australia and the OECD median. Despite this comparatively high spending, New Zealand reaps a relatively poor return from its infrastructure investment. Alarmingly, we rank near the bottom 10 per cent of high-income countries for the efficiency of our infrastructure spending. In other words, we don’t get much bang for our buck” – see: Deficit obsession ignores abysmal state of Kiwi infrastructure delivery (paywalled)

According to Birchall, the politicians are largely to blame for the poor delivery: “Too many recent projects have been imposed on the public without being fully scoped or planned, leading to cost overruns, or cancellation when the political winds shifted.” For example, “Fancy projects that capture media headlines, like Auckland Light Rail, are often announced without a business case or coherent plan, only to see costs spiral out of control.”

7) We should be careful, however, in believing the new Government’s exaggerated pronouncements on the scale of Labour’s overspending and alleged inability to cost big projects into future spending forecasts. Newsroom’s Tim Murphy looks at some of the fiscal claims made by the National-led Government and says “Many of the numbers make great headlines but not a lot of sense” – see: History is re-written by the victors

Murphy pleads with Luxon to “rein in his more hot-blooded ministers, advisers and speech writers and give us numbers that mean something rather than spook the public without context.”

8) Such claims of the new Government are especially ironic, given that it also seems guilty of underfunding some of its big promises. The Herald’s Jenée Tibshraeny reported yesterday: “Delivering the roads and public transport National campaigned on ahead of the October 2023 election could end up costing more than twice as much as the party said it would, leaving a potential fiscal hole of $24 billion” – see: Transport projects could cost twice as much as National estimated, leaving potential fiscal hole of $24b – NZTA (paywalled)

Here’s here elaboration: “NZTA estimated 17 projects could collectively cost between $30.9b and $46.6b. National, which was accused by Labour before the election of under-cooking its estimates, budgeted only $22.2b for the same projects. NZTA’s upper estimate is a whopping $24.4b (110 per cent) above National’s, while its average estimate is $16.6b (75 per cent) higher.”

9) Labour’s Three Waters reform programme is still costing huge amounts of money, despite being cancelled – see Kate MacNamara’s Redundancy pay totals $710k for two departing Three Waters bosses, a third still employed (paywalled)

MacNamara explains: “Jon Lamonte and Colin Crampton both left their posts on December 15 with redundancy packages worth six months’ of their $710,000 “establishment chief executive” base salaries. They were each on the job for just 10 months… The hiring of the chief executives was originally contentious because the pay constituted a massive 50 per cent rise, on average, for three of the chief executives who were previously on public sector salaries.”

10) Has the Green political tide in Wellington started to recede? A council by-election has just been held – at a cost of $120,000 to ratepayers – because the previous Green councillor Tamatha Paul won the Wellington Central seat at the general election. She had previously won the city council seat by a huge margin as part of a Green wave, but her replacement has only just squeaked in by a margin of 45 votes, which the Herald’s Georgina Campbell says today is “hardly a resounding win for a party that’s been heavily favoured by this part of town recently” – see: Geordie Rogers’ Green win in Lambton Ward byelection hardly a resounding victory (paywalled). She says his reduced majority “indicates there is discontent brewing”.

11) The Auckland War Memorial Museum is decolonising itself, and catching up with trends in which museums see themselves as “social impact organisations”. The Museum has put out its draft annual plan announcing its new direction, which will be as “a Tiriti-led museum”, distancing itself from its origins “born in colonial times” which has previously “influenced its character and makeup”. It will now focus much more on “an approach of proactive repatriation of taonga”. This is reported by Newstalk’s Philip Crump – see: Auckland Museum to shift from 'colonial museum' to 'Te Tiriti-led Museum'

Dr Bryce Edwards

Political Analyst in Residence, Democracy Project, School of Government, Victoria University of Wellington

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NZ Politics Daily – 22 February 2024

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NZ Politics Daily – 22 February 2024

Top “NZ Politics Daily” stories today

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NZ Politics Daily – 22 February 2024

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