Comment: Prime Minister Christopher Luxon proudly touted the completion of a 49-point, 100-day plan of action for his new Government on Wednesday.
The clock started then and runs until March 8. The plan includes 24 items to help “rebuild the economy and ease the cost of living”, eight to “restore law and order” and 17 to “deliver better public services”.
“We will be a government that gets things done for New Zealand and we will start straight away, with a 100-day plan that includes a range of actions we will take to improve the lives of New Zealanders,” Luxon said.
As ambitious as that sounds, peel back the layers and it becomes clear there’s a lot of aspiration for the next three months but not quite as much substance. That’s particularly the case for measures that will tangibly “improve the lives of New Zealanders”.
The big ticket items, which will soon be implemented, are mostly in education and health. An hour of reading, writing and maths will be required in primary and immediate schools from next year and cellphones will be banned in schools. Five new health targets will be set and cold medicine that includes pseudoephedrine will be legalised.
Much of the plan involves introducing legislation, which may then take many more months to pass. Just four of the legislative actions are commitments to pass a bill within the 100 days: Repealing the RMA reforms, Fair Pay Agreements, the Smokefree reforms and the Clean Car Discount (the last of which has a December 31 deadline in the plan).
There are 10 actions that pledge to introduce legislation within 100 days. These bills would return the Reserve Bank to a single inflation mandate; remove the Auckland Fuel Tax; restore 90-day trial periods for workers; repeal Three Waters reforms; crack down on gangs; boost police powers relating to gangs; allow remand prisoners to access rehabilitation services; repeal part of the Arms Act; disestablish the Māori Health Authority; and repeal the Therapeutic Products Act.
Luxon suggested at his post-Cabinet press conference on Wednesday that laws regarding the Reserve Bank and gang patches would be in place by the end of the 100 days, but the plan he released doesn’t commit him to that timeline.
Most of the concrete actions that can take place within the 100 days are stop work orders. The Government is stopping work on the Income Insurance Scheme; Industry Transformation Plans; a pumped hydro scheme at Lake Onslow; Let’s Get Wellington Moving; the draft Government Policy Statement on Land Transport; further speed limit reductions; Auckland Light Rail; the prisoner reduction target; taxpayer funding for cultural reports for offenders and He Puapua (which hasn’t been a going concern for two years anyway).
Then there are the raft of policies the Government promises to begin work on, including a National Policy Statement for renewable energy; a National Infrastructure Agency; housing policy; cracking down on youth offending; and “delivering better public services and strengthening democracy”.
The difficulty is, though the health and education policies may make a measurable difference for Kiwis’ access to services, there’s nothing obvious in the 100-day plan that will help with the cost of living in the first 100 days.
This is the issue the election campaign was won on. It should be National’s signature issue, but cost of living is mostly absent from the action plan.
Asked what in the plan would help Kiwis’ wallets within 100 days, Luxon pointed to the Reserve Bank changes and the abolition of Fair Pay Agreements. The latter may, in theory, reduce some costs for consumers, but businesses will probably have priced those changes in as soon as the election results were clear.
The former, meanwhile, isn’t necessarily going to be through Parliament by March 8. Moreover, returning the Reserve Bank to a single target, inflation, would just free it to resume raising interest rates without worrying about employment. Hardly the big win for working New Zealanders that Luxon was touting.
There are, of course, the tax changes. Oddly these were absent from the 100-day plan, and though Luxon was accompanied at his post-Cabinet press conference by Leader of the House Chris Bishop for an exhaustive recounting of the Parliamentary calendar over the next three weeks, there was no mention of the “mini-mini-Budget” at which the tax changes will be implemented.
It’s hard to understand why this, National’s signature policy, would be left off the plan. It speaks to some confused messaging, or perhaps Luxon and Finance Minister Nicola Willis beginning to realise the scale of the work before them to get the package to all add up.
What’s clear is that the mini-mini-Budget won’t be scheduled for at least a few weeks.
What will the Government’s first official action be, then?
Before any legislation is introduced, before even the Speech from the Throne, the 100-day plan commits the Government to pause the adoption of new World Health Organisation rules developed (partly by Sir Ashley Bloomfield) in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. This was a commitment in the coalition agreement with New Zealand First, after Winston Peters campaigned on false allegations that the rules would override state sovereignty.
It speaks to priorities, but not necessarily Luxon’s.
Hardly surprising Marc, 100-day plan priorities, not necessarily Luxon’s. Among the personalities that present problems for society in general and for the corporate world in particular are narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy, sometimes referred to collectively as the dark triad. As described by researchers Nathanson, Paulthus, and Williams , “ Those high in narcissism are characterised by grandiosity, entitlement, and a sense of superiority over others… Such individuals are arrogant, self centred, and consistently self-enhancing… Individuals high in Machiavellianism are characterised by cynicism and the manipulation of others…these individuals exploit a wide range of duplicitous tactics to achieve their self-interested goals.
Abolishing the Fair Pay Agreements legislation acts against the PM’s claims that this will be a government that helps low and middle income earners.
Abolishing the Fair Pay Agreements legislation leaves us stuck in a low wage economy rut.
Systems like fair pay agreements are a common feature of the high wage economies our PM claims to aspire to.