Duncan Garner: Just how patient does National think voters are?
Still hopeful: Finance Minister Nicola Willis and PM Christopher Luxon are looking forward to economic growth next year. Photo / Getty Images
The Prime Minister’s enthusiastic but largely scattergun pursuit of economic growth in 2025 looks to have failed, even though there’s four months of the year still to play out. Does anyone really reckon those four months will make a difference?
Christopher Luxon came out of the blocks hard. It would be a year of economic growth, he declared. But his declaration was designed for grabbing headlines only, rather than deeply planned and linked to policies. It needed more than just energy; it needed hard and detailed work wrapped around the idea. It needed changes to laws and economic settings, but National doesn’t appear to have thought that far.
Everything was once over lightly – and even that’s being generous. Jawboning and trying to talk growth up is not an economic policy.
So, here we find ourselves and just how is it looking? Not great – and again, that’s being generous. Newly released figures show unemployment has spiked to a five-year high of 5.2%. That’s 16,000 Kiwis who lost their jobs during the past year and are receiving Jobseeker Support or watching their savings – if they’re lucky enough to have any – dwindling. Half a million New Zealanders rely on food parcels every month; homelessness has spiked.
This is surely not what Luxon meant when he said this was the year of economic growth? Growth happens when you hire workers, but National appears to have taken us in the other direction. Its programme is failing, isn’t it?
Yet this week it doubled down. It fell to the Finance Minister Nicola Willis to explain the sagging economy, and she sunk Luxon’s growth goal within the first few minutes. It wasn’t deliberate or planned or done with any malice. I doubt she even realised what she’d said.
She simply said we are yet to close the chapter on the worst economic management in the history of this country when Labour was in office, but when that happens next year, watch out for the opportunities and jobs that might come your way. Next year, there’s the key.
So, park your ambitions for 2025 – the survive to 2025 catchcry is well and truly out – and wait until 2026. Apparently. Willis declared that good things are happening and grumbled about people taking a glass-half-empty view of unemployment figures when they were better than what was forecast. (Let’s ask the 16,000 recently unemployed how they feel about what’s in the glass.)
She said 240,000 jobs are expected to be created during the next four years, but that seems like more big talk from National. They’d be better to lower expectations and surprise us with the delivery, a useful lesson they could take from a Labour government.
As loose with the purse as Labour was, National’s limited impact in the economy is keeping the opposition alive in the polls, when it would normally, at this stage in the cycle, be dead and buried.