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10:23 am, December 14th, 2025 - 13 comments
Categories: chris hipkins, education, election 2026, health, labour, local government -
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If Labour wins government in 2026, many things won’t be recoverable.
This is true of the world as of New Zealand, but as Chris Hipkins regularly reminds us including today on RNZ, what was possible in 2017 will not be possible in 2026 and beyond.
The Dunedin and Nelson hospitals will be well underway. The big Roads of National Significance in Northland, Waikato expressway, and northern Wellington region will be underway. Light rail will never be spoken of again. We’ll be paying our transport taxes by RUC and not fuel taxes.
City Rail Link and Sky City National Convention Centre will have opened as signature National Party projects. The Cook Strait ferries don’t arrive until 2029 but they’re underway. Again.
The RMA has been replaced but otherwise after 6 years of re-regulation chaos there won’t be major opposition to its replacement. The urban densification rules will be locked into place particularly in Auckland because consultation will have finished everything except final decisions in 2027. The new water entities will be locked in place. The regional council representation will have been re-bundled, with tasks and teams re-aggregated into relevant local councils.
If Labour did win in 2026, so many of those old battles won’t be worth the fight. Even if you aligned every Supreme Court judge in the land. Dozens and dozens of the Fast Track (COVID Recovery) or Fast Track 2025 legislation proposals will be beyond argument and under construction.
All the social trends will be slightly worse apart from crime. New Zealand’s economic drivers will be from the South Island: now that’s a real head shift. The North Island including Auckland is on track to continue stagnation.
In 2026 we’re going to have a very different country and the old one isn’t coming back.
There will be no spare public money to spend on anything, given how in debt we will be by then and how low public income forecasts are. Thanks Nicola Willis for the shambles.
The old policy shopping lists aren’t working. I loved the country I grew up in. I still love it in its current form. But nostalgia is no longer delivering political dopamine.
Like the New Zealand that Helen Clark inherited from Jenny Shipley in 1999, New Zealand won’t be the place we knew and loved in the years previously.
There will be a new form of New Zealand.
Many parts of the politics in the United States will also be unrecoverable. Trump will still be in power so we don’t know if NATO or other core institutions will survive for long. China and the BRICS will accelerate their re-ordering of the world. Climate change will continue to corrode the earth of the 20th century we once knew.
What would be worth still putting your shoulder to as a government?
There are specific areas we know a fresh government can still influence strongly: education from early childhood to tertiary. Health from the cradle to the grave. Housing public and private. Defence. Police. Treasury. IRD and the expanded Bright Line/CGT. Transport in all its income and regulatory and maintenance forms, if not all its projects. Energy in generation, reticulation, and retail. ACC. NZSuper. Employment law and conditions and pay. Housing public and private. All solid policy fields to get teeth into. And the big one: the power to determine how to re-discipline Parliament itself as our respectful and respected law making institution. Hipkins is clear abou the targets adn the levers.
After a recession lasting since 2021 the public will not be in a mood to believe any expansive promise. From personal experience Hipkins knows the scale and expense that Ardern undertook to save the Old Zealand, and relentlessly broadcast the tragedean heroics of muddling towards a New Zealand slightly worse than what she started with.
The Helen Clark government is worth pointing to. When Prime Minister Clark started there was a similar sense of ruin and exhaustion about New Zealand. But with help from an outstanding and talented Cabinet and creative and insistent support partners, a lot of good from that government was built and still stands. Her government shifted what was possible, starting from that new form of New Zealand.
Chris Hipkins if he gets to over 40% of vote will be his own person:
Here’s the longer form where you get a taste of what has driven him from an early age, what some big policy trigger points are:
I don’t like admitting it particularly but the political parties that will do well in 2026 are the parties that admit and embrace the form of New Zealand that exists in 2026 and not an imagined one.
I find it very hard to be hopeful right now. I’m not alone. Thank God it’s Christmas as a saying is more an existential relief than an expansive moment in which to sit back in a reclining armchair and open the stop-gated dam of civic imagination once again.
Goodbye nostalgia. Hello election 2026.
I understand the sentiment, and it's probably true that some old battles get harder with time, but this is a curious concession to make at the moment.
How is it that a one-term Government of radical, authoritarian neoliberals who overturned so much of its predecessor's policy, gets to have so many of its own policies retained even after it leaves office? Especially given that their predecessors were not radicals at all, but rather moderate social democrats who believed in the efficacy of markets, relatively low taxes, strict limits government debt, and only a modest social safety net. Does only the far right get to be activist now, while the centre-left must accept what they've done and potter about with a few worthy projects at the margins? Because if that's at all true, it looks to me like a suicide note for 2029 – it looks like acting as the handmaiden to a new government in 2030 that is even more radically right-wing than the current coalition.
The quick answer is:
National are failing because they are being at least as radical as Labour tried to be.
It's a lesson only Labour is currently learning.
The left had its shot at a hard leftward shunt 2017-2023 and blew it.
National are running into the same trap as Labour by trying to do too much too fast, but they have had zero crises to distract them and Labour had at least five.
Absent massive crises like white extremist massacres, global pandemics, and multiple tropical cyclones like Gabrielle, National are doing a lot better at executing than Labour.
Even if we had another Saviour/Mamdani/Ardern/Moadibh (Dune) to arise and unite and declaim from the cliffs with their hair flying back and whatever, everyone can see that success didn't come, let alone "transformation".
It's not a suicide note or whatever predictable histrionics the old left usually generate, it's just a clear reading of what people will really put up with.
Whatever the merits of your general argument, that is patently a nonsense. Liberal shunt perhaps, but NZF blocked any seriousl left shift in the 2017 terms, and Ardern blew the social capital once Labour had an outright majority. Too soon after the restrictions of the pandemic, Labour tried to push two things on a population not ready and botched it: three waters and co-governance.
The reason it failed is because it believes that central government can impose policy on people. The people proved them wrong. Both three waters and co-governance were ideas that served NZ, but ironically given the post, both needed to be adapted to the NZ we are, not the NZ Labour thought we should be.
And if Labour can enforce such change, why shouldn't National? Had Labour taken the time to engage with the public and bring them along we might not be another few inches closer to losing democracy.
I'm not being partisan here, I have some heft critiques of the Greens atm too (and TPM obviously). Best we get them out of the way now, so next year we can focus on getting a change of government.
A dimension to absorb over the holiday period is infiltration of AI into mass media. Deepfakes are being touted as the wave of the future. The imaginal realm of our minds is verging on breakout into mass consciousness (having been too subliminal for too long already). Any thinking around the future of politics must factor this in.
Culture will trend into a massive warp from here on. We must do a shift into field theory in intellect and these things in discourse:
I like to find out what people are talking about, not just pass it by as something I encountered that day.
Field theory (psychology)
In Gestalt psychology and social psychology, field theory is a theory that examines patterns of interaction between the individual and the total field, …
Interactive diagrams
Quantum field theory
Well now I haven't understood that what about the moving interactive diagram?
And from – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.Field_theory_(psychology)
In Gestalt psychology and social psychology, field theory is a theory that examines patterns of interaction between the individual and the total field, or environment. The concept first made its appearance in psychology with roots in the holistic perspective of Gestalt theories. It was developed by Kurt Lewin, a Gestalt psychologist, in the 1940s.
This field theory can be expressed by a Lewin's equation: B = f ( p , e )
, meaning that behavior B is a function of the person p and their cultural environment e….
Now that sounds good. If only they could have got the hang of it a bit earlier we might have headed off Hitler and the whole mind-bending WW2 and its foulness and stench. So have a go at it now with renewed vigour as we haven't much time left. Since we privatised rubbish collection, there is a truck just about every day and who knows what they'll eventually find to put in them. Having one council collection seems more rational as these trucks look expensive and add to global warming and oil resource wastage but it all will fit into some divine plan that will ultimately be revealed.
+100 AB.
Hipkins is being pathetic in saying that he will not reverse many of the things the COC is doing.
He could and should make it clear that the massively pro developer/pro super rich legislation that will force local councils to compensate landowners if they are refused consent for developments will be reversed.
This will be a disaster for our landscapes and could well bankrupt the Queenstown Lakes District Council.
Queenstown is labouring under its commercial popularity and having trouble housing the labour required to do it. Then the Tarras airstrip – that was part of their Great Leap Forward wasn't it? Funny how the self-satisfied laughed at China's. We on a couple of islands can't even cross between them much less leap. And Kiwi ingenuity with a do-it-yourelf try was only possible in good weather probably. Individualism isn't enough to win against the corpse bribing and menacing their way into the nation. Bribing by buying rights to reside and vote, multiply possible in local council; and menacing by having the International business court which has its own supra-laws on trade and commerce to threaten us with costs, fines etc.
Labour will find it hard to reverse National's changes cos they come at a great cost. The Ardern govt made small changes (that it isn't worth Nat's effort to reverse) eg banning plastic bags, Matariki holiday. Labour's big policies were aspirational and never got started & were bogged down in consultancy phase(Mt Roskil rail, 100,000 Kiwibuild, bike harbour bridge, 3Waters).
National's changes will have got started … freeways & mining consents so Labour runs the risk of cancelling projects that are underway and that is tough on the provinces.
To be fair to the Ardern govt, some lefty changes / initiatives have been the target of NAct1's concerted Ctrl-Z efforts introduced via urgency – ahh, memories!
Who saw Nicky No Boats and Brooke GPT coming – ‘govt’ buy and for the sorted.
What Labour propose in the education space will be interesting given the context of the pace and extent of the Stanford 'reforms.'
Replacing the Ministry with some Oz group (ignored there) for advice on policy is out there.
If Labour want to meekly accept blankets and muskets in exchange for our sovereignty, thinking their new masters will be trustworthy ……
Well then, we know how that turns out.
I don't get this Ardern did nothing from 2020. Why then did the CoC spend their first 100 days repealing it? 2017 to 2020 Winston was the handbrake. He stopped a lot happening that should have been done ; Fair Pay Agreements for example.