We’re stuck. Stuck with governments paralysed by inflation, the demands of the property market, declining social cohesion and overwhelming demands for more spending in health, housing and infrastructure. Even in these last few pre-Budget days, when the current government is getting praised for being decisive, in reality it’s just trotting out some very old ideas. Here’s our punishment stick, say Nicola Willis and her colleagues, and look, there are the public servants, social-housing tenants, disability carers, rough sleepers and beggars, even the ones just minding their own business, which is most of them. Whack, whack, whack.
Willis knows she made a mistake to say people in social housing have “won the Lotto”, but she thought it. How appalling.
We’re stuck. Trust in politicians and political parties is low. AI threatens everything, in ways it’s almost too hard to think about. And thanks to the megalomaniac narcissist in the White House, we face both climate devastation and a war that could destroy the global economy. Not that the techbros, fossil-fuel oligarchs, manospherians and almost the entire Republican Party seem to mind: they, presumably, figure they’ll just keep on making money and accumulating power.
Christopher Luxon and Willis are not to blame for the war on Iran, any more than Jacinda Ardern and Chris Hipkins were to blame for Covid. But all four of them and their colleagues share some responsibility for many of the other problems we face. We’re stuck, at least in part, because of them.
What should they do? What should we want from them, as voters?
In my view, the political views of most people now are motivated by two great desires. We want change, and we want reassurance.
It’s as true for supporters of Te Pāti Māori as it is for fans of Act and everyone inbetween, and it’s true globally.
We want change because what we’ve got is not working. It’s time for something else. And we want reassurance that change will not hurt. We remember better times and we want them back.
In my view, the political views of most people now are motivated by two great desires. We want change, and we want reassurance.
We really are stuck, and it’s not good. The major parties, National and Labour, are keen to offer reassurance. But do many people believe them? Meanwhile, schooled up by Nigel Farage, Winston Peters has found a way to offer change and reassurance. If our other parties don’t start looking more effective, the appeal of NZ First’s divisive, climate-denying, nostalgic fantasies will just keep growing.
This post is the first of three, which I’ll publish among other posts over the next few weeks. The focus is on some of the ways we might get ourselves unstuck, so that we do make progress as a society and don’t succumb to the rank populism of the right.
This one’s about the idea of a “grand coalition”: a wartime-style government formed by National and Labour working together. NatLab, if you like.
Also in the series: Why is it still not easy being Green, even though, uniquely among opposition parties, they have an actual policy platform? And how credible is the newly refreshed Opportunity Party, which says it can break the deadlock?
The problem with a NatLab government
NatLabs? I’m not a fan. A grand coalition is valuable in times of genuine national emergency: both New Zealand and Britain had one during World War II. But we’re not there, at least not yet.
For the rest of the time, the idea is incoherent and ignores some of the basic realities of politics. But I do think it contains within it the germ of a really good idea. I’ll come back to that.
The reality of politics was sharply exposed when Labour and National agreed to a housing accord in 2021. Both parties knew three things: urban development required greater housing density; councils were too scared of voters to zone for that density; and if only one party was to take the lead in instructing councils, the other would gain electoral advantage.
In effect, the accord was intended to take political risk out of the issue. If the two parties agree an unpopular thing should be done, they might succeed if they do it together.
But National abandoned the accord a mere two years later, because there were votes in it.
That experience tells us a grand coalition would be inherently unstable. Politics is about jockeying for advantage. It requires parties to remain true to their supporters and define themselves as different from the other lot. But if they’re in a coalition, it’s hard for them to promote policies their own voters don’t support: what would be the point in voting for a party that lines up with its main opposition?
Maybe that’s wrong. Maybe a NatLab government would turn out to be stable. Almost certainly though, for that to happen, it would be because it adopted only the policies they both agreed on.
This is not a better option. We’d have a government with a supermajority doing very little: “managing” the status quo but not improving it. A stable government where nothing much changes.
That is not going to satisfy the widespread societal discontent or build trust in politics. If we want change, why vote for an arrangement that won’t deliver it?
Where good ideas come from
Nobody wants the same anodyne government forever. I want policies that are more progressive than either Labour or National has been prepared to implement; you might want the opposite. We vote in the belief it might happen.
Related to this, let’s remember where good ideas come from: usually, it’s the edge. Societies progress through conflict and debate, the clash of vested interests, the search for better ways to do things and, over time, the adoption of new norms of behaviour and belief. Many of the things that define us now came from a once-radical fringe: basic workers’ rights, votes for women, the welfare state, our proudly anti-nuclear tradition, the idea that we are a nation of the south Pacific.
Radical ideas move into the mainstream. The process is dynamic and often troubled: we all know state institutions don’t work as fairly, justly or efficiently as they should. But they do work and they’re improveable. Democracy is alive and progress happens.
It’s not perfect, but there is no perfect form of democracy. In this, perfect is the enemy of good.
(And right now, just to mention in passing, our democracy is doing much better than some others. The contest of ideas in Aotearoa is not accompanied by ICE goons snatching people because of the colour of their skin, breaking up families, killing citizens in the streets.)
If we want new ideas to infuse our parliamentary processes and decision-making, the minor parties need a role and need to believe they have a future.
Some of the people advocating a grand coalition don’t see this, or perhaps they don’t value it. They seem a little less motivated by a desire, not for progress, but for the status quo. Auckland mayor Wayne Brown, for example, wants to keep the “pesky” minor parties out of government, because they have “nutter” ideas.
Yes, sometimes they do. But so do the major parties. Last year, National increased the speed limit around most schools. Last election, Labour thought taking GST off fruit and vegetables was a better way to address cost-of-living hardship than asset tax reform.
If we want new ideas to infuse our parliamentary processes and decision-making, the minor parties need a role and need to believe they have a future.
A political setup designed to shut minor parties permanently out of power would be disastrous. Their bad ideas might be sidelined, but their good ideas would be too. Their voters would feel alienated and betrayed.
This points to the biggest reason of all that a NatLab government would be bad for us. The fresh thinking of minor parties saves the major parties from atrophy. Without them, their own policies would probably be rubbish.
What they share
And yet. Despite their deep tribal enmity, National and Labour do have many things in common. They’re both neoliberal: fully committed to low debt, restrained government spending and a market-based economy. They’re also both moderate in this: to varying degrees, they believe the state has a role in overcoming market failure and providing a welfare safety net.
Both parties have moved towards integrated land-use planning, where transport, housing, utilities, schools, shops, parks and other services and amenities are planned together. They’re not great at it yet, but they’re moving in the right direction.
They both use immigration to boost GDP and provide essential workforces in several sectors. They are roughly aligned on free trade, following the US in foreign policy but not too overtly, and maintaining a relatively small conventional defence capability.
All up, they’re both orthodox “mainstream” parties in a social democracy.
There’s something else they share: an inability to build back better out of a crisis.
Covid and the US/Israeli war on Iran offered one party then the other the chance to reform the economy so we become, as a society, more resilient and more able to seize the opportunities in front of us. Both failed to seize that chance. Perhaps they don’t want to, or they don’t know how, or they’re too scared, or they just don’t see the world in those terms: whatever it is, they’re useless at it.
There’s something else they share: an inability to build back better out of a crisis.
This failing has had long-term consequences, including low productivity, a chronic inability to manage healthcare needs, car dependency that chokes our cities, absurdly high fossil-fuel dependence, a tragically distorted housing market and, related, a deeply flawed tax system. Banks, supermarkets and electricity gentailers are allowed to keep profiteering at our expense. And there is a shocking deficit in the creation and preservation of long-term assets, including water services, transport, flood resilience and the natural environment.
The truth is, neither National nor Labour have the policies or the courage to overcome these things. The neoliberalism within which they operate has nothing to offer.
What they don’t share
There’s another problem. Whether you lean left or right, you probably hope that if your lot gets into government, they will pursue the things that distinguish them from the other lot, not abandon them. Because despite their similarities, in many ways National and Labour are not the same. And those differences are important.
Perhaps the best way to describe this is that while the major parties stand quite close to each other, they face in different directions. Quite often, they walk in different directions. Here’s a by-no-means exhaustive list of ways they really don’t align: treaty partnerships, tax reform, climate action, workers’ rights, social housing, environmental protections, energy independence, road safety, benefit access, school curriculums, primary healthcare …
A better way to do it
So what’s the good idea lurking inside the bad one? How do we not remain stuck in the middle with those two?
The two major parties should work together more often, but not in a formal coalition.
MMP needs to evolve. Its current iteration is widely regarded as giving too much power to the minor parties of the government. This undermines democratic accountability and trust in democracy. When a majority of voters can say, “This isn’t what we voted for,” over and over, cynicism takes hold.
The prospect of the two major parties working together more often offers a way forward.
We’re in this situation because of how badly the National Party has mishandled its coalition relationships. Act and NZ First both secured many specific policy commitments in the 2023 negotiations to form a government that National itself clearly did not want. And since then they’ve both been free to attack their own government, seemingly whenever they want.
They’re playing National for fools. Which means they’re playing us for fools too.
National and Labour should both make public commitments, before the negotiations, to a willingness to work together to stop tails wagging dogs.
So let’s have them do it differently. After the election this year, coalition negotiations should not produce long lists of specific legislative commitments. They should, instead, focus on principles, parameters, and the direction of travel. Nothing wrong with a few key policy commitments, but there’s everything wrong with pandering to niche obsessions, payoffs to influential party supporters and culture-war obsessions that everyone knows will be inflammatory.
The major parties should seek confidence and supply support from minor parties, in return for roles in the government they form. But they should also tell prospective partners they are willing to seek wider parliamentary support for measures the minor parties aren’t keen on.
And they should tell us as well. National and Labour should both make public commitments, before the negotiations, to a willingness to work together to stop tails wagging dogs.
Ad hoc bipartisan support is already a reality, but it’s surprisingly rare. On the other hand, it’s been frightful how many of NZ First and Act’s kookier policies have been allowed to waste parliament’s time and get turned into bad law.
As per above, there’s no perfect form of democracy, but perfect is the enemy of good. This is a way forward: it should produce better decision-making, it will almost certainly help rebuild public trust in politics, and it will make our parliament more fit for purpose as it, and we, face the new crises to come.
It is, in essence, a commitment to parliament.
Elsewhere in Hopetown
More good news from home and abroad.
The floating gardens of Copenhagen
In the harbours and canals of Copenhagen, the Danish government has installed floating platforms planted with wildflowers and native vegetation. They’re a way to attract birds, bees and other pollinators into the city, but the benefits for everyone are also plain to see. It’s not a new idea. The same thing has been done on the Charles River in Massachusetts.
And before Hernán Cortés introduced smallpox to the Aztecs, the city of Tenochtitlan relied for much of its food on floating gardens called chinampas. They had frames made from wood and reeds, often with willow trees at the corners whose roots held the gardens. The soil was a mix of nutrient-rich canal mud and organic waste: yes, they recycled their kitchen rubbish. Chinampas were so fertile, they could produce up to seven harvests a year. The Spanish drained most of the canals, although chinampa remnants still exist in the Xochimilco district of Mexico city.
Bike trips on the rise
Auckland in April saw a 20% jump in the number of bike trips recorded by Auckland Transport’s 26 counters around the city, compared with April 2025. In all, 309,197 trips were recorded: that’s about the same as the pre-Covid peak of 2019.
The obvious reason for this is the fuel crisis, but that doesn’t explain the pretty consistent longer-term trend, which is also up. More cycleways means more safe cycling means more people on bikes.
Among the latest to open: Pitt St and Vincent St, which together connect the entertainment precinct around Aotea Square with Karangahape Rd, Mercury Lane and the pink pathway, the Northwest Cycleway and the cycleway on Great North Rd. An ever-more joined-up network, emerging from all those roadworks, and these latest lanes have been done cheaply and well: even Wayne Brown should be happy.
There’s heaps more data, some of it live, courtesy of analyst Tim Welch, right here.
Zohran v Amazon
Delivery vehicles from Amazon, a company worth US$2 trillion, had racked up millions of dollars in fines in New York by the time Zohran Mamdani became mayor. Not for parking illegally, but for idling: churning diesel fumes into the city air while their drivers made deliveries. Mamdani says, “We collected every dollar they owe the people of this city.” That’s US$9 million. “No company,” he added, “no matter how large or small, is above the law.”
Thank you Simon, and a delight to read you again. Only 2 writers were worth reading in the NZ Herald , you and Gregor Paul. Both excellent writers and observers, both deeply caring yet dispassionate in judgement. Once you left the Herlad it left a vast hole in the social commentry. I look forward to reading your next 2 parts in this series.
Thanks for another positive outlook Simon that makes a lot of sense. Hopefully it gets through to people of the close-minded sort.
Some here wish for a Kiwi Mamdani.
We already have one :
Chloe Swarbrick.
God forbid she gives up politics before seeing her party's policies put into action. In some respects, she's our only hope.