A Crisis Response Designed to Exclude

There's something almost admirably brazen about the way this government operates. When a crisis arrives, one that affects every household in the country regardless of income, employment status, or circumstance, the National-led coalition reaches instinctively for a mechanism that excludes the poorest New Zealanders by design. Not by accident. By design.

The Strait of Hormuz crisis, caused by the United States and Israel launching an illegal war of aggression on Iran, has driven petrol prices to levels not seen in this country's recent memory. Every family that owns or depends upon a vehicle is being squeezed. 

The retired couple driving to their medical appointments. The solo parent on a Jobseeker benefit ferrying children to school across a city with inadequate public transport. The person on a supported living payment who has no realistic alternative to a car to get to their treatments or those on jobseeker support who are required to attend job interviews. All of them are being hit. All of them are suffering.

On 25 March 2026, RNZ reported:

Fuel crisis package: Nearly 150,000 families to receive $50 a week

Speaking to reporters, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said the package struck the right balance.

"It is a hard reality that we cannot alleviate the pressure of rising fuel costs for everyone. And as we have learned from the Covid response would do more damage to our economy, which has just started growing again."

The government's response, announced by Finance Minister Nicola Willis and Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, is to deliver up to fifty dollars a week to approximately 143,000 families through a temporary boost to the In-Work Tax Credit.

The measure will cost an estimated 373 million dollars over a year and has been fastened, with some precision, to an existing mechanism that carries within it an explicit exclusion clause: no person receiving a main benefit from Work and Income may receive it.

On 25 March 2026, RNZ reported:

Who Will Be Eligible to Get an Extra $50 a Week as Part of the Fuel Crisis Package?

It excluded beneficiaries, superannuitants and those without children.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Willis said for beneficiaries, there would be usual increases on April 1 which "working families" did not automatically get.

"And I'd also note, working families face the obligation to get to and from work each day. Beneficiaries do not face that obligation," Willis said.

 

Read that again. The In-Work Tax Credit, by its very architecture, bars beneficiaries from receipt. This was not an oversight. It was a political choice made years ago, and it is a political choice being enthusiastically renewed today.

Willis, when pressed on why families on core benefits were excluded, offered the observation that welfare payments would increase from the first of April through the usual annual inflation adjustments. This is the kind of answer that requires a certain composure to deliver without embarrassment.

Half of NZ's most vulnerable children excluded from fuel relief packagehttps://t.co/zv6DR1CCQh

— Newstalk ZB (@NewstalkZB) March 26, 2026

Those inflation adjustments, modest by any measure, are entirely unrelated to a sudden and severe fuel price shock. They were calculated before the Strait of Hormuz became a flashpoint. They address a different problem.

To offer them as an equivalent response to a specific and acute crisis is not fiscal prudence. It is sophistry dressed as compassion.

On 25 March 2026, the NZ Herald reported:

Fuel Relief: How New Zealand's $50 Support Package Compares with Support Overseas

New Zealand’s newly announced fuel relief package will give about 143,000 “squeezed middle” families $50 a week through a boost to the In-Work Tax Credit.

However, unlike many overseas responses to the oil supply shock, it does not directly reduce the price of petrol at the pump nor offer support to businesses.

There’s also no targeted support for beneficiaries or superannuitants, with neither eligible to receive the boost, which begins on April 7 and will be paid weekly or fortnightly, depending on when people are paid.

What is revealing here is not merely what the policy does, but what it says. The language surrounding the announcement has been carefully chosen. Families in the "squeezed middle." Parents "working hard for a living." The implicit contrast, as always, is with those bottom feeders who are not working hard, who are not deserving, who have made, in the preferred framing of this coalition, poor choices.

The In-Work Tax Credit has always carried this ideological freight. It is a payment that rewards employment with an almost moral fervour, as though being in paid work is itself a virtue sufficient to entitle one to support during a crisis, while being unemployed, elderly, disabled, or otherwise reliant on the state is a condition that forfeits such entitlement.

On 25 March 2026, RNZ reported:

Is Fuel Support Package 'Generous' or Not Enough?

Isaac Gunson, spokesperson for the Child Poverty Action Group, said it would help working for families but there was nothing for people relying on benefits.

"Close to a quarter of a million children live in households receiving a core benefit and the idea that there's no additional support for them that will be made available is pretty outrageous."

While Finance Minister Nicola Willis said they were potentially less affected because they did not have to travel to work, Gunson said they would still need to travel for groceries or job interviews.

He said the 3.1 percent increase in benefits from April 1 would not be enough.

"The idea that benefit dependent households won't face as big a downturn in their finances because they don't have the same obligations to go to work… that just doesn't stand up."

The Child Poverty Action Group has noted the obvious and the New Zealand Council of Christian Social Services has called for the package to be extended to beneficiary families. The Green Party's co-leader Chloe Swarbrick has also pointed out, correctly, that the government has simultaneously pushed people out of work through its neoliberal economic settings and is now withholding crisis relief from those same people.

The current government has increased unemployment by 35% since coming to power, a very sobering figure that should guide peoples voting preferences come November 2026.

On 30 March 2026, the NZ Herald reported:

Fuel Crisis: About 140,000 Families to Receive $50 a Week to Help with High Fuel Prices

The Green Party’s reaction was far more critical, saying it left too many New Zealanders behind.

“The Government’s narrow tweaks to tax credits leaves behind the tens of thousands of people their economic plan has pushed out of work, only to then punish with new obligations and sanctions,” said Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick.

“So much for planning for the ‘worst-case scenario.’ There is no plan to support people on to public transport and reduce fuel demand, no plan to prevent corporations price-gouging while families cut back on groceries.”

It is worth pausing on the numbers. The income cut-off for the In-Work Tax Credit sits at around $89,000 for a family with one child, rising with each additional child. This is, in practical terms, a payment that can flow to families earning near six figures, while a solo parent surviving on a benefit well below the poverty line receives nothing. The government calls this targeted. One might call it something else.

The increased GST from the first 6 months of rising fuel costs will easily cover the estimate $373 million WFF in-work tax credit for the year. This financial relief should be expanded to all Kiwis on low incomes. Cheapskates, @NZNationalParty. #CostOfLivingCrisis #nzpol pic.twitter.com/oD6gCfnmvd

— Jackal (@Jackalblog) March 24, 2026

This isn't an aberration. It fits precisely into the pattern that has characterised this coalition since it took office: benefit cuts, sanctions, the scrapping of the New Zealand Income Insurance Scheme before it even began, and the steady withdrawal of support from those most deprived of state help while tax arrangements continue to favour those at the top.

The fuel support package is merely the latest expression of a governing philosophy that regards poverty as a personal failure and welfare as a reward to be withheld.

New Zealand has a Child Poverty Reduction Act. It has commitments, statutory ones, to the wellbeing of children regardless of what their parents do for work. Those commitments are being quietly set aside while the government congratulates itself on its fiscal discipline.

The squeezed middle, at least, appears to have the government's attention. Those below the middle can, it seems, be squeezed a little harder.

The Real Cost of Brooke van Velden's Time in Power

Brooke van Velden has resigned as Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety, and the occasion demands considerably more than the polite eulogy that ministerial departures typically attract. Her tenure was, by any serious accounting, one of the most regressive periods in New Zealand's modern labour history. To permit it to dissolve into the news cycle without further examination would be a profound disservice to the hundreds of thousands of workers whose livelihoods and legal protections were stripped away while she held the portfolio.

Let's start with the overnight demolition of pay equity protections for working women. In August 2024, the government rushed amendments to the Equal Pay Act through under urgency, extinguishing the legal mechanisms by which workers in female-dominated industries could pursue pay equity claims. 

The affected workforce, predominantly women employed in aged care, early childhood education, and health support, had in many cases invested years in building claims through the proper channels. Those claims were voided at speed. Subsequent estimates placed the number of affected workers at well over 300,000, including nurses, teachers, support staff, hospice workers, and caregivers, with warnings of care sector breakdowns and skilled workers leaving for Australia.

On 19 March 2025, RNZ reported:

How a crucial 45-minute meeting between ministers took pay equity claims away from tens of thousands of women

Those choices formed the backbone of the government's overhaul of the once "world-leading" Equal Pay Act - retrospectively stripping nurses, teachers, carers and other female-dominated workforces of the right to pursue pay equity claims under the existing law.

Within five weeks of that meeting, Parliament had passed the Equal Pay Amendment Act under urgency - a move the people's select committee last month described as "a flagrant and significant abuse of power".

The legislation was announced then passed all stages of Parliament within three days in May, meaning the public had no opportunity to make submissions through the usual select committee process.

Dozens of in-train claims were stopped. The rules governing future claims were significantly tightened. And $12.8 billion originally earmarked to fix decades of systemic gender discrimination was instead returned to the Crown's Budget allowances.

The government's justification, that the framework was too costly and legally unpredictable, amounted to a frank admission: the rights of low-paid women were to be weighed against fiscal convenience and discarded. Van Velden offered this argument with the characteristic breezy confidence of someone who has never had to worry about whether her wages reflected the gendered undervaluation of her occupation. 

Van Velden even proudly stated that she had saved the Budget by axing pay equity. She said this as though stripping hundreds of thousands of women of the right to fair remuneration was a sensible line item to balance, rather than an act of deliberate economic harm to the most vulnerable workers in the country.

On 24 March 2026, RNZ reported:

 

ACT Party deputy and minister Brooke van Velden retires from politics

On the decisions she's made in government, van Velden said she's proud of all of them, including the highly controversial changes to the pay equity regime.

"I hand on heart believe that the decisions I made and the actions I took were in the best interests of the country, and ultimately I saved the Budget."

This is where the gaslighting becomes particularly galling. ACT has always presented itself as a party of individual freedom and fairness, the great liberators of the citizen from state interference. Yet when working women sought to use a legal framework to secure fair pay, the party moved with extraordinary speed to shut that framework down. The freedom ACT champions is, in practice, the freedom of employers to continue paying women less. Everything else is rhetoric.

That hypocrisy runs deeper still when one examines ACT's own internal culture. In June 2024, reporting by Stuff journalist Tova O'Brien revealed a picture of the ACT Party campaign operation that bore little resemblance to the party's libertarian self-image. At least six staff members and volunteers had quit following the 2023 general election, citing allegations of intimidation and unfair treatment of women. 

Sources described a culture of fear, comparing the campaign environment to the Hunger Games. The party's own board faced a vote of no confidence. Candidates and volunteers were left in tears. This is the organisation whose deputy leader was entrusted with protecting New Zealand's workers from exploitation and harm in the workplace. The irony here is profound.

On 7 June 2024, RNZ reported:

Tears and resignations after ‘train wreck’ ACT Party election campaign, sources claim

Allegations of a culture of fear

Several people close to the party spoke to Stuff on the condition of anonymity.

The divisions between "Mission Control" and "HQ" were at the heart of the ructions, they said.

"HQ became a bit like a military hospital," one source said. "Mission control, were shooting their kneecaps out faster than HQ could patch everybody up.

"It wasn't unusual to be at HQ and see people in tears, be it candidates or supporters, just sitting down saying I can't do this anymore."

Things got worse when problems started arising with candidates - one compared vaccine mandates to concentration camps, another compared the vaccine to drownings and another referred to Covid as "mass hysteria".

"There was a culture of fear in the party when the wheels started coming off around candidates, anyone that stuck their head up above the parapet was seen as dispensable."

Then there is the minimum wage manipulations. For nearly three consecutive years under this coalition, minimum wage increases have failed to keep pace with inflation. In real terms, New Zealand's most vulnerable workers have gone backwards every single year. This isn't economic bad luck. It is the predictable consequence of a government that regards minimum wage increases as an inconvenience. 

Van Velden happily presided over each of those inflation-adjusted wage cuts, invoking, as ACT ministers often do, the spectre of small business hardship.

On 26 October 2025, the NZ Herald (pay-walled) reported:

Meet Brooke van Velden – the minister loathed by unions and loved by business

Van Velden has been the most polarising minister of labour or workplace in the past 50 years for unions and workers.

Brooke van Velden's philosophical indifference to the welfare of ordinary people was perhaps most vividly exposed in her now-infamous comments about the value of human life. Appearing on Q&A with Jack Tame, she appeared to reconfirm that New Zealand had placed too high a value on human life during the COVID pandemic, stating that the country completely blew out what the value of a life was and that she had never seen such a high value on life.

The comment was not a gaffe. It was a window into the worldview that animated her entire tenure as the minister responsible for worker safety. That attitude to life ultimately followed her into the significant portfolios her mentor David Seymour attained for her in the right-wing coalition government.

Just like the covid response saving lives was not a bad thing for the economy, the evidence shows that higher minimum wages do not destroy jobs in the way Brooke van Velden and the ACT Party's ideological tradition has always insisted they will.

The rewriting of contractor law sits alongside these failures as a reform that will outlast the headlines. The changes narrowed the tests by which workers could establish that they were employees rather than contractors. In practice, this shifts power decisively toward the multinational platform companies, logistics operators, and labour hire firms that have always preferred contractor arrangements precisely because they eliminate sick leave, holiday pay, and the protections of the Employment Relations Act. 

Uber drivers, transport workers, construction workers, cleaners, security staff, and labour hire workers all had protections removed, stripping their rights to minimum wage protection, extended leave entitlements, unfair dismissal protections, and their employer's superannuation obligations. The language of worker choice and flexibility was deployed to obscure what was, in substance, a gift to corporate interests.

On 24 March 2026, Emily Writes reported:

So, Brooke Van Velden, this is your life...

Van Velden removed protections for all of these workers by allowing them to be classed as contractors despite their actual work situation. This removed their rights to minimum wage protection, extended leave entitlements, unfair dismissal protections and their employer's superannuation obligations. Her Employment Relations Amendment Bill essentially rewrote employer-employee relationship obligations into a form never before seen in the modern working world.

All of this has occurred against a backdrop of accelerating economic destruction that the coalition has done nothing to address. Heinz Wattie's announced the closure of three factories in Auckland, Christchurch, and Dunedin, affecting around 350 jobs. The McCain processing plant also shut its doors, leaving Buy NZ Made to warn that these closures reflected broader structural challenges facing New Zealand manufacturing, with almost half of surveyed producers citing slow demand. 

In Nelson alone, the closures of Kitchen Things, the Eves Valley sawmill, Proper Crisps, and Sealord's coated fish factory saw over 500 jobs vanish in the space of three months. In the first half of 2025, 1,270 businesses shut down, a 12 percent increase on the same period the year prior.

 

On 31 August 2025, E tū reported:

Manufacturing in crisis: Closures hit hard in 2025

It's been a devastating year for manufacturing workers around the motu, with major closures gutting local economies and leaving thousands of skilled workers out of a job.

...

These aren’t isolated incidents, but symptoms of a deeper failure. The Government has no clear plan to protect the country’s manufacturing base. While other countries invest in green tech, domestic supply chains, and set proper industrial strategies, Aotearoa is letting decades of expertise and infrastructure slip away. 

This is the economic environment in which van Velden was weakening worker protections, cutting real wages, attempting to gut health and safety regulations that were passed in the wake of the Pike River disaster, and handing legal advantages to employers. Families and survivors of the Pike River tragedy described their meeting with van Velden as a waste of time: She seemed to be focusing all the time on the employers, said Sonya Rockhouse. 

One might have expected a Minister for Workplace Relations to ask what impact her policy agenda was having on workers already confronting redundancy, casualisation, and economic insecurity. There is no evidence she did.

Then came the parliamentary theatre. In May 2025, in response to a Labour question referencing a Sunday Star-Times column by journalist Andrea Vance that had used the C word against the female ministers who dismantled pay equity, van Velden became the first MP to use that word in the debating chamber, framing her outburst as a defence of women against misogynistic language. 

The performance was characteristic: theatrical indignation deployed to reframe a debate about the stripping of women's rights into one about parliamentary decorum. It succeeded, briefly, in changing the subject, but the 300,000 women who lost their pay equity claims remained without recourse.

On 14 May 2025, RNZ reported:

Brooke van Velden drops C-word in Parliament

I do not agree with the clearly gendered and patronising language that [national affairs editor for the Sunday Star-Times] Andrea Vance used to reduce senior Cabinet ministers to girlbosses, hype squads, references to girl math and c****," van Velden said.

What we are witnessing, and have been witnessing since 2023, is the consequence of allowing ACT's neoliberalism to function as the ideological operating system of a government nominally led by the National Party. National, once a broad church capable of restraint and pragmatism, has been progressively colonised by ACT's worldview, an economic doctrine with a long and distinguished record of failure that stretches from the 1980s reforms Roger Douglas inflicted on New Zealand to its various iterations elsewhere. It treats labour as a cost to be minimised, regulation as an imposition to be dismantled, and workers as mere market actors who need only be freed from protection to flourish.

Van Velden leaves office with a record that should not be quietly filed away. It should be studied, in detail, as a case study in what happens when personally held beliefs outrank evidence, and when the interests of multinational corporations are accorded a higher priority than the dignity and security of working people.

New Zealand's Very Expensive Military Gamble

There is a particular kind of recklessness that masquerades as strategic vision. It does not announce itself as folly. It arrives dressed in the language of security partnerships, capability upgrades, and alliance obligations, and it is precisely this brand of recklessness that now defines the Luxon government's approach to New Zealand's military procurement.

The National-led coalition has committed approximately NZ$2.7 billion to the purchase of five Sikorsky Seahawk helicopters and associated military assets from the United States.

In August 2025, RNZ reported:

Watch: Judith Collins and Winston Peters reveal new $2.7b planes and helicopters

The purchases are the first that were forecast in the Defence Capability Plan unveiled in April, setting out an expected $12b in spending on defence assets over four years, $9b of that being new money.

The plan overall lifts New Zealand's defence spending to more than 2 percent of GDP over the next eight years.

There is a fundamental and largely unexamined question concerning these significant military acquisitions: what precisely does New Zealand receive in return for spending billions of dollars on American hardware, from an administration that has demonstrably withheld already-purchased, already-paid-for weapons from other allied nations the moment it suited Washington's political interests?

The answer, on current evidence, is very little. When the Trump administration ordered a freeze on military transfers, the consequences were not merely theoretical. Weapons already loaded onto trucks in Poland for onward delivery to Ukraine were stood down. Ammunition purchased using funds specifically appropriated by Congress for the purpose was simply not delivered.

Countries that had paid in good faith were left without the equipment they had contracted for and were offered no refund. These were not adversaries. They were partners, customers, and in several cases treaty allies who had done everything Washington asked of them.

New Zealand confirmed through MFAT that it had zero input into the Trump administration's Foreign Arms Sales Task Force priority partner list and did not even know whether it appeared on it. That the directive came with not only incentives but obligations: priority partners were expected to share production costs more substantially. New Zealand was apparently expected to pay more, without being consulted about whether it was considered a priority partner at all.

In April 2025, RNZ reported:

Officials don't know if NZ is on US priority weapons trading partners list

The NZ Defence Force is competing to get arms under its new $12 billion Defence Capability Plan in a world market where military spending is surging.

The NZDF talked with US lawmakers in April about potential opportunities to buy from the US, Official Information Act papers showed.

A foreign arms sales taskforce newly set up by Trump said it sought international input before launching its first six initiatives last month, including new legislation aimed to help lower the barriers that limit the proliferation of high-tech arms.

MFAT said: "New Zealand has not had any input into the taskforce."

 

That situation has since worsened. In February 2026, Trump signed a new executive order formally establishing an America First Arms Transfer Strategy, directing the Secretaries of Defense and State to develop clear priority partner criteria within 90 days and produce a prioritised sales catalogue within 120 days.

The order makes explicit that countries investing more heavily in their own defence and occupying a critical geographic role in US strategic plans will receive preferential treatment.

Despite increasing the military budget to 2% of GDP by 2032/33, as requested by the Trump administration, New Zealand has still received no public confirmation that it appears on that list. 

Official papers meanwhile show that 60 percent of the NZ Defence Force's $6 billion in arms currently on order is sourced from the United States. New Zealand has committed billions to a supplier whose formal priority framework it had no input into, whose criteria it may not meet, and whose list it may not even appear on.

This is the arrangement the Luxon government has chosen to deepen, at a cost of billions of dollars, during a period in which the geopolitical reliability of the United States as a supplier has been placed in serious and documented doubt. The pattern is not obscure. It is structural. American arms transfers have been converted from security commitments into instruments of political leverage, withheld when recipients pursue independent foreign policies, dangled when compliance is required, and apparently non-refundable in either case.

Meanwhile, the broader context in which New Zealand is making these procurement decisions has shifted considerably. The United States and Israel have conducted military operations across at least six countries in the past year, including strikes inside Qatar, a US Major Non-NATO Ally hosting the largest American air base in the region, without Doha's consent and with Qatar notified so late that it had no practical opportunity to prevent the attack.

The lesson for smaller allied nations is stark: allied status under the current Washington-Tel Aviv axis confers no guaranteed protection, and may offer no recourse whatsoever if the political winds change.

Against this backdrop, Winston Peters signed New Zealand's name to a joint statement expressing readiness to contribute to military efforts in the Strait of Hormuz, a strait closed in direct response to an American-led war launched without UN authorisation, and then spent the following week insisting the commitment meant nothing of the sort.

A functioning foreign minister cannot sign a document on a Friday and disclaim its meaning on a Tuesday. The commitment was made when New Zealand's name appeared on the paper.

What the Luxon government has managed, with impressive efficiency, is to spend billions locking New Zealand into military dependency on a supplier that does not consider us a priority, to sign documents attaching us to a war we had no hand in starting, and to do all of this without extracting a single meaningful concession in return. Not a tariff exemption. Not any guarantee of equipment delivery. Not a formal security guarantee. Not even confirmation that our name appears on the correct list.

Deference to Washington, as former Prime Minister Helen Clark and others have noted plainly, is not only distasteful. It is not working. And two and a half billion dollars' worth of helicopters, purchased from a government that views arms transfers as political bargaining chips, does not constitute a defence policy. It constitutes a very expensive gamble on the continued goodwill of an administration that has shown, repeatedly and in writing, that it does not feel especially obligated to honour its side of the arrangement.

New Zealand deserves better than that. It is not clear that this government has even noticed.

The Politics of New Zealand's Rental Crisis

There is a particular kind of dishonesty that often dresses itself up as economic theory. For years in this country, we were told that New Zealand's rental market was simply supply and demand in action, the invisible hand at work, efficiently allocating housing to those who valued it most.

What it actually was, of course, was something rather more tawdry: a system engineered to extract the maximum possible sum of money from anyone unfortunate enough to need to rent a roof over their head.

Let us be precise about the mechanism. When a prospective tenant applied for a rental property in New Zealand, they were routinely required to declare their income. This was presented, with straight faces, as an affordability check. In practice, it functioned as a price-setting instrument. Landlords and property managers could observe what a household earned and calibrate the rent accordingly, not to the condition of the property, not to its size, or whether the plumbing actually worked, but to the upper limit of what the prospective tenants could conceivably be made to pay.

The signal here was not quality. It was vulnerability. Middle and higher-income earners found themselves charged accordingly, regardless of whether they were occupying a warm, well-maintained home or a damp, mouldering box dressed up with fresh paint and a flattering TradeMe photograph. Low-income Kiwis often didn't even get their foot in the door.

The results were entirely predictable. By 2022, some 46 percent of renting households were spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent, compared to just 19 percent in 1988. Since 2003, house prices had increased by 230 percent, whilst median household income grew by only 137 percent. Housing was no longer all about shelter. It had become a very profitable business enterprise.

The insignificant easing of rents we have witnessed recently isn't the result of good governance to remedy this issue. The mean weekly rent in New Zealand for the year to September 2025 was $568, showing a 0.6% decline compared to the prior year. This is welcome in itself, but its cause isn't deregulation or the benevolence of landlords. It is a symptom of a recession and emigration. Net overseas migration slowed to just 13,066 in the year to July 2025, compared to a peak of over 135,000 in late 2023, and the net outflow of New Zealand citizens hit a record high of 47,600 in a single year. People are leaving in their tens of thousands because they cannot afford to live in New Zealand.

That is a grim form of market correction, and it deserves to be named as such. Contrast it with Australia, where sustained migration has pushed rents up by an estimated 43.8 percent over five years, with the typical renter paying around $10,500 more annually than at the start of the pandemic. New Zealand's slight moderation has been purchased at a considerable social cost, the departure of skilled younger workers at a rate that constitutes yet another unsustainable crisis.

Against this backdrop, the Green Party's Renters' Rights campaign proposes a two percent annual cap on rent increases, the reversal of no-cause evictions, a Rental Warrant of Fitness, and the construction of tens of thousands of quality public homes. It represents not a radical departure but a long-overdue acknowledgement of reality.

On Wednesday, RNZ reported:

Greens promise to cap rent rises at 2 percent a year

The 'A home for everybody' policy was launched by the party co-leaders and local MP Tamatha Paul at a rental home in Wellington on Wednesday afternoon.

Co-leader Marama Davidson said with rental costs increasing from 19 percent of incomes in 1988 to 30 percent in 2022, it was time for housing to be treated as a human right.

"In a country like Aotearoa, with our wealth of resources and skills, there is no excuse for people to go without a decent home, let along any home at all."

Co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick said the Greens would build tens of thousands more public homes and support councils and community providers to do the same, stimulating local economies and creating jobs while curbing homelessness and waiting lists.

"This isn't rocket science," she said. "Mass building of public housing almost 100 years ago led to decades of stable, affordable homes for New Zealanders.

ACT Housing spokesperson Cameron Luxton responded by calling the campaign a plan to make more people homeless. This is, to put it plainly, a talking point that serves a specific constituency, and that constituency is clearly not tenants.

On Wednesday, Scoop reported:

Greens Revive Campaign To Make More People Homeless

ACT Housing spokesperson Cameron Luxton says the Green Party’s latest housing policy is a return to the same failed ideas that drove up rents and reduced supply.

“We’ve just seen rents fall nationally for the first time in years after anti-landlord policies were reversed. The Greens now want to take us straight back.

WHO ACTS FOR ACT

The ACT Party was founded on the Rogernomics tradition of Roger Douglas, a disciple of the view that markets, left sufficiently alone, will solve all human problems. Three decades of evidence in New Zealand's housing sector clearly suggests otherwise. Yet the party's institutional memory, and crucially its donor base, remains firmly committed to the proposition that property investors are the real victims of housing policy.

This isn't merely ideological. It is financial, and the money trail isn't difficult to follow. Analysis by RNZ of Electoral Commission records found that people with interests in the property industry donated more than half of their political contributions to National, with ACT receiving 32 percent of the total, and Labour a mere two percent. As Victoria University senior research fellow Max Rashbrooke observed, donors of this scale enjoy a constant level of access to ministers that ordinary voters can only dream of.

The conflicts of interest are not merely financial. They are, in the most literal sense, structural. The 2024 Register of Pecuniary Interests shows that Parliament collectively owns 261 properties, an average of 2.2 per MP. National MPs account for the bulk of this, with 18 of them owning approximately 30 or more rental homes. One does not need to be a committed cynic to ask whether legislators with this much skin in the game are best placed to design fair tenancy law.

THE DAVID SEYMOUR PROBLEM

No examination of this subject is complete without dwelling on the particular and instructive case of David Seymour. For years, Seymour cultivated his public image as the honest outsider who simply could not afford to buy a home, a man of the people standing bravely against the landed political elites of Parliament. It was a compelling narrative. It was also, in material respects, completely untrue.

In 2021, Seymour was forced to correct his Register of Pecuniary Interests to disclose that he was a beneficiary of three trusts, the NN Faithfull Family Trust, the BH and VA Seymour Family Trust, and the Beachcomber Trust, two of which held property including a Northland beach house and a neighbouring section, and his father's house in Whangarei. These interests had not been declared in previous years, in violation of Parliamentary disclosure rules. His return was also filed late, drawing a formal rebuke from the Registrar of Pecuniary Interests, Sir Maarten Wevers.

Seymour called it an honest mistake and claimed he had legal advice saying he did not technically own the properties. That is a distinction the rest of us might find difficult to take seriously. A beneficiary of a trust that holds property stands to inherit or profit from that property. The rules requiring disclosure of such interests are not ambiguous. They are written plainly in Standing Orders, and Seymour is a lawmaker who has sat in Parliament for over a decade... a decade too long some might argue.

What makes this particularly pointed is that in 2017, when he was still falsely presenting himself as property-free, Seymour told RNZ: "The fact that the average National MP owns 2.2 properties of their own might suggest why they have spent a lot of time introducing solutions that you would almost suspect were not supposed to work, because they certainly have not." He was right. He was also, at that moment, a beneficiary of trusts that held the very kind of assets he was criticising his colleagues for owning.

One is entitled to ask what he was really doing when he invoked that argument. He was not speaking truth to power. He was in fact dishonestly presenting himself to the public as just another ordinary Kiwi.

Having now restored interest deductibility for rental property investors as a key plank of the coalition agreement with National, and having championed the removal of no-cause evictions, the right-wing coalition government have ensured that the landlord class which funds their political parties have received a considerable return for their political investment, an investment that is ultimately paid for with globally high rents.

A HOMELESSNESS CRISIS OF THEIR OWN MAKING

The claim that the Green Party's proposals would cause homelessness requires particular scrutiny, because the homelessness crisis is already here. It grew substantially under the very deregulatory settings that ACT champions, and it has worsened measurably under the current neoliberal government.

The number of people sleeping rough in Auckland more than doubled between September 2024 and September 2025. Wellington's Downtown Community Ministry recorded a 25 percent increase in rough sleepers in 2025 compared to the prior year. In Christchurch, the City Mission recorded 270 new clients in just six months to March 2025, up from 156 in the corresponding period prior.

The government tightenning the gateway to emergency housing is partly to blame, a policy that came into force in August 2024. The rate of emergency housing applications being declined rose from 4 percent in March 2024 to 36 percent by June 2025. One social agency reported that in a single month, every one of the 27 people they referred to Work and Income for emergency housing was turned away. The government has also reduced its funding for homelessness support by $79 million compared to the prior financial year.

Emergency housing motel numbers have fallen, from 3,141 in December 2023 to 591 a year later. Associate Housing Minister Tama Potaka declared this a triumph. The Salvation Army described it more accurately as a likely contributor to the rising number of people living on the street.

To invoke the threat of future homelessness as a reason to do nothing about present homelessness is not policy analysis. It is a defunct defence of the arrangement that produced the crisis in the first place.

WHAT ACTUALLY WORKS

The international evidence is available to any government willing to look at it. Vienna has kept housing affordable for over a century through a combination of city land ownership and large-scale municipal development that sets a genuine price anchor for the broader rental market. 

Singapore's Housing and Development Board provides affordable housing to nearly 80 percent of the population, combining public construction, grants, and income-sensitive pricing to ensure that shelter is a right rather than a commodity to be speculated on. Finland, through its Housing First policy introduced in 2008, became the only European Union country where the number of homeless people has consistently declined year on year. These nations did not stumble into housing security by removing tenant protections and trusting property investors to be decent humans. They built it deliberately, through sustained public investment and enforceable standards.

WHAT REFORM MUST LOOK LIKE

Any meaningful reform in New Zealand must begin with a centralised rental database, a single authoritative register from which all real estate agents and property managers are required to operate. Every rental property should be assessed and graded by size, condition, insulation, heating, proximity to services, and structural integrity. Rents should be set in relation to that assessed quality, not in relation to the maximum amount prospective tenants can pay.

Properties should be offered to renters in order of quality, at affordable rents calibrated to their actual standard. The practical effect of this would be significant, as better quality houses would be rented first. Owners should also be substantially financially penalised if they leave their properties empty and dilapidated, or demolish houses that are still suitable for human habitation. A substantial proportion of New Zealand's older rental housing stock fails that test. The Healthy Homes Standards are a beginning. A Rental Warrant of Fitness, independently certified, publicly searchable, and tied to legal occupancy, is the logical next step.

The Tenancy Tribunal also requires substantive reform. The procedural and evidential disadvantages facing tenants in dispute with landlords are well documented. The current framework leans heavily toward those with legal experience and resources. Protections for renters need to be strengthened in law, not merely recommended as guidelines, and legal representation support for tenants at the Tribunal must be funded accordingly.

There are genuine risks in any rent control regime implemented carelessly. A blunt national cap, applied without regard for regional conditions, property quality, or supply dynamics, could suppress new construction if designed poorly. That's why the Green Party also owes New Zealand a costed, detailed build programme alongside its tenancy protections. Ambition without logistics isn't a housing policy. It is a press release.

But the answer to that risk is better policy design, not the continued absence of any policy at all.

And New Zealand must build state houses that people actually want to live in. Not cramped, isolated units on the periphery of cities, but well-designed, well-located homes that integrate their residents into communities with genuine access to schools, transport, parks, and employment. Vienna did not solve its housing crisis by building chicken coops. Neither did Singapore.

The lessons are available. The question, as ever in this country, is whether the political will exists to act on it, or whether we will continue to mistake the interests of an asset-rich parliamentary class for the national interest, and simply give up by accepting the resulting misery as a natural consequence of the free market.

New Zealand Signs Up for Trump's War of Aggression

In a move that can only be described as complicity in an illegal war, the Luxon government has added New Zealand's name to a joint statement calling on Iran to cease its closure of the Strait of Hormuz and declaring the signatories ready "to contribute to appropriate efforts to ensure safe passage through the Strait."

The language sounds measured, even bureaucratic. It is neither. Examined carefully, the statement represents a significant departure from this country's independent foreign policy tradition, and it was made in the service of a war New Zealand had no hand in starting and no business joining.

The context is not complicated, whatever the government's communications staff might prefer. 

On 28 February 2026, the United States and Israel launched coordinated airstrikes on Iran, killing the Supreme Leader and targeting nuclear sites, civilian and military installations. Iran responded by returning fire and closing the Strait of Hormuz, through which approximately twenty percent of the world's seaborne oil normally passes. The US then launched a military and propaganda campaign to reopen the strait. New Zealand signed a statement expressing its willingness to assist with that effort. The causal chain here is not ambiguous.

What, precisely, did Luxon commit the country to? The joint statement expresses a readiness to contribute to "appropriate efforts," which is language deliberately vague enough to mean almost anything while binding the signatories to a political position that is entirely clear. Within days, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte was telling Fox News that the signatory countries were working to "implement President Trump's vision" of reopening the strait. Rutte named New Zealand explicitly, alongside Australia, Japan, South Korea, the UAE and the NATO alliance itself.

On Tuesday, the ODT reported:

Peters denies NZ has signed up to secure Strait of Hormuz

Over the weekend, the government joined 19 other countries in condemning Iranian attacks on commercial ships in the Gulf.

In a collective statement, the countries including the United Kingdom and Germany, expressed "deep concern" about the escalating conflict. The statement also expressed its signatories would be ready "to contribute to appropriate efforts to ensure safe passage through the Strait".

They called on Iran to immediately cease threats, laying mines, drone and missile attacks and other attempts to block commercial vessels from travelling through the Strait of Hormuz.

Winston Peters, cornered, insisted that Rutte had "probably been misinformed" and that the statement was "specifically narrow." Christopher Luxon attempted to clarify that any actual contribution would still require Cabinet approval. These reassurances collapse under scrutiny. A foreign minister cannot sign a document on behalf of his country and then disclaim what the document's chief proponent says it means.

The statement exists. New Zealand's name is on it. The framing of the exercise, as Donald Trump's vision being collectively implemented, was provided by the Secretary-General of NATO.

The legal position deserves examination. New Zealand's participation in any military operation would ordinarily require a United Nations mandate. No such mandate exists here. Labour leader Chris Hipkins was correct to note this plainly in Parliament, observing that the commitment was broad and that any support should follow a UN mandate that has not been sought. The UN Secretary-General called for the strait to be opened through multilateral means. The US-led operation is proceeding without that multilateral foundation. New Zealand's statement of readiness to contribute aligns the country with an unlawful, unilateral military enterprise, dressed in the language of freedom of navigation.

This is where Five Eyes becomes relevant. New Zealand's intelligence-sharing obligations under that arrangement have long created an asymmetry in this country's capacity for genuine foreign policy independence. When our signals intelligence apparatus is woven into a shared network dominated by Washington, "independence" in practice often means independence on issues Washington does not care about. The Hormuz crisis is an issue Washington cares very much about. The pressure on Five Eyes partners to close ranks is structural, not merely diplomatic.

The government's preferred framing is that New Zealand's concern is purely economic: fuel security, supply chains, cost of living. These are real concerns, and the closure of the strait has caused genuine hardship. But the remedy for an energy crisis created by a war that the United States started is not to join that war. New Zealand's fuel vulnerability is not Iran's doing. It is the consequence of the US-Israeli strikes, launched without New Zealand's knowledge or consent, in the name of a strategic agenda this country has never endorsed.

 

There is a direct line from Luxon's signature on that joint statement to the Trump administration's campaign to reshape the Middle East by force. The government wants to describe that line as dotted, provisional, not yet fully binding, like a contract initialled but not yet executed, subject to Cabinet review before anything concrete follows. It is not dotted. Signing a joint statement alongside a number of other allied countries, which was then cited by the NATO Secretary-General as evidence of collective support for Trump's strategic "vision" isn't provisional in any meaningful political sense.

The commitment was made the moment New Zealand's name appeared on the document. Cabinet approval for any subsequent military deployment is a domestic procedural step, but it does not undo the political signal already sent to Washington, NATO, and Tehran. That signal is one of solidarity with a military operation that lacks UN authorisation, serves American and Israel's strategic interests only, and has already cost thousands of innocent lives. New Zealand should not be on that list, and the government has not yet honestly explained to the public why it chose to put us there.

It is little wonder, then, that faced with mounting domestic criticism, Peters moved to try and distance himself from the implications of what he had already signed. A foreign minister who endorses a collective statement of military readiness on a Friday and spends the following Tuesday insisting it means nothing of the sort has not changed the country's position. He has merely changed his description of the government's support for an illegal war.

Also on Tuesday, RNZ reported:

Winston Peters says New Zealand not 'rushing to contribute military forces to this conflict'

The Foreign Minister says people shouldn't be alarmed that "somehow we're going to be engaged in some military exercise" following statements by the head of NATO including New Zealand as one of 22 countries "coming together" to secure the Strait of Hormuz.

It comes as Labour raises concerns about the "broad nature" of a joint statement New Zealand was part of over the weekend, and what the commitment may open the country up to.

Winston Peters said there had been "scaremongering" from critics who say the government is "rushing to contribute military forces to this conflict".

"What absolute crap, what absolute nonsense - New Zealand is not a party to this conflict, and we have absolutely no intention of joining it," he said at Parliament on Tuesday. 

  

What we are witnessing is the collision of three failures of political character. Donald Trump, having launched an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign state without UN authorisation, is now leaning on smaller allies to launder his campaign as a collective enterprise. Benjamin Netanyahu, whose government has conducted an extensive project of regional destruction, has found in Trump an accomplice willing to undertake what previous administrations would not start. And here in Wellington, Luxon and Peters have obliged them both, attaching New Zealand's name to their unjustifiable war of aggression and then, when challenged, pretending they had done no such thing.

Peters' assurance that New Zealand has "absolutely no intention" of joining the conflict would carry more weight if he had not already signed a document expressing readiness to do exactly that. These are not statesmen navigating a crisis. They are politicians managing a communications problem, while the bodies mount and the fires burn, and New Zealand's good name is spent in the service of an empire that does not particularly care about our country at all.

The GST Windfall Willis Doesn't Want You to Know About

When a Finance Minister invokes the authority of Treasury, the public is generally entitled to assume that what follows is an accurate rendering of the advice received. That assumption, it appears, does not hold in the case of Nicola Willis and her recent remarks on GST, fuel prices, and the fiscal consequences of the global oil shock caused by Trump's illegal war on Iran.

Speaking in the wake of the Strait of Hormuz disruption that has pushed 91 octane petrol to around $3.30 per litre nationally, with some Auckland forecourts already touching $4.00, Willis offered the following reassurance when questioned about a potential GST windfall for the Crown.

Here's Nicola Willis' 24 March post on Facebook:

Many Kiwis have asked me if the Government will receive windfall tax-gains as a result of rising fuel prices. Short answer: NO! It's a fair question though, so here's what you need to know.
New Zealand's petrol excise tax is a fixed number of cents per litre, not a percentage of the pump price, so the tax take does not increase when fuel prices go up.
 
GST revenue on fuel theoretically rises when pump prices increase, but I'm advised that in the context of current price increases, this is expected to be offset by reduced fuel demand and by lower discretionary retail spending elsewhere as households adjust their budgets. Put another way, as Minister of Finance, I've not been told to expect an increase in the GST-take as a result of the fuel-price spike. 
 
I know this is something many people have asked in good faith, so I'm disappointed to see Chris Hipkins making factually inaccurate claims in response. It's simply misleading for him to allege that the global oil-price shock will somehow benefit the Government at the expense of everyday Kiwis. The simple reality is that petrol price increases will not benefit the Government financially - in fact the opposite is more likely to be the case.

The statement is constructed to suggest that Treasury has assured Willis that higher pump prices will not materially enrich the Crown, because New Zealanders will simply buy less petrol and spend less on everything else. It is, on close examination, a misleading conflation of two quite separate things: the trajectory of GST specifically, and the trajectory of total Crown revenue.

Let us deal with the first claim, that reduced fuel demand will offset the GST gain. This argument rests on the assumption that demand for fuel is highly elastic, that is, when prices rise sharply, people simply stop buying.

The evidence from New Zealand's own context tells a rather different story. Research published by the Motu Institute places the price elasticity of petrol demand in this country somewhere between negative 0.1 and negative 0.66, with short-run estimates at the lower end of that range. At a mid-point estimate of around negative 0.4, a 27 percent price increase would reduce consumption by approximately eleven percent. The GST take on the remaining 89 percent of purchased fuel has still risen by 27 percent. You do not need a Treasury economist to recognise that the arithmetic does not support a cancellation effect.

The second claim, that reduced discretionary spending elsewhere will neutralise the gain, is even weaker. The spending substitution Willis describes is not a disappearance of economic activity; it is a reallocation of it. A household that spends less at a restaurant in order to fill the tank has not removed that money from the GST-liable economy. It has moved it from one GST-bearing transaction to another. Fifteen percent of one hundred dollars spent on petrol raises precisely the same GST as fifteen percent of one hundred dollars spent at a cafe. The total take is, in this respect, broadly unaffected.

What Willis has carefully avoided discussing is perhaps the most consequential dynamic of all: the savings draw-down effect. 

New Zealand's household saving rate was already negative as recently as early 2025, and with wages stagnant in real terms, many families will not simply cut discretionary spending to absorb a $25 to $35 weekly increase in fuel costs. They will reach into whatever savings they have.

That money was previously sitting in a bank account, entirely outside the GST system, generating no consumption tax for the Crown whatsoever. Once it is withdrawn and spent on essentials, 13 cents in every dollar flows to Inland Revenue as GST. Far from reducing the Government's GST take, this dynamic actively increases it. The struggling family dipping into its savings to keep the car on the road is, in effect, funding a portion of its own relief package.

Independent analysis from Infometrics suggests the Crown could receive somewhere in the vicinity of $180 million in additional GST revenue from higher fuel prices over a hundred-day crisis period. Factor in savings drawdown, and the realistic upper bound reaches well beyond $300 million for 100 days, a figure not far removed from the estimate put forward by Opposition Leader Chris Hipkins, whom Willis incorrectly dismissed due to her own disinformation.

On Tuesday, The NZ Herald reported:

 

Fuel crisis: Nicola Willis slams Chris Hipkins’ ‘factually unbased claims’ over Govt’s tax take 

“Put it this way, as Minister of Finance, I’ve certainly not been advised that I’ll be getting windfall tax gains out of the current global crisis, in fact, I’ve been told to brace myself for the opposite, which is that this is likely to reduce Government revenue.”

Willis said she had been “disappointed” by Hipkins’ “factually unbased claims”.

“I think it’s really disappointing to see the leader of the Opposition grabbing what is a fair question but then providing Kiwis with misleading information. This is a time for cool, calm heads.”

 

Treasury's concern about total Crown revenue declining is almost certainly genuine and well-founded. A lack of any government growth strategy and a sustained fuel shock will compress corporate profits, slow economic activity, reduce PAYE receipts, and, if the Reserve Bank is forced to respond to inflation exceeding four percent, tighten financial conditions at exactly the wrong moment. These are serious risks to New Zealands fiscal outlook and Willis should be taking them seriously.

However, what the Finance Minister isn't entitled to do is apply a broad macroeconomic revenue warning specifically to GST in order to deflect from a perfectly reasonable question about whether the Government is quietly pocketing a windfall while ordinary New Zealanders struggle at the pump. Treasury would not have advised her that GST revenue is going to fall, because the evidence strongly suggests the opposite. Any economist who advised this should be sacked!

The Minister would do well to be straight about the distinction, rather than allowing the public to draw an inference that her own officials almost certainly did not intend.