NEW ZEALAND
In 2024 we mostly stayed home, because David had a job working on AI technology. We went to the USA (family, friends, and work) with a side-trip to Canada for the Footbag World Championship tournament, but otherwise we stayed home and spent quality time with our friends in beautiful Tauranga, except for our beach holiday in Rarotonga for Lili's 50th! One thing is for sure, we made the best decision of our lives to move to Tauranga. Our friends are fabulous, our house has an epic garden, we have the best weather in the country, and the city has a lot going on for a small, laid-back place. New Zealand politics is kind of shit now, but at least we're not ruled by an orange menace dictator dude.
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Now it's 2025, and so far so good, for us personally, but the world situation is not looking good. You know. It's all over the news. So I won't bore you with that. I'll bore you with a report on New Zealand politics instead...
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Buckle up.
The Coalition Government's Systematic Failure (2025):
In October 2023, the people of NZ elected a right-wing coalition government led by National Party's Christopher Luxon, supported by the ACT Party (led by David Seymour) and the NZ First Party (led by Winston Peters).
This coalition has delivered a cost-of-living crisis, systematic attacks on public services, environmental destruction, and policies serving wealthy landlords and corporate interests only. Meanwhile, for ordinary Kiwis, economic indicators are flashing RED. The evidence of this government's true priorities is overwhelming and damning. From the start, our fearless leaders have abused parliamentary urgency to ram through major legislation without scrutiny, bypassing committees, expert testimony, and public debate. See below for examples. This deliberate avoidance of oversight shows they know their policies are unpopular and immoral. The real urgency lies in the cost-of-living crisis (and global climate action), not in deregulating everything that protects ordinary people.
The Cost of Living Crisis: Food prices and rents are soaring while wages stagnate, driving increased inequality and homelessness and poverty. Rent hikes are crushing families; mortgage stress is spreading. Yet property speculators get new tax breaks?! Young people have lost access to unemployment benefits, KiwiSaver contributions are cut, childcare support is gone, and scientific research funding has been slashed. None of these measures address the true crisis, the extreme cost of living that should be the government's top priority.
Health System Cuts: Over 2,000 jobs have been axed from Health NZ, the largest share of nearly 10,000 public-sector layoffs, despite already critical understaffing! Shame! Nurses leaving for Australia are not replaced, and IT cuts risk patient safety. The numbers expose madness: expert analysis claims that New Zealand desperately needs 3,450 more doctors and 4,100 more nurses in the next decade, with over 1,800 doctor positions already vacant. The government response? Cut thousands of health jobs. The human cost is devastating. Meanwhile, Health Minister Simeon Brown diverted $50 million to private companies, outsourcing thousands of procedures. This isn't fiscal responsibility, it's privatization by stealth. Cut public healthcare, then claim private companies are the solution to the crisis you created. What we need instead is a big boost in funding, to hire more doctors and nurses, and pay them a fair wage.
By the way, Wellington Central now feels like a ghost town with so many jobs slashed, and so many people squeezed by high costs. I recently visited and caught up with former colleagues in the public service. Across the board, the mood was bleak. Everyone I spoke to described the job cuts as reckless, too much, too fast, and driven more by ideology than need. Vital institutional knowledge is being lost, and skilled professionals who were delivering essential services, axed! Why?
Worst Housing Market in the World (relative to income): This disaster is a case study in serving vested interests, not public need. Rental costs are skyrocketing. Houses are unaffordable. The coalition has done nothing to help here, in fact they have done the opposite by giving a new tax cut for investors. The coalition has refused to implement any meaningful tax on housing wealth or capital gains, despite emphatic recommendations from experts (city council rates based on housing value are separate). The result is zero effective taxation on housing wealth, which is so stupid, because we need the tax revenue, and this provides the perverse incentive for people to invest in housing ahead of productive businesses. NZ housing prices are firmly among the worst in global affordability rankings. But wealthy white Kiwi boomer landlords vote for National, because they hate paying tax.
The coalition's urgent repeal of the so-called Three Waters reform was another big mistake. This reform was a sensible, evidence-based response to a genuine crisis, a public health necessity after repeated system failures. Consolidation addressed chronic underfunding and inefficiency. Co-governance with Maori was about stewardship and Treaty of Waitangi obligations. The reform created the scale and financial capacity needed to fix decades of neglect. So why destroy a sensible compromise that was urgently needed? The answer seems clear: racism and privatization. The coalition has been blatantly anti-Maori. They even abolished the Maori Health Authority under urgency, despite persistent inequities in Maori health outcomes, which only proves the racism argument (there are more examples). The current proposal shifts control to commercial boards without properly addressing pollution, affordability, or Treaty obligations. It treats water as a product, not a right, which will hurt poor communities. So now cities are left with the massive cost of updating regional infrastructure, and they don't have the money.
Speaking of water, New Zealand's rivers are in a crisis, many choked with nitrate runoff from intensive dairy farming. Some groundwater sources are now unsafe to drink, and nearly half of monitored rivers and lakes fail to meet health standards. But instead of strengthening freshwater protections, the coalition government is doing the opposite: dismantling the National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management, sidelining Te Mana o te Wai (which once put the health of waterways first), and rewriting the rules to favour polluters. These rollbacks empower corporate farming interests to discharge more waste with less oversight, while stripping away the legal tools that communities and iwi use to protect their rivers. It's a deliberate, cynical shift, sacrificing environmental health and public wellbeing for short-term profits.
The Treaty Principles Bill was another blantant attempt to take away rights from Maori, rights rooted in the Treaty of Waitangi. This bill was drafted without consultation, and promoted with rhetoric designed to inflame racial tensions. The bill generated over 300,000 public submissions, the largest civic response in parliamentary history. The scale of opposition reveals the government's fundamental disconnect from public values. At least democratic resistance remains alive.
The Fair Pay Agreements Act which was designed to bring dignity to industries like cleaning, security, and bus driving, was repealed, under parliamentary urgency, of course. Just another quiet knife in the back of working people.
The reinstated Three Strikes Law has been condemned by legal experts as ineffective and discriminatory, yet the coalition brought it back anyway. The law disproportionately harms Maori, which may be a feature rather than a bug for a government comfortable with divisive racial politics.
Marine Environment Destruction: Minister Shane Jones has championed the position that bottom trawling should continue unimpeded, including in vulnerable and biodiverse ecosystems. The government has blocked protections both internationally and within Auckland's Hauraki Gulf. Jones actually argues against protection for vulnerable habitats at international fisheries meetings. Shame! Bottom trawling is environmental vandalism on an industrial scale. The scale is staggering. This isn't sustainable fishing, it's strip-mining the ocean floor. Why? Short-term commercial profit, ecological health be damned.
Climate Change: They cut the Clean Car Discount under urgency, then went further: reopening offshore oil and gas exploration, delaying agricultural emissions pricing, fast-tracking mining projects, and slashing climate funding. They also weakened the Emissions Trading Scheme and leaned heavily on forestry offsets instead of actual emissions reductions. Together these represent a deliberate retreat from climate action. And this: the Fast-Track Approvals Act ... Projects can now bypass environmental protections, public consultation, and Treaty obligations if they serve corporate interests. This law serves extractive industries while destroying legal protections built up over decades. The pattern is clear: environmental protection is being systematically dismantled to serve corporate profits.
The Regulatory Standards Bill creates mechanisms for corporate interests to pressure Parliament to weaken protections for workers, the environment, health, and Maori treaty rights. This is a blatant effort to enshrine property and corporate rights ahead of the public interest. Sure, we should streamline the red tape for a lot of things, but this bill is terrible.
In another cynical move, the Coalition rewrote New Zealand's Pay Equity Law, under urgency, voiding active claims affecting nurses, teachers, care workers, and midwives. These were live claims, with years of evidence, suddenly rendered worthless. The government raised the threshold for all future claims too, making it virtually impossible for anyone to argue their work is undervalued due to gender. Women's groups and unions are furious. So am I.
I sadly conclude that this government serves property speculators, extractive industries, cow farmers, and corporations, not the average Kiwi. This isn't just incompetence, it's the successful implementation of an agenda that transfers wealth upward while using culture war politics to distract from terrible policy. Economic indicators show widespread financial distress. Democratic processes have been corrupted. The evidence of this government's true priorities is overwhelming and damning.
OR... We could tax wealth (I believe that an inheritance tax is the best way to do this). We could raise a ton of money while simultaneously taking the heat off the absurd housing market (by shifting investment incentives). Next election: Party vote: GREEN. The Green party is the only major party who backs this approach. The TOP party does too, but they are sadly not viable. Meanwhile, for those of us who are lucky enough to own our own homes, life in New Zealand is actually great. Especially if we compare ourselves to the extreme sh*tf*kery happening overseas. Applications from Americans to move to NZ are at an all time high...
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