Published in The Australian (Sydney), 3 November 2026
On Saturday, New Zealanders elect a new parliament and deliver their verdict on the first term of Christopher Luxon’s government.
What that verdict will be, nobody can say with any confidence. Some of the final polls put Luxon’s centre-right coalition within reach of a majority, while others give the left enough seats to govern with help from the relaunched Opportunity party.
With Opportunity polling not far above the 5 per cent threshold, small shifts could decide who governs.
Yet it is astonishing that this election is close at all.
Three years ago, after six years of Jacinda Ardern and Chris Hipkins, voters nearly halved Labour’s vote and gave National a clear mandate for repair. No New Zealand government has lost office after a single term since 1975, and National never has.
Labour has barely recovered from its defeat. The race is only close because National’s own support has fallen away. This government never won New Zealanders’ minds, let alone their hearts.
Since 2018, the pollster Ipsos has tracked how voters rate government performance. Weeks before they threw Labour out, voters still rated its performance higher than they rate Luxon’s government today, at 4.1 out of 10. Luxon’s government has never been rated above Labour’s final score.
That would be easier to understand if the government had failed across the board, but four ministers in particular delivered what they promised. Erica Stanford, the education minister, brought structured literacy into classrooms, banned phones in schools and began replacing a vague curriculum with one built on knowledge. Regular school attendance in the second term rose from under half of all pupils in 2023 to nearly two-thirds this year.
Chris Bishop, who carries housing, transport and planning, did the heaviest lifting of the term. He pushed through a fast-track consenting law for large projects and, in parliament’s final weeks, steered through the laws that will replace the Resource Management Act, the planning law that has held back building since 1991. House prices have been flat for three years, and rents fell for much of last year.
Todd McClay, the trade minister, closed a free-trade agreement with India, which National had promised in 2023.
Mark Mitchell, the police minister, can point to progress on one of National’s central promises. Violent crime has fallen by about a fifth since the government took office, and a quarter fewer young people are committing serious, persistent offences.
Voters have given the government remarkably little credit for any of it. Since August 2024, Ipsos finds, the share of New Zealanders naming crime as one of their main worries has halved. Yet over the same period, National’s lead as the party best able to handle crime has all but vanished.
Crime has faded as a worry, and with it National’s strongest issue. Voters trust Labour more on the worries that now dominate, above all the cost of living. Of the 20 issues Ipsos tracks, National now leads on just one, crime, by a single point.
Luxon’s government did well when determined ministers took charge of problems. It did less well when success depended on the Prime Minister and his finance minister, Nicola Willis. Voters looked to them for a plan that hung together and for leaders who seemed to understand their lives.
In opposition, National cast Labour as profligate spenders and promised a thorough repair of the public finances and a leaner public service. In office, it delivered far less.
Treasury now expects no surplus until 2028-29, two years later than National promised in 2023. Even the improvement in Treasury’s latest forecasts owes much to inflation and bracket creep, which have pushed up the tax take. Inflation, which voters blame on the government, is helping to mend its books.
The public service is barely smaller than the one National inherited and still more than a third larger than in 2017, when Ardern took office. National now plans to cut thousands of positions by 2029. That is work for a second term, if it gets one.
A government that cut little has been punished as if it had wielded the axe. Now National is campaigning on fiscal discipline again, without having made the case for it. It still pledges to bring core Crown spending back towards 30 per cent of GDP, a level Treasury does not expect before 2030-31. To households squeezed by the cost of living, that sounds like harder times ahead, and its opponents are happy to call it austerity.
The government’s leadership has often sounded more like Labour than National. Ministers lectured the banks on their profits and interest rates and pushed for a parliamentary inquiry into them. National now promises to pursue a break-up of Foodstuffs, one half of the supermarket duopoly, even though the study it relies on does not rule out legal and implementation hurdles that are “very high, or even insurmountable”. Australians will remember the idea from Peter Dutton’s last campaign.
Whether such talk won over any cost-of-living voters is doubtful. It certainly irritated National’s own supporters, especially in business, where people who once regarded National as their party now ask why it keeps picking fights with companies.
Unlike the Key government after 2008 or Ardern’s after 2017, Luxon’s had no honeymoon, and the Prime Minister’s personal ratings have stayed modest throughout. To many voters, its leaders came across as a little aloof, as if they did not quite feel what the cost of living meant for an ordinary household.
Luxon’s response this week to the Ipsos poll showed the problem. There was “a range of polls” saying “a lot of different things”, he said, and he was “more interested in the data of what’s actually happening in the economy”. To voters who had just named petrol prices and hospitals as bigger worries than at any time since 2018, that will not have sounded like someone who was listening.
That is how a first-term government has ended up in a close race. Several of its ministers did good work. But the government’s leaders never offered a coherent plan that might have won voters’ minds, nor the warmth that might have won their hearts. And they have picked fights with the people most inclined to vote for them.
If Labour wins on Saturday, it will owe its return less to its own case than to National’s leaders never having made one.
