Jul 7, 2025 Society
Since when did extending a deadline get a job done quicker?
Christopher Luxon and David Seymour want to extend the parliamentary term to four years. A referendum is planned for next year’s election, with any change to follow when we vote in 2029. According to the prime minister, the current three-year term causes short-term thinking. “You’re often just getting going and then you are into an election year again,” he moans.
We should take Luxon at his word about his own performance. But previous New Zealand governments experienced no such difficulties implementing their policy programmes within three years, and often less.
In 1870, then colonial treasurer Julius Vogel issued bonds to build a national rail network. When he became premier in 1873, the Auckland–Onehunga line was already operating. By the end of the decade, nearly 2000 kilometres of rail was operational.
Michael Joseph Savage won the 1935 election and in his first year implemented compulsory unionism, the 40-hour week and an unemployment benefit. His first state house was ready the following year and his cradle-to-grave welfare state was in place before he faced the voters in 1938 and won his second term.
The First National Government took over in 1949 and within two years had abolished the Upper House, signed the ANZUS agreement, deregulated the butter and petrol markets and smashed the waterfront unions.
After becoming prime minister in December 1972, Norman Kirk reformed the tax system, extended ACC, made Elizabeth II “Queen of New Zealand”, recognised the People’s Republic of China, banned the Springboks from touring, established the domestic purposes benefit and launched his compulsory superannuation savings scheme — all before dying in August 1974.
Sir Robert Muldoon abolished the savings scheme immediately on becoming prime minister, albeit not quite legally.
Famously or infamously, David Lange radically reformed New Zealand’s foreign and economic policy in his first term, from 1984, and was rewarded with 48% of the vote in 1987.
In his first term, Jim Bolger cut welfare benefits, deregulated the labour market, began groundbreaking Treaty settlement negotiations, passed the Resource Management Act, patched things up with the Americans and French, launched the student loans scheme and radically reformed health and education. At the equivalent point in his first term that Luxon is currently at in his, Bolger had already reversed some of his ministers’ more controversial moves.
In her first two years, Helen Clark raised taxes, removed interest on student loans, set up Kiwibank, the New Zealand Superannuation Fund and district health boards and introduced good-faith bargaining.
The difference between these governments and the three that have followed is that their senior figures had bothered to do some work in opposition about what they would do if elected. Their objective as political leaders was not merely to win office seemingly for the hell of it — à la John Key, Jacinda Ardern and Luxon — but to exercise power in the best interests of the country, as they saw it.
In opposition, policies were developed then sold to voters, or in some cases hidden from them. New governments focused on doing their jobs and didn’t really start to think about re-election until towards the end of their second year.
In the past two decades, the practice has turned around. Broadly, National promises tax cuts, no cuts to social spending, vague talk of economic growth and surpluses. Labour promises tax credits or similar, increases to social spending, vague talk about social cohesion and surpluses. Neither party takes any of this, or the median voters it aims to win over, seriously.
It’s common for oppositions to bash out policies the night before their announcement, to try to give a sense of substance to political slogans. Once in office, governments spend their first year setting up working groups, the second receiving and procrastinating over their reports and the third rejecting their recommendations while asking for more time to ‘complete the job’. The cycle then repeats itself. Politics dominates throughout, with the Beehive operating in permanent campaign mode.
With voters increasingly recognising that nothing substantial tends to be delivered, except politicians enjoying holding office and presiding over decline, Luxon and others blame the three-year term, arguing they need an extra year to get anything done. They say that things are just more complicated than in the days of Clark, Bolger, Lange, Muldoon, Kirk and earlier. Also, they claim, policies put in place too quickly don’t endure.
Yet those previous leaders and their senior MPs managed to put together reasonably well-developed and meaningful manifestos with neither the help of the internet, email, messaging services or mobile phones nor the benefit of the government’s accounts and other data being publicly disclosed every six months and again just prior to elections.
Within weeks of becoming ministers, previous Cabinets managed to put the finishing touches on their promised policy programmes with the assistance of just a handful of expert officials in Wellington, rather than the tens of thousands of bureaucrats taxpayers now fund. Their major initial moves would be announced in pre-Christmas mini-Budgets, just weeks after the administration has taken office. Those delivered boldly, early in a government’s term, have tended to endure much more robustly than those put in place in the final years.
There’s no reason to believe today’s National or Labour would use four years in government more productively than three. Especially in bureaucracies, work expands to fill the time available. In any case, the problem with both main parties is not how they use their time in government but how they prepare in opposition — assuming, too charitably, that they bother at all. A four-year term would give them even more excuse to do nothing to prepare for office and to procrastinate after securing it.
Cynically, the four-year proposal comes with a promise that future governments will give more power to oppositions to control select committees and scrutinise legislation, ministers’ performance and departments’ financial management and policy advice.
It would take even an average prime minister and chief whip about five minutes to work out how to subvert those flimsy promises. One Parliament can’t bind the next, anyway. Consequently, officials warn, there are both constitutional and practical problems with the government’s proposal. The way the legislation is worded, we voters may not even know, when we go to the polls, whether we’re electing MPs for three years or four.
Twice before, in 1990 and 1967, New Zealand voters have been asked to give MPs another year of job security. Both times we wisely voted around 70% against. Yet, in practice, we tend to give our governments six-year terms, with a half-time review, and then make the call whether they deserve a three-year bonus.
Against the argument for governments to get four years initially, a better proposal would be to formalise our current practice and opt for a two-year term, like the United States House of Representatives. Our new governments could see themselves as having an initial four-year term, with a half-time review. They’d have no choice then but to do some work in opposition to get their new government under way quickly. There’d be no time for working groups.
Yet with all the economic, fiscal, social and foreign policy crises New Zealand faces, the best proposal of all would be to force our politicians to throw out this referendum on extending their job security and tell them to take their existing jobs more seriously than any have done since 2008.
