Explainer: The Government’s 100-day action plan, and key differences from National’s original plan

Explainer

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has revealed the Government’s 100-day Action Plan, which he insists will make a difference to people’s wallets as they continue to navigate the cost-of-living crunch.

Yesterday, the Reserve Bank left the OCR unchanged and forecast the possibility of an increase next year.

The Government’s plan includes National’s key pledges as well as those from coalition partners Act and New Zealand First, including substantive changes such as to firearms laws and smoke-free legislation, and less substantive ones such as stopping work on He Puapua (which stopped in December 2022) and dropping Labour’s prisoner reduction target (which was discarded during the election campaign).

It also includes scrapping “industry transformation plans”, which are long-term partnerships between government and business, workers and Māori across eight industries including advanced manufacturing, agritech, construction, fisheries, forestry and wood processing, and tourism.

The Government will also repeal Labour’s RMA 2.0 laws and reinstate the Resource Management Act before Christmas. That law, ironically, requires that the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi be taken into account - something the new Government says it will review all legislation for and, according to the NZ First-National agreement, “replace all such references with specific words relating to the relevance and application of the Treaty, or repeal the references”.

Reinstating the RMA is meant to be a temporary measure while the Government looks to implement its own “fast-track consenting regime”.

National also has some seemingly redundant items on the list, such as making gang membership an aggravating factor at sentencing. The Sentencing Act already includes “the nature and extent of any connection between the offending and the offender’s participation in an organised criminal group” as an aggravating factor. Perhaps the Government will make it something a judge must take into account without the current qualifier of whether it is applicable to the case in question.

More vague commitments include “better public services and strengthening democracy”.

Soon-to-be-gone are the Government’s participation in Auckland light rail and Let’s Get Wellington Moving, the Lake Onslow pumped hydro scheme, fuel tax hikes, fair pay agreements, and the clean car discount (or “ute tax”).

The plan also includes culture war-derived diversions on the likes of lodging a reservation against adopting amendments to World Health Organisation health regulations”. This must be done in the next two days, making it one of the most urgent of the actions in the plan - ahead of restoring the Reserve Bank’s single mandate.

Tweaked:

Ditched:

Redundant?

Vague:

Additions thanks to Act and NZ First

The same as in National’s 100-day plan:

Derek Cheng is a senior journalist who started at the Herald in 2004. He has worked several stints in the press gallery and is a former deputy political editor.