Labour finance MPs risk looking more crack-pot than crack-team

Tuesday, 2 December 2025

'Christmas cheer' or 'tired and ratty' Finance Minister Nicola Willis and Labour MPs face-off in fiery Scrutiny Week hearing at parliament

Scrutiny week is an opportunity for opposition MPs to hold government ministers and officials to account in intimate and intense hearings. For political hawkeyes it’s also a great chance to see how well-matched political opponents are in the ring. As Stuff’s political editor Tova O’Brien explains, today’s fiery Finance hearing risked undermining Labour’s attempts to present itself as a government-in-waiting ready to steer the country out of a cost of living crisis.

ANALYSIS: Unrepentant, Labour’s finance team should at least consider being embarrassed by their boorish heckling of the Finance Minister.

Far from presenting a government in waiting to steward New Zealand out of a cost of living crisis, the party’s three most senior money MPs were more ‘Regina George’ than ‘rigorous opposition’.

Be under no illusion, there is nothing better than a bit of fiery political pugilism to spice up any Finance and Expenditure Committee hearing. Goodness knows it often needs it.

Nicola Willis speaks during the Finance and Expenditure Committee hearing.

And goodness knows Finance Minister Nicola Willis deserves to be subject to a forensic prosecution of the government policies and settings that have led to New Zealanders no longer trusting National on the economy or cost of living.

It’s also completely understandable that opposition MPs would be frustrated by patsy questions from the government bench effectively wasting time in the precious 45 minutes set aside for intimate and intense scrutiny of senior ministers.

But what Barbara Edmonds, Deborah Russell and Megan Woods brought to Scrutiny Week was a het up and, at times, rude heckling that risked undermining their own credibility and Labour’s.

It was also unproductive.

Unlike the 4 minutes and 51 seconds when Greens co-leader Chloe Swarbrick took the floor and - after putting the minister on notice to be succinct - elicited the admission from Willis that the government would not be buying offshore carbon credits if New Zealand fails to reduce emissions to the level agreed at Paris.

Here’s the story that earlier led Stuff on that very important issue.

Likewise the 4 minutes and 30 seconds that Te Pāti Maori co-leader Rawiri Waititi questioned the minister in which he highlighted - and arguably showed the government up for - the disparity between the government, on the one hand, celebrating the Maori economy growing faster than the economy as a whole, and on the other, removing targeted funding for Maori specific programmes and the reality of Maori unemployment outstripping the general population.

None of this is to say that Labour wasn’t attempting to prosecute important issues including whether National was spending less money on infrastructure than it had promised.

“When you’re a conspiracy theorist, you see conspiracy everywhere,” said Willis.

But the hearing won’t be remembered for showing the minister up on the matter, it will be remembered for the chaotic cacophony of Labour MPs yelling: “Which table?! Which table??!!” at Willis, drowning the finance minister out, after she suggested they had misread a table.

Watch the video above and judge for yourself.

“I was called a liar in that committee,” Willis said.

We can all empathise with the perils of being hangry, and Russell told reporters after the committee she was hungry and needed to get to her scone but this was next-level.

Willis nearly managed to sail above the fray, and take the high road of still, even-toned sanctimony as Labour got rowdier and rowdier, but came unstuck in the final question of the hearing when Russell suggested recent changes to the Emissions Trading Scheme were designed to improve the Government books.

“When you’re a conspiracy theorist, you see conspiracy everywhere,” Willis retorted.

When confronted by Stuff about resorting to name calling, Willis fell back on a time honoured, sandpit justification: they started it.

“I was called a liar in that committee, that is unparliamentary,” Willis told Stuff, “it is actually against standing orders and I chose not to take issue with it. I was then accused of taking policy decisions in order to flatter the books.”

Had Labour handled its questioning of the minister better, voters may have been more-the-wiser.

As it stands, its Finance MPs came across more crack-pot than crack-team and did Nicola Willis more favours than themselves.