A time for the tried and true, or to make way for the radical?

Thursday, 13 November 2025

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and NZ First leader Winston Peters have both taken predictable stances on the question of asset sales this week, writes Janet Wilson.

Janet Wilson is a regular opinion contributor and a freelance journalist who has also worked in communications, including with the National Party.

OPINION: With an election on the horizon, welcome to the season of zeitgeist wrangling and megaphone grabbing, as politicians’ feint and weave in their search for the most beguiling policies that will ensure the most votes.

This isn’t any arbitrary exercise. Politicians choose those policies based on a metric capturing social movements and shared norms and values.

It’s called the Overton Window of Political Possibility, and was developed by a US policy analyst named Overton in the 1990s. The “window” is a range of ideas bookended by the unthinkable and radical at each end, with sensible popular policy in the middle.

The unthinkable, radical extremes lie outside the Overton Window with those in the middle within it. But the window can move or expand over time as ideas become more politically acceptable; it explains why compulsory military training ceased in 1972 and same-sex marriage was legalised in 2013.

This week, while Te Pāti Māori self-annihilated, the Overton Window saw two of the governing parties stick resolutely to well-worn policies because, well, if it’s worked before, why won’t it again in the face of low growth, increasing debt and high unemployment?

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon spoke to reporters on Tuesday morning, after Winston Peters criticised the Government for making little progress towards growing the economy and over Luxon's talk of selling state assets.

It took Treasury’s Investment Statement released last Friday, to remind us, once again, of the parlous future the country faces; rising public debt “and absent policy changes, our fiscal position is on an unsustainable path over the long term”, the statement thundered.

National blithely ignored most of Treasury’s answers to the looming crisis – cut superannuation, reduce health spending, increase revenue - as politically unpalatable. But it was quick to support Treasury’s suggestion of asset sales, or their new incarnation, “a formal capital recycling programme”.

And while the prospect of National divesting itself of some of the $100 billion worth of commercial assets and $470b in physical assets aligns with its small government, core party philosophy, there’s one glaring reason why the idea is dead in the water if it wants to stay in power.

Winston Peters.

In the Overton Window of NZ First policy, refusing to sell assets is catnip to his nationalistic voters. Unsurprisingly, Peters reaction ranged between bullish brouhaha and bluster. This time, though, Christopher Luxon surprisingly struck back publicly.

On Tuesday, Peters marched into RNZ’s Morning Report to accuse Treasury of pushing a failed economic strategy, “a tawdry repetition of history”, then attacked the coalition Government – one that he was a member of – for not turning the economy around as quickly as it should have.

Peters described Nicola Willis’s suggestion of selling $643 million of debt in the Chorus fibre network as “creative accounting of the worst sort” saying, “you’re selling off debt on the basis that you’ve got an asset? Why don’t we just make sure that Chorus pays us back.”

“It’s not surprising. He’s been here for 50 years for goodness’ sake,” Luxon retorted, just to prove we’re in the season when the “we” of the coalition plays second fiddle to the “me” of individual parties.

Newly elected New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani delivering his victory speech, and achieving what even a decade ago would have been considered astounding.

And while it’s a politician’s job to detect where the changing Overton Window is in any given election, there are rare times when politicians can move it by endorsing a policy lying outside the window.

Ten years ago, the rise of a young, democratic-socialist, Asian, Muslim man like Zohran Mamdani as New York City’s mayor would have been astounding.

In Aotearoa though, in a different part of the cycle, there’s a bigger question for voters; do any of this week’s political powerplays ease the increasing burden of people’s lives? The answer, right now, is “no”. It’s just more political white noise on the line.

And amidst Treasury’s depressing drumbeat thumping out the country’s future issues, let alone what we’re facing now - a flat housing market, unemployment at a nine-year high, and emigration at record levels - a lugubrious malaise has settled, of drift and decline.

For all economists’ sunny green-shoot projections, it’s no golden dawn. Instead, as Craigs Investment adviser Mark Lister says, it will make them “less poor”.

It seems almost parallel to New Zealand of the late 70s/early 80s when Rob Muldoon ran out of answers for an increasingly angry electorate and young upstarts like me upped sticks and fled to Australia.

In the wake of that malaise lay revolution in the form of the Fourth Labour Government.

There’s nothing to suggest that radical change will break out next year while Te Pāti Māori continues its operatic defenestration, and the Greens recover from their own self-imposed slings and arrows.

Around the world extremists continue to gain power- right-wing populists able to harness the roiling discontent among their voters.

But, as Mamdani has shown, the left is rising.

In another four years, will the same happen here?