National missing the message by only listening to those it wants to

Thursday, 20 November 2025

Senior Cabinet minister Chris Bishop risks his reputation in shifting from a politician who gets things done to one who indulges in pork-barrelling, 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: There’s a moment in every party’s governing term when realisation slowly dawns that it has lost any agency it once had with those who put it in power.

As Barack Obama once said, “if people cannot trust their government to do the job for which it exists – to protect them and to promote their common welfare – all else is lost”.

This week, that lack of trust was strikingly evident in the Ipsos Issues Monitor Survey which gave the Government the lowest rating since the survey began in September 2017, at 3.9 out of 10.

Respondents rated Labour as the best party to handle 15 of the 20 top concerns, including inflation/cost of living, healthcare, the economy, housing, unemployment, and poverty/inequality, with National deemed best on only two issues, crime/law and order and defence/foreign affairs.

For National, it’s a stupendous switcheroo; just two years ago, the Ipsos October survey deemed it the most capable party in 15 out of 20 issues.

The great constant in all these surveys, since February 2022, has been cost of living/inflation. It was the highest concern in 2023 and remains so now.

National rose to power promising to “fix” the cost of living crisis. The fact that it hasn’t wouldn’t necessarily have meant disaster at next year’s election, if it wasn’t saddled with a weak leader and entitled senior ministers acting as if they’re in their third term, not their first.

That broken trust goes on and on for voters, in the pain of increasing food prices, up 4.7% in the year to October, electricity up 11.8% and gas up 14.4%, accompanied by the dawning realisation this Government isn’t listening and just doesn’t care.

Christopher Luxon campaigns in 2023 to get New Zealand “back on track”; now, it seems to have lost its way.

The right track/wrong track gap in the latest Ipsos monitor might have dropped two points, but at 63% wrong-track and 37% right-track, it’s still a win for the pessimists and a harbinger of electoral devastation for National next year.

Cynics will also have detected that the coalition’s lack of aural skills only extends to those it strongly disagrees with, while rewarding those buddies prepared to cuddle the coalition - and ignoring due process along the way.

You would have thought minister Chris Bishop would have learned his lesson about due process when the Fast-Track Approvals Act, passed last December, attracted 27,000 submissions. But no, he wants to make more than 100 changes to the act, giving himself and Shane Jones more influence and shortening the timeframe for decisions “by six weeks or more”.

This week former National Party MP Simon Upton, now Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, called Bishop’s move “a significant expansion in executive power”.

The introduction of new government policy statements allows the ministers to pre-define what is a national or regional benefit, which expert panels would need to consider when assessing the applications. Upton says this sets the terms of a panel’s evaluation, preventing robust cost-benefit analysis.

Truncated decision-making and appeal rights is bad enough, but ignoring parliamentary procedure – again – is another undemocratic trademark of the coalition, with only an 11-day window for select committee submissions, which closed on Monday, with the act to be passed under urgency by Christmas.

But if you listen to Bishop, this is all a fallacy - the expert panels still get to decide, even if ministers determine what should be considered.

Labour is now the most trusted party to respond to eight of the 10 most important issues to voters, according to the latest Ipsos Issues Monitor survey.

Increasingly, riding roughshod over process is branding Bishop less as a guy who gets stuff done and more as one indulging in good old-fashioned pork barrelling.

This week The Post revealed that he approved $27 million, earmarked for a stormwater project, to instead pay for a walking and cycling bridge in his electorate of Lower Hutt.

The fact that he personally campaigned on the project during the last election, and in the face of a Cabinet manual directive barring ministers making decisions about projects within their electorate, was all made tickety-boo, according to Bish, because his mate Nicola Willis made the decision with him.

On Tuesday Luxon backed him, using the tired “pragmatic” line.

Funding was found so quickly in March that Treasury didn’t have a view on it, but Willis signed it off nevertheless, despite the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development saying it could create “reputation or precedent risk”.

Power confers this hypocrisy, as does increased aggression, less empathy and a sense of entitlement, all of which characterise this Government. It’s the ultimate judge of character and, at its worst, strips politicians of any authenticity.

Entitlement has tightened National’s circle of influence so much that now it’s a corset around its girth. Increasingly those who National is talking to will have their own financial reasons for doing so while the rest of us… well, we can go to hell.

Ipsos’ lesson here is that political parties that don’t listen to the loud morse-code the electorate is telegraphing are destined to lose.

It did for Labour in 2023 and National seems destined to go the same way in 2026.

The question is, does it realise it?