Andy Burnham’s populist template offers a way forward for NZ
Saturday, 25 July 2026
Josie Pagani is a commentator on current affairs and a regular opinion contributor. She works in geopolitics, aid and development, and governance.
OPINION: The first thing the UK’s new Labour prime minister has done is remove their GST-equivalent from electricity, which will bring power prices down. That’s a win for his first exam question as leader: are you doing the things that voters say are the things?
No.1 issue in the UK and New Zealand is the rising cost of things you can’t do without; petrol, electricity, food. Andy Burnham promises a “cost of living government”.
Contrast that with National’s ads attacking Labour on tax. Negative, hard to read, and only indirectly to do with prices.
Burnham passes his second test because he knows this sugar hit won’t be enough.
Read more:
A warning for NZ Labour here. Cutting bus fares will get attention, it won’t guarantee votes.
Burnham recognises that Britain needs a new story about itself, backed up by delivery.
Brits are around 27% poorer than their French and German counterparts.
We have been poorer than our Australian cousins for 50 years. We’ve forgotten it wasn’t always this way.
Former PM Keir Starmer’s plan bore a resemblance to the plan of the National-led Government. Economic growth would come from reducing growth in spending, building houses, growing science and technology, and mild reforms to the public service.
Like Starmer, PM Luxon’s Government claims the economy is turning the corner on inflation, turning the corner on jobs, turning the corner on interest rates, and turning the corner on growth. That’s four corners. We’re back where we started.
Andy Burnham promises to end 40 years of “neoliberalism”. The date puts his re-set roughly in the middle of the Thatcher government, long after the coal miners were smashed and the economy was deregulated, and slightly before unemployment began to fall from its high of around 3.3 million.
“Neoliberalism” has a niche in the recondite kabbalah of political theory, but it is more a token of lefty doctrine and shorthand for liberal market economies. Burnham means a return to subsidies rather than user pays, re-nationalisation of utilities like water and rail, and a market managed by guardrails.
His keen ear for what voters want, matched with a belief in managed markets is, well, popular. He will devolve more decision-making to local communities, take a tough stand on immigration, spend more on defence, and insist on work in return for benefits.
In the book of Burnham, markets and governments are complements, not substitutes.
If you want more and better markets, you need more and better governance; a public service that doesn’t get mired in frameworks and strategies. A tax system to pay for public goods, like building stuff.
The relevance to us is that we usually follow trends a bit later. The Burnham ascension heralds an active state role in the economy, just as deregulation and market-oriented policy arrived here after the US and UK, along with synthesizers and big hair.
Our inflation figures published midweek show how a country squeezed by the cost of living could be attracted to Burnham’s interference with the price of power. Energy is the largest component in price rises. Some of that is the direct result of Donald Trump’s disastrous war in Iran, which Christopher Luxon failed to oppose.
Electricity prices are high because, as in the UK, we don’t have enough generation. Transmission prices are rising to fund the cost of building new lines capable of electrifying the economy.
When people tell us that all we need to do is electrify the economy and build more renewables, they skate right past the costs. The cost of building new, fatter power lines will keep rising for a decade, probably two.
The promise of lower electricity prices from renewables and markets has turned out to be fraudulent. Prices have kept going up by more than inflation for thirty years.
Labour’s 2023 policy to take GST off the cost of food given to hungry kids caused an epidemic of cardiac arrests among economists. Persuading a government to remove GST from power would require a populist government that wore abuse from experts and elites as evidence of its authenticity.
Burnham has recognised that a hands-off government is unsustainable in a cost of living crisis, and there is no such thing as a rich country with low energy resources. He is not ruling out a return to drilling for gas in the North Sea.
Our Government had no choice about a subsidy for Golden Bay cement this week. We have to stop the de-industrialisation of New Zealand.
Wood processing is mostly leaving. Juken Nissho is closing its Kaitaia plant. A plant in Marton that makes malt for beer is closing. Malt is made from grain. Grain growers need large amounts of gas in autumn to dry the grain. The problem is not the price of grain, it's the last government's ban on gas exploration that makes it hard to get contracts.
Burnham may yet disappoint. But he is laying out a template for a populist politics that could work here.
We need to turn one more corner to finally head in the right direction.