Coalition barbs show what 2026 may well look like

Saturday, 22 November 2025

Winston Peters announcing plans for the country’s new Cook Strait ferries earlier this year. A further annnouncement came this week, but it was his comments about the Regulatory Standards Bill in an interview which caused a degree of niggle within the coalition Government.

Luke Malpass is politics, business and economics editor

OPINION: On Thursday, Winston Peters gave an interview to Radio Waatea. In it, he said that he would be campaigning against the Regulatory Standards Bill, which NZ First helped pass only last week.

This is the probably-won’t-do-anything bill that David Seymour fought to have passed through Parliament. It seeks to basically bind Parliament to more stringent rules around what laws can be passed, particularly in regard to regulatory takings. Essentially, it seeks to limit government law-making if it impinges on property rights — or at least compensates for doing so.

Both the opponents of this law — which are legion — and the proponents of it have probably overstated its importance. The New Zealand Government is very good at doing most of what it wants, and a good deal of scepticism is warranted about whether the new act will achieve anything meaningful.

Nevertheless, it is now the law of the land, for good or ill. Peters and NZ First voted in favour of it when it passed its third reading last week.

Nonetheless, Peters — always with a keen eye for campaign material — told the station that he might now campaign against it.

“It was their deal, the ACT Party’s deal with the National Party. We were opposed to this from the word go but you’ve only got so many cards you can play,” Peters said.

“We did our best to neutralise its adverse effects and we will campaign at the next election to repeal it.”

Clearly, if the coalition is returned, it will not be repealed. But it probably would be under any Labour-led government — whether or not such a government included Peters.

In response to this, Seymour took a swipe at Peters, saying that it was “pretty worrying” and that “it sounds like he’s getting ready to go with Labour again”.

Winston Peters has confirmed his party will campaign against the Regulatory Standards Bill, just days after the bill became law - thanks to NZ First's votes. ACT leader David Seymour says it shows NZ First is looking to work with Labour next year.

The back-and-forth is not a massive issue, but it is a niggly one and gives a taste of what politics will look like in 2026. The chasm in both the patrimony and policy of the two smaller coalition partners will only become more apparent. And National will be caught in the middle — constantly called upon to provide some semblance of discipline, but also trying to stake out its turf for whenever the next national poll may be.

Besides the fact that NZ First is much keener on using the state to get economic growth going than ACT is, there is the basic difference in approach and outlook. Whereas NZ First regards ACT as all principle and no trousers, ACT regards NZ First as simply a collection of nostalgic left-wingers who will make any deal to get back into power.

But while that is considered an unhelpful distraction within the National Party, what has been worrying MPs — particularly those on the back bench — was the Ipsos Issues Monitor, where, out of 20 policy areas, the Government led voters’ confidence on only two.

The fieldwork for Ipsos was done about a month ago, and numbers do move around a bit depending on who and what issues have been in the news, but given it is mostly issues-based, the trend over time is what matters.

And it has a lot of people worried. While The Post/Freshwater Strategy poll has also been showing the same trends, Ipsos has been doing this since 2017 and it is pretty robust.

For instance, when Ipsos came out in June 2023, it showed that the National Party was ahead on some key areas — and identified the growing importance for voters of areas such as law and order. It asks about the issues with the most salience and the best-placed political party to manage them.

While obviously the Government has been keen to talk down its findings and its impact — in the same way it did with the Boardroom survey — privately there are some real concerns about this.

Cost-of-living first shot up as voters’ number one concern in February 2022 and has stayed there since. Meanwhile, the trend line for National has fallen steadily on basically all the issues except law and order.

Law and order is an interesting issue. It is great for the Government — and the country — that crime has been reducing, violent crime in particular. But the problem is that parties rarely get rewarded for that — people think that governments should keep crime down. But they do get punished if it is not going right.

David Seymour took a swipe at Winston Peters following the latter’s radio interview this week, saying “it sounds like he’s getting ready to go with Labour again”.

Not only that, but the more successful governments are at dealing with an issue such as crime, the more its salience reduces. Translation: if people are happy about it, they stop thinking about it.

Yet it is the perception of economic issues that is concerning, and it is getting both ministers and some backbenchers talking.

And whether the Government — and Prime Minister Christopher Luxon — can turn it around.

There has been some more positive economic data recently and the ninth floor is feeling a little more confident. It is also true that when Christopher Luxon says he doesn’t care about the polls, he really doesn’t. There is an attitude that the Government needs to just hold the course and that things will come right and voters will turn around.

Luxon will be giving a speech on Sunday in Lower Hutt that will seek to rally the party faithful and set out what the Government has been doing and where it goes from here. It will be closely watched.

The fact is that leadership speculation is now swirling around Wellington. On Tuesday, Air New Zealand held a parliamentary function chock full of executives, industry and government affairs types. The PM read the room and gave a mercifully short speech after a lot of droning on from the hosts.

Anyway, clearly many at the function got around and talked to people before a whole lot of them decamped up to Auckland, continued to talk, and rumours then flowed thick and fast back to the capital that some sort of leadership spill was imminent.

That, of course, was not the case.

But those rumours didn’t happen without reason. They came from important and plugged-in people talking to ministers and backbenchers and forming an impression. Politics isn’t just about fundamentals and what the Government is doing — very often it is about perception.

But the upshot is that the speech Luxon will be giving on Sunday — which, to be fair, hasn’t been briefed up in any major way by the ninth floor — will be very carefully watched. When things start being viewed through the prism of leadership, even mundane things are assessed differently.