David Seymour wants fuel taxes to go up as planned, despite Chris Bishop saying it would be a ‘death wish’

Thursday, 23 April 2026

Deputy Prime Minister David Seymour says the Government should stick to a planned increase to petrol taxes, despite soaring oil prices as a result of the Iran War.

That’s despite Transport Minister Chris Bishop saying its unlikely the taxes will go up as planned early next year.

The fuel excise tax and road user charges (RUC) make up about 70 cents a litre of the cost of petrol and diesel vehicles which is funnelled into the national land transport fund (NLTF) to pay for upgrading, maintaining and building new roads.

In January next year it is scheduled to go up by 12 cents per litre, with a further six cents per litre increase in January 2028 and another four cents a litre in 2029.

David Seymour told The Post he did not want those plans to change.

Read more:

• Infrastructure Commission to take over monitoring multibillion-dollar projects from Treasury

• Green Party members promote Tania Waikato ahead of sitting MPs

• The three questions remaining for Christopher Luxon after staring down his critics

“I understand the agony that people are facing that's driving these requests, but if we have roads being cancelled, maintenance being cancelled, roads full of potholes, if we borrow money to try and prop that up and leave debt and inflation for the next generation, or even just the next few years, that is also a failure that we have to balance.”

Seymour noted the land transport fund was under significant financial pressures.

“There's already roads that may have to be cancelled. To starve the NLTF of funding is going to leave us in a much worse position in the long term.”

He said he did not want to see similar debt levels racked up during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Bishop says putting up fuel taxes would be a political ‘death wish’

Chris Bishop told The Post given the pressures facing the NLTF, officials had advised him to keep the tax increases and even put them up more than what was currently planned but he did not have a “death wish”.

“With diesel at $3.80 a litre and petrol at $3.40 give or take which is the highest it has been for many, many years how popular do you think putting up fuel taxes by 12 cents a litre on the 1st of January is going to be?”

Bishop said the transport funding was a “bloody difficult situation” that keeps him “up at night”.

“I'm the poor sucker who has to deal with seven years of decisions around this, I mean, fuel tax has not gone up since 2020.”

Between 2017-2020 Labour put up the fuel taxes three times, cut them during the Covid-19 pandemic then put them back up.

It had scheduled three further rises from 2023 but those were deferred by the coalition Government.

Fuel tax is incurred at a flat rate levy on every litre of fuel, meaning it does not go up with fuel price inflation - or construction inflation. Bishop has repeatedly noted in recent years that this means they do not keep up with the rising costs of building and maintaining roads.

Labour leader Chris Hipkins has called for the Government to scrap the planned increases next year.