In praise of politics

Sunday, 7 June 2026

Luke Malpass is politics, business and economics editor.

OPINION: Politicians often get a bad rap.

They are doing the wrong things. They are moving too quickly, or not quickly enough. They are not taking issues seriously. They are always after votes.

They are condescending, patronising, bland or, even worse, evil.

Take your pick.

Mostly, it is nonsense (especially the evil bit). Most politicians are diligent, believe in things and genuinely want to change the world, at least a little, in line with those beliefs.

That occurred to me this week at the Insurance Council of New Zealand's annual conference.

The council had proposed that the current FENZ levy — through which insurance holders help fund New Zealand's fire service — should instead be paid out of general taxation. The levy dates back centuries to an era when insurance companies maintained their own fire brigades.

The council, led by former Labour minister Kris Faafoi, also proposed a 'Community Protection Levy' on insurance policies to help fund flood mitigation and other resilience measures.

The argument on the FENZ levy is straightforward: fire services are used by far more people than just insured property owners and businesses.

Yet neither Nicola Willis nor Chris Hipkins, both of whom addressed the conference, appeared overly keen for the Government to take yet another cost onto the Crown balance sheet. That is unsurprising, even though insurance has been one of the household costs that rose sharply during the cost of living crunch.

Like any other organisation, governments are generally reluctant to pay for something when someone else already is — in this case, homeowners.

One of the conference's major themes was the insurance industry's desire, shared by local government, to build a long-term bipartisan consensus around climate adaptation and planning.

Willis argued that resource management reforms would help provide greater certainty. Councils want clearer national guidance and stronger powers to reject developments in flood-prone areas. In the meantime, there is broad agreement that New Zealand needs to spend more on reducing climate-related risk.

The question, as always, is who pays.

It is unlikely to be councils facing pressure to contain rates. Central government is trying to steer the books back to surplus by 2029, but even if that target is achieved and sustained, debt will remain substantial.

Nor do the underlying pressures on the Government's finances make things easier. Every year, more is spent on NZ Super, healthcare and defence. Reaching 2% of GDP on defence spending is increasingly seen as a minimum rather than a target in a more uncertain world.

There are often calls to 'take the politics out' of issues like this — including, at times, from politicians themselves. The implication is that some technocratic solution exists, or that everyone should simply agree with the Government of the day's preferred approach.

This is a moment to defend politics.

In a democratic system, this is precisely what politics is for.

There is relatively little disagreement across the political spectrum about the need to adapt to climate change. The difficult questions are about priorities, trade-offs and costs.

It falls to the political system — and the politicians who sit atop it — to work both separately and together to chart a path forward. That means grappling with managed retreat, risk mitigation, insurance affordability and how to do all of it in a way that is at least broadly equitable.

This is no small task. But it is exactly the sort of challenge that requires politics: testing ideas, exposing weaknesses, making trade-offs and ultimately building legitimacy for difficult decisions.

Climate adaptation is rarely an immediate front-page issue except in the aftermath of a major weather event. Yet it is precisely the sort of long-term problem that the political system should be steadily working away at.

There is already significant work under way in the corporate sector and local government to adapt to a world of changing risks. What many are now looking for is national leadership.

New Zealand has the politicians across the spectrum capable of providing it.

Now is the time to do so.

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