The penny drops...
New Zealand is back, and it’s leaving woke Britain in its wake
Kiwis have ditched their failed Labour government for a conservative coalition. So why are the Tories following in St Jacinda's footsteps?
Sam Collins
30 November 2023 • 9:00am
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/1 ... n-in-wake/
What a difference a generation makes. After the first proportional representation election in New Zealand in 1996, the country spent 60 days in limbo amid wrangling over who should form a government. The result was years of drift and disunity. Weary Brits no doubt now understand the feeling.
The good news is that a complete paucity of good ideas and ideological decline can be reversed. Just look at the new programme of government set out by those same players who took part in that first failed PR government, National, NZ First and ACT, who formed a coalition last week to replace the failed Ardern/Hipkins Labour government. If the government can hold together, it will be committed to a series of reforms to the planning, education and regulatory systems that British voters should be crying out for.
Many of their policies would make the committed Trussite swoon. Massive reforms to planning laws to put private property rights at the heart of any planning decision. A huge push for new partnership schools (similar to the charter schools programme introduced, then effectively abandoned, over the past decade). A reintroduction of the “three strikes” law that will see violent criminals locked up for longer and judicial discretion reduced, alongside an effective ban on natal males from participating in women’s sport.
It’s all the stuff the Tories keep promising and failing to deliver. Real tax cuts, reductions in the civil service headcount, a commitment to cutting the public sector as a proportion of the overall economy. A legal requirement that regulators base their decisions first and foremost on economic efficiency.
And that’s before we even look at their plans to repeal Labour policies – scrapping a rail project in the largest city where the costs had increased almost five-fold since inception; allowing landlords to issue a 90-day notice to a tenant to quit a property without needing to offer a reason or go through the courts; abolishing the bonkers Labour policy to ban people born after a certain date from ever buying tobacco.
Observant readers may have noticed an unexpected theme running through the awful policies which were brought in under Saint Jacinda, and which the new government has committed to reversing. Whether it’s the commitment to white elephant rail projects, restricting landlord rights or a bizarre crusade on tobacco, they are all policies which Britain’s so-called Conservative Party is adopting.
It is remarkable that the Ardern/Hipkins Government, considered to be a poster child for wokery and virtue signalling, seems to also be the example that the current Tory administration seems keen to follow.
A yawning divide is now emerging between “conservatism” in Britain and conservatism in much of the Commonwealth - and it really ought to trigger some soul-searching within the current Tory Party. A fixation with, or perhaps a fear of upending, the status quo leaves British Conservatives hamstrung. They’re unwilling to face the backlash that would accompany any efforts to deregulate, or cut taxes “for the rich”. And so they find themselves endorsing quasi-socialist policies of redistribution or nanny statism, rather than reversing them.
Across Canada, New Zealand and Australia there is a more nuanced understanding driven, perhaps, by our comparative youth – if it works then embrace it, if it doesn’t then find a model that does. That people vote for change because they don’t like the policies and ideas of the current lot in power, not because they want the other side to do the same thing marginally less badly. We trust in breaking down any barrier that gets in the way of giving people choice and opportunity. But from that moment the individual is left to choose what to do with it and, within reason, deal with the consequences.
Jacinda’s legacy, seemingly bulletproof as she guided Labour to more than 50 per cent of the vote in 2020 and was extolled as possibly the “most effective leader on the planet”, was already in tatters by election day. Her own Labour Party had neglected to even mention her name on the campaign trail, and her successor as Labour leader had immediately jettisoned a range of her policies. But even that was insufficient to save Labour from the chopping block as Kiwis voted overwhelmingly for effective government over virtue signalling platitudes.
Rishi seems at risk of heading the same way. Frankly, most of last 14 years have been marked with drift, disunity and interventionist policies.
No government, despite the original pledge of David Cameron that we all had an invitation to “join the Government of Britain”, has treated British people as grown-ups who can make basic decisions of their own without state interference. While there is probably little that Rishi could have done to reverse the feeling of malaise, his government’s tendency to over-promise and under-deliver on a range of policy areas has made the situation worse.
Worse is the political position it puts Britain in. New Zealanders have at least had an opposition that has argued against the big-state overreach of the Ardern years.
In Britain the main opposition has come from the left, arguing that the state should intervene sooner, tax higher and spend more. The lack of a serious vehicle on the optimistic right opens the door to conspiracists, populists or worse to fill the gap. At some point over the next 15 months the Conservatives are likely to go into Opposition. It is vital that once there they rediscover some self-belief and optimism in their underlying philosophy of individual choice and opportunity. Otherwise no one will enjoy what replaces them.
