The National-led coalition government has held its first cabinet meeting and signed off on a joint plan for its first 100 days in office.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said the past few years had been difficult for many New Zealanders and they were trusting National, ACT and NZ First to steer towards a better future.
“New Zealanders voted not only for a change of government, but for a change of policies and a change of approach - and our Coalition Government is ready to deliver that change,” he said.
Luxon said the 100-day plan was focused on rebuilding the economy, restoring law and order, and delivering better public services.
The plan includes:
- Introducing legislation to remove the Auckland Regional Fuel Tax
- Repealing the Clean Car Discount scheme, also known as the ‘Ute Tax’
- Introducing legislation to refocus the Reserve Bank on a single mandate of price stability
- Repealing the Fair Pay Agreement legislation
- Stopping blanket speed limit reductions
- Starting work to establish a new regulation agency to improve the quality of regulation
- Repealing the Water Services Entities Act, also known as Three Waters
- Introducing legislation to ban gang patches
- Requiring primary and intermediate schools to teach an hour of reading, writing and maths per day starting in 2024
- Banning the use of cellphones in schools
- Setting five major targets for the health system, including for wait times and cancer treatment
- Introducing legislation to disestablish the Maori Health Authority
- Begin work to repeal the Therapeutics Products Act 2023
- Repealing amendments to the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products Act 1990 and regulations.
More to come.
82 Comments
The other side of the equation is that 20,000 people are alive and that's some 100,000 people who didn't lose a first relative
If you can convince at least 50% of them that dying / losing a close relative (not of your choice) is preferable to a few weeks of Netflix and chill you get my vote as New Zealand's next dictator
Boring. Another boring binary discussion. I detest people who say our approach was godawful, and I detest those who say it was great. There were big pros, and big cons. The cons are seldom acknowledged.
‘a few weeks of Netflix ’ - whatever! Typical dismissal of the downsides, which were huge. Wasn’t the lockdown 2-3 months? You probably don’t live in Auckland. Just like my dad in Wellington, no understanding of the impact at all
I'd argue that the outcome of lockdown procedures, say people visiting rest homes, actually lessened the number of natural deaths by way of the usual relatives visiting and spreading their coughs and colds as would have happened pre-covid anyway. The stats are highly trumped up, inconsistent and used in a way to glorify the government of the day. If you want to compare to other countries, you'll find different methods of measuring deaths 'by' COVID so it isn't possible, therefore the claim that XXX number of lives saved loses all validity in relation to other countries. For example in NZ people who died and tested positive were classified as dying from covid for a long time before it was amended to deaths with covid. It is akin to a hopeless argument such as stating that because you didn't drive your car today, 11 lives were saved over the next 10 years.
The lockdowns simply delayed the death of the frail and the weak. Those lives that were saved, well a large majority of them are now dead, and for what? To hang on for a few more years at a Ryman facility costing thousands per week. Not to mention the social problems we are now left with, the mandates and the vaccine injuries and deaths which haven’t had the media coverage they deserve. No surprises there with our bribed MSM. NZ Firsts covid enquiry will uncover a lot of skeletons.
- Begin work to repeal the Therapeutics Products Act 2023
- Repealing amendments to the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products Act 1990 and regulations.
Really don't get these two...?
Stopping snakeoil sellers selling unproven and often dangerous potions and basically encouraging people to smoke... 🤔
What's the point for a company to send its spokesperson into a political party if they don't get any benefit even 10 years later?
Cell phone ban in schools- what a joke. Now the kids will have flat batteries on their laptops after lunch when they spend their time on them instead. My college aged son expects this to lead to increased physical bullying in his school, since the bullys wont be distracted as much/ bored. Hope hes not right with that one.
Can't they lock out a load of Websites at the school ? Worked for places where they locked out several due to staff wasting hours on them. Pretty easy kill FaceBook, Trade-Me and anything else they can monitor. Phones need to be banned at school, no need for them whatsoever during class time, the kids are coming out of school with hopeless academic achievements. I'm surprised National are not reintroducing School Cert and University Entrance.
I thought this was an odd response. Surely there is just as much bullying going on using the internet/cellphones?
I don’t understand the outcry. Students are at school to learn. They don't need a cellphone in class. It’s a distraction they could do without. And the poor teachers trying to get their attention could do without the added struggle of trying to drag the students away from their screens and tik tok videos.
Whether that should just be good school policy or law is debatable of course. But so many people seem to think a child HAS to have a phone on them at all times as a seemingly basic human right perhaps making it law was the only common sense solution?
I'm a teacher and think this a good policy if applied at primary/intermediate (surely these schools already ban phones), though debateable at high school. It will just become one more thing to police and the kids will use laptops for the same purpose anyway, given 90% of interactions are through social media and messaging apps rather than texting. France has a similar ban, and my friends who teach there say it makes little difference. Kids do stuff like have a cheap burner phone they hand in for the daily confiscation, then go off into the bathrooms to use their normal one.
I would love to have a school without phones, but it's not going to happen without some help. Policy doesn't magically change behaviour. There is a lot of stuff that is banned at school and yet happens regularly. Considering how autonomous schools are it is also a weirdly intrusive policy, essentially overriding the current ability of schools to set their own device policies.
Fair points. My children are only at primary/intermediate school. They don't use laptops so I can see the problem is more complex with laptop access at school as well. You’d think in this day and age technology would exist to make the internet/school networks more secure in a school environment so kids can focus on their schooling instead of doing what they want on social media and all the problems that come with it. Is it a lack of will to do so? Or is it there is always a work around?
There are some good software options that work with school internet systems, I think if National wants to go ahead and ban phones they should be investing in schools to support this technology. It's not a problem you fix in isolation though. I'm at a public school and honestly the majority of kids work well despite all the distractions. Well planned lessons, clear instructions, realistic goals, and accountability from students are still important as ever. Phones are banned in junior classes and rarely cause issues. Many of the more self aware students talk openly about the negatives of phones and how they don't like seeing friends and family always glued to them. What really pisses me off is when I walk into a class with a teacher (and not always a reliever) sitting at the desk scrolling their phone!
As someone who has a fair amount of experience “dealing” with gangs and gang members I concur.
Many people would agree gangs are a problem and the problem is getting worse with all the 501 deportees coming into the country.
But banning their patches will just lead them to replace that with something different and we will be in the same situation we are now anyway. (Never mind the fact they will fight such legislation with tooth and nail).
There are many other options open to them besides this.
There are offences for participating in an organised criminal group for one. The law could target gangs by passing harsher sentences on crime where gang membership was a component as a deterrent.
Yeah I hear you! But I still think better penalties from the court could be a better long term solution to deter gang membership.
There has been plenty of discounts on sentencing for all sorts of reasons of late.
Why not a 35% uplift on your sentence for gang memberhsip.
I worked for him too at Air NZ,many more thought he was the worst CEO in recent history,notwithstanding Brierlys time.Fyfe & Norris did the heavy lifting in transforming the company,Luxo turned up in the sweet spot for Air NZ...when it looked to turn tough for Air NZ,he cashed in his many millions of shares & resigned.Slash and burn conditions & product was all he knew.He was never visible to the frontline or back room staffers.Fyfe & Foran regularly do time on the job,listening to the issues,in the knowledge that if you don't,you get a filtered version of whats going on as it works it's way through middle & upper management.
When I and a few others retired from Air NZ, Luxon turned up uninvited to the farewell party, made a very nice speech and shook our hands.
Some of the previous CEO's and board members were despised - Jim McCrea, Selwyn Cushing and Bob Mathew to name a few. Luxon did a good job, the company was profitable. Being a CEO isn't a popularity contest.
I'm luvvin' every minute of this new govt.
Not being threatened with new taxes every day so they can squander it on boondoggles like the abandoned Income Insurance Scheme, the moronic gun buyback, the Harbour Bridge Cycleway, Pike River, the TVNZ/RNZ merger, 3 Waters, the Light Rail fail, bike lanes no one uses, and 14,000 more civil servants.
I look at the list and ask, is that it? Are these really the most important issues facing this country?
I have no doubt that the mini-budget will empathise the shocking state of the books, how awful our economic position is and yet, the best thing the government can do is throw some $3bn at landlords. Irrespective of whether you think that's a good idea, it surely cannot be a priority for a cash-strapped government.
Mediocracy rules.
It seems now that tax relief for the plebs will be in the form of getting inflation under control, raqther than any actual money.
...Luxon has ended the conference saying his government will ensure it puts money in people's back pocket (it's central promise of the election campaign) by ensuring the Reserve Bank, which is in charge of inflation, goes back to a single mandate of ... keeping inflation between its target band of 1-3%...
Mortgage tax deductibility is a legitimate expense on landlords, and its removal amounted to legalised theft. Why didn't they remove mortgage deductibility from commercial and industrial property owners?
The turkeys responsible for it thought that rents would decline, but the opposite happened, unsurprisingly, which just goes to show how far removed those socialists were from the real world.
There's 40,000 empty houses in Auckland, owned by people who can't be bothered with the bureaucracy.
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