Todd McClay, Christopher Luxon and Judith Collins speak to media after the prime minister's State of the Nation speech on 23 January, 2025. Photo: RNZ / Marika Khabazi
Analysis - At first glance the Prime Minister's fresh plan to inject growth in the economy is a hark back to pre-Covid days and the last National government.
Direct foreign investment, international students and tourists are the three immediate solutions Christopher Luxon has put up to provide some economic stimulation.
A fourth, and arguably more controversial suggestion, is that Auckland Council abolish the limit on the number of concerts allowed to be held at Eden Park so Kiwis don't have to keep flying to Australia to see their favourite band play live.
Queenstown Mayor Glyn Lewers is already picking holes in Luxon and his new economic growth minister Nicola Willis' plan to open the floodgates to tourists again, but local government mayors have nothing on the anti-Eden Park concert brigade and its biggest cheerleader, former prime minister Helen Clark.
Hitting go on more international students and overseas visitors is an easy lever to pull but in order for it to work the infrastructure needs to be in place to deal with the influx of holiday-makers.
While Lewers supported the push for growth he said it would require serious central government investment to make it sustainable. Photo: RNZ / Niva Chittock
Lewers was dubious about the idea because he saw first hand pre-Covid what a reliance on tourism looked like - hospitality and ski resort workers living in cars in the middle of winter due to a housing shortage and a small ratepayer base being overwhelmed by growing demands on ageing infrastructure like pipes and roads.
While Lewers supported the push for growth he said it would require serious central government investment to make it sustainable.
Following his State of the Nation speech on Thursday to the Auckland Chamber of Commerce and Kiwibank, Luxon told RNZ a roading package for Queenstown and city regional deals that will allow councils to come together and pitch ideas to help grow their region faster were already announced last year.
But there were no spades in the ground on any of that work so far.
On reform of the Resource Management Act, Luxon said there would be legislation in the House this year finalising laws to allow infrastructure at pace.
"We are not going to apologise because this country desperately needs growth ... we were slow coming out of the gates, and we lost wholesale relationships in tourism," he told RNZ.
The tourism sector also lost its social license with communities because of the impacts short-term rental housing shortages and broken water pipes had on the people who call tourist destinations home.
Very little, if anything, had changed on either of those fronts, and on Thursday afternoon Luxon twice failed to give Queenstown ratepayers an assurance they would not end up back there carrying the load.
Central government politicians are some of the first to say local government mayors and councillors are quick to look for a reason not to do something instead of putting up ideas for how to make it happen.
And Luxon spent much of his address talking about the need for many in New Zealand to learn the art of saying yes.
Getting people to say yes, however, relied on learning from past mistakes and not repeating them.
It was unclear, based on the Prime Minister's responses on Thursday, whether any work has or will be done immediately to prevent pre-Covid tourist highs from doing exactly that.
If the same pace and enthusiasm to get tourism running at capacity again could be put into fixing the country's infrastructure woes then the Prime Minister would be cooking with gas.
Invest New Zealand
On direct foreign investment the immediate response from the government was to create a new agency, Invest New Zealand.
Putting aside the irony of a government with a laser sharp focus on reducing the bloated bureaucracy creating more of it, the details of how exactly the agency will attract that investment in the near-future was not clear.
It looked to be a slightly beefed-up NZTE, but retained all the same people that had already been tasked up until now with the job of getting overseas investors interested in New Zealand and what it had to offer.
Luxon's State of the Nation came only a few days after his reshuffle and one day after the caucus met for the first time this year, so it would have been a tall ask for all the details to have been nutted out.
The business community, tourism sector, universities, and the public would be keen to get a more detailed blueprint in the near future.
With Luxon having made this the year of economic growth the pressure is on to deliver, and avoid fixing one problem only to create another one in the process.
Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
