By 2023, New Zealand had become a bitterly divided place – wracked by years of social engineering during which we were told how we could work, how we should raise our families and what we could say. Certainly some of this came about as an emergency response to COVID – but those measures quickly evolved into an authoritarian regime that sought to centralise control over everything from education to water. Our nation had become a very dystopian place where people who’d gotten along all their lives were suddenly at odds with each other. We were tired of being angry, we were tired of feeling defensive and we just wanted a government that would end the social engineering, ease the division and give the country a chance to breathe again.
You were the beneficiary of that craving for change. The Ardern–Hipkins government was voted out much more than your government was voted in – but by the time you took office, that distinction was academic. Between you and your coalition partners, you had a clear mandate to change our direction and enough goodwill to get on with it.
There was genuine excitement about what your government could do and it was pretty clear what people were looking for. They wanted a Government that would return to fiscal responsibility and get a grip on the books. They wanted you to take a sledgehammer to a bloated public service and to reduce the bureaucracy that had made it much harder to live our lives, invest, build a business and give someone a job. They wanted an end to social engineering and a return to trusting parents and communities to make decisions for themselves.
Some of this you explicitly promised to do – the rest was based on a reasonable expectation that, as a National party government, you would stick to the principles and ideals of that party.
But then, inexplicably, you took a left turn and completely changed course on the things that you had promised to do. Instead of immediately addressing the eye-watering Crown debt of $155 billion that you were confronted with in 2023, you increased it further to $187 billion over the next three years. Instead of finding a pathway back to surplus, you keep pushing that back with the promise of ‘just a couple more years of pain’. Instead of ‘taking a sledgehammer to the bloated public service’ you reduced it by a pathetic .05% with renewed promises of those cuts only cynically reemerging in May of this year.
On social policy, your track record is even worse – indeed, you appeared to double down on many of the policies that the nation had explicitly expected you to change. And, where you did grudgingly make change, it was invariably at the insistence of one of your coalition partners. As recently as July this year, parents who you had explicitly promised that they would have more say over what their children were taught found that your government had replaced the requirement for schools to consult their communities on health education, including relationships and sexuality education, with a mere requirement to ‘inform’ them. A huge betrayal of a clear government promise.
By midway through your term it was clear that a significant disconnect had developed. Your support was falling and people were telling you why – not with outrageous demands that were out of left field – but with pleas to return to the sorts of policies that sat squarely within National’s values. They wanted the party they’d voted for to govern like the party they’d known. That was your clear signal to take another look at what your government was doing and, where your policies fell short of those values, to change course. But you didn’t.
I’m not dismissing the handful of things that you did that deserve our gratitude – but they pale into insignificance against your broader suite of changes.
Consider it from the perspective of the kitchen table in a typical kiwi home. From the perspective of people who have worked all their life, paid off their house and are now trying to stay in it on a fixed income. Rates rose 8.8 per cent in the year to September 2025 and another 6.2 per cent the following year. Your response? To tell them that a cap was coming in 2029. Then there were the people who heard your government say it would get 50,000 people off Jobseeker Support and saw that number rise by 28,500 from your own starting point by June 2026. For people waiting to see what a change of government would mean in their lives, the reality was beyond disappointing.
Perhaps you felt that some of the choices you made were the only ones open to you? Perhaps the books were worse than you’d imagined? Perhaps there were things that you believed needed doing and couldn’t get through Cabinet, or things you changed your mind about once you saw what the job demanded. I’ve led organisations. I know what it’s like to have information that others don’t, make what you honestly believe is the right decision, and then find that the people you were trying to do right by are angry with you.
But those were the moments to look down the barrel of a camera and talk to us. To say, in your own words, what you’d found when you took office. To tell us where you’d changed your mind and why. To tell us what you’d heard from people and what you were going to do about it. To treat us like adults.
If you’d just been honest with us I think you’d have been surprised at how many people would have given you more latitude. They’d backed you once. They were still looking for a reason to back you again.
Instead, you treated us like fools. Too often, when you were pressed, you sounded as though the question itself irritated you. I don’t know if that was what you felt but it was definitely what people heard. And when people who’d given you the benefit of the doubt started to feel that their concerns were beneath your attention, their disappointment turned to anger.
But how did it get this bad? How did National stray so far from the people who’d put it there? I suspect that some of that distance was growing long before you became leader. Over successive candidate selections and list choices, members who’d given years of their lives to National found that the party was becoming less and less recognisable to them. They kept turning up, kept doing the work and kept voting for it but over time, they seemed to have less and less say in what it stood for. When your defeated candidate Vanessa Weenink said she worried the coalition was pulling National too far to the right, I wonder how that sounded to people who’d voted National all their lives and spent the past three years wondering how much further left their party would go.
And yet many of those people still wanted your coalition to govern – and some of us saw a way to make that happen, despite the polls, by backing a National candidate locally and giving our party vote to ACT or New Zealand First. So how did you respond? By rolling out Sir John Key to urge them against it – surely one of the most tone-deaf, suicidal, acts in modern political history! Despite this – voters are smarter than you give them credit for and they delivered you 42 electorates on the preliminary count – far above your list entitlement and just one fewer than in 2023. Your party vote fell from 38.1 per cent to 29.2 while your partners gained about six points between them – exactly what you would expect to see from a successful vote splitting strategy and – make no mistake – the reason that National is still in with a fighting chance to form the next government.
Think about that. People who couldn’t bring themselves to give National their party vote in 2026 were still willing to back your local candidate in order to keep the alternative out. Think about the message that those people are sending to you.
Of course, the specials may yet take that chance away – but if the coalition survives and you’re able to form the next government – National has a stark choice to make: It can carry on as if nothing’s happened and discover how much further it can fall. Or it can take the result for what it is and recognise that the people who gave the coalition another chance want change.
They want new faces in Cabinet, they want a return to the country they thought they were voting to restore in 2023, and they want a greater voice for coalition partners who appear to better understand what kiwis actually expect.
But above all, Mr Luxon – they want a new leader. Someone who can bring the party back to the values that earned it the trust of generations of New Zealanders, and who can speak just as naturally to people who’ve never voted for it. There may still be hard years ahead and people are looking for someone who can tell them the truth about what’s coming and make them feel that we can get through it together.
I know how hard that must be to hear. You’ve put three years of your life into the job and there’s work you still want to finish. I don’t doubt your sincerity – in fact, I hear from people who’ve seen you away from the cameras that you’re warm, quick and very funny, and that you can hold a room in a way that would surprise people who know you only from the news. I believe them. And I believe you took this job because you wanted to do something good for New Zealand.
But it’s time for a change. Your continuing presence isn’t just a distraction – it’s a liability. You are who you are an no amount of effort is going to move the dial on how kiwis perceive you.
Whether that change should take place before, or after, the coalition talks, is a matter for you and your advisors – but I urge you to do it on your own terms, while the decision is still yours to make. Give the next leader the chance to bring people together and give New Zealanders some confidence that we can get through what’s ahead of us.
Thank you for the work you’ve done for New Zealand. The anger of these three years will pass and people will have more room to remember what you gave to the job and what you got done. And when they look back at the moment you could have fought to stay, they will remember, with gratitude that you chose instead to give the country the fresh start it needed.
Ashley Church
Ashley Church is former CEO of the Property Institute of New Zealand and is an active social commentator. This article was sourced HERE
