Michael Swanson/The Periodical/Substack
Watch the 2026 campaign closely and a pattern emerges. National and Labour are not short of policies.
What they are short of, with a few exceptions, is the willingness to be first. The big ideas on offer have usually been road-tested by someone else, and the bigger parties have waited to see who got burnt.
Nobody is entitled to demand that a major party reinvent the country every three years. Governing parties are allowed to be incremental, and oppositions are allowed to be cautious. Plenty of good policy is old policy, done properly. Borrowing a sound idea is no sin either, since that is partly what a multi-party Parliament is for. The question is one of sequence and nerve. Are National and Labour leading the argument, or waiting for the smaller parties to run the experiment and report back?
KiwiSaver, in three acts
Compulsory KiwiSaver is the cleanest case. NZ First pitched a government-led expansion in May, including enrolment at birth. In June, National announced that the scheme would become compulsory for every worker from July 2028. Luxon conceded that when National released the first tranche of its KiwiSaver policy the previous November, it had said it would not make contributions compulsory. What changed in the meantime was the discovery that, in his words, New Zealanders “believe we can go further”. Winston Peters had a more pointed reading, and told Stuff it was “slightly embarrassing” for National to criticise NZ First and then copy its policies.
Labour came third. Its version, as 1News explained, makes only the employer contribution compulsory while lifting it to 6 percent. Meanwhile the Opportunity Party has been pitching its own “KiwiSaver 2.0”. By the time Labour spoke, the idea had been floated, tested against the public mood and given a few months to see whether the sky fell in. Compulsion also has form. The Spinoff notes that it was part of the platform on which Labour suffered an historic defeat, after which both major parties promised not to go there. The smaller parties went first, and nobody was punished.
Supermarkets and the Great Pretender
The grocery sector tells the same story, only louder. NZ First announced in April that it wanted Foodstuffs structurally separated. In mid-September National said it would “pursue” a break-up, with a catch. It would amend the Grocery Industry Competition Act so the Commerce Commission could decide whether separation would leave consumers better off. Peters promptly dubbed them the “Copy Nats” and, in a fine piece of political theatre, played reporters The Great Pretender.
Days later Labour promised to force Woolworths and Foodstuffs to run their wholesale arms independently of their stores. The Greens and Te Pāti Māori have their own interventions, and ACT has described the whole pile-on as insane. Whatever you think of any of these proposals, the shape of National’s is telling. It is a conditional commitment that outsources the actual decision to a regulator. Luxon said as much in the debate: “If they say no, we don’t do it.” Hipkins, for his part, called it just another review, and said New Zealanders can’t eat a review. He has a point, though Labour’s own answer arrived only after NZ First’s had been out for five months and National’s had been out for days.
Even the flagship is not as bold as it looks
Labour’s capital gains tax is the obvious objection to this argument, and it deserves a fair hearing. Labour announced a 28 percent tax on property gains, excluding the family home and farms, and has stuck with it despite a hostile Finance Minister and pressure from the Greens to go further. In the debate, Hipkins was asked when he last changed his mind on something that mattered, and pointed to his own U-turn on the CGT. “I’m happy to own that,” he said.
But look at the history. Jacinda Ardern said in 2019 that after almost a decade of campaigning, Labour had been unable to build a mandate for a CGT. Hipkins ruled one out in 2023. The idea is not new, it was battle-tested for years, and the version now on offer is carefully fenced. It exempts the family home, farms, KiwiSaver, shares and inheritances. Labour also ruled out any changes to interest deductibility, and Hipkins has rejected wealth and inheritance taxes. The CGT is real and carries some risk. It is also the product of a decade of public testing and a design built to survive the attack ads. Labour has been brave in the way a careful person is brave.
National, meanwhile, has promised no new taxes and has not released a comprehensive tax policy of its own. Its big KiwiSaver move was, by its own account, prompted by listening to voters. A good policy does not lose its merit because its origin was somewhere else. But a pitch built on “we heard what you said” is not the same as “here is what we think the country needs”.
What the debate showed
The TVNZ leaders’ debate on Tuesday was the best evidence for this pattern, mostly through what was not said. Both leaders ruled out raising GST but would not guarantee that other taxes and charges would hold. Hipkins said he wanted to index benefits to wages and inflation “as we can afford to do that”, after first saying Labour had made no clear commitment. Pushed on the Jobseeker-style hard choices, both retreated to familiar ground.
On fuel, Hipkins pledged a tax freeze for the whole term and Luxon called it unfunded, which is a fair summary of how much of the 90 minutes went. Asked whether it was morally acceptable for one person to be a billionaire, both ducked. The strongest moment of agreement was an offer to work together on regulating artificial intelligence, a field where neither side has yet been asked to take a position that might cost votes.
Even the points of difference were mostly about settled ground. Hipkins now backs the school cellphone ban that the current Government introduced and will keep the gang patch ban Labour first opposed. Those are sensible calls, and they are also evidence that the safe route is to wait until a policy has survived someone else’s term.
Asked for an example of a time he had changed his mind, Luxon could not name one. His government’s KiwiSaver reversal, a few months earlier, would have made a decent answer.
Why it matters now
This matters more because of where the polls sit. The two blocs are neck and neck, the Opportunity Party holds the balance of power in the latest 1News Verian poll, and the Greens are heading towards 19 or 20 seats. A 1News explainer describes voters turning away from both big parties as the minor parties reap the rewards. There is an irony in that. The minor parties are being rewarded for exactly the work the major ones are avoiding, which is putting a concrete idea on the table early and wearing the heat. Then the major parties adopt the safest of those ideas, trimmed and conditioned, and present them as their own.
None of this is corruption, and some of it is simply how coalition politics is meant to work. A smaller party that gets its policy adopted has done what it set out to do. But a country that wants to fix its housing market, its health system and its retirement savings needs its two largest parties to do some of the early running. Waiting for others to find out what is politically survivable is a strategy, though it is not leadership. With four weeks to go, voters could reasonably ask both Luxon and Hipkins for one thing that is theirs, tested by nobody, and worth defending.
