Some Trans-Tasman Thoughts on NZ 2026

As I wrote for Real Good Oil this week, we Aussies feel your election pain, New Zealand. You’re in pretty much the same position we were for the last couple of elections here: the major parties are woke and woker and none of the minor parties seem worth voting for. Following the campaign, it seems the same pattern is still holding.

TOP want to pretend they’re NZ’s answer to One Nation, when they’re just the same socialist same-old. National are at least showing some conservative spine with their welfare policies.

National has released its welfare policy, which includes the introduction of random drug testing of jobseeker beneficiaries from 2027.

The party has announced a new five-point plan it says will strengthen the “expectations for those who remain on Jobseeker long term”.

These include reducing benefits for long-term recipients and increasing the residence period to qualify for main benefits from two years to five years, which leaves unanswered whether the government will crack down on ‘asylum seekers’ and ‘refugees’ skiving off the Kiwi taxpayer as soon as they slither into the country.

Conservatives have good grounds for supporting such policies: after all, they’re paying the taxes that fund the bennies and they have a right to demand that those taxes be used only to meet basic needs like food and shelter, not to sustain drug habits. For a libertarian party, ACT seem strangely at home with the idea, too. Still, as ACT’s David Seymour points out, being stoned out of their gourds seems at odds with being job-ready.

Speaking about National’s new welfare policy, which includes drug testing for jobseeker beneficiaries, Seymour said it went a “short distance in the right direction”.

“Yes, there need to be consequences, but if languishing on the dole is bad, why wait two years for consequences?” he said.

“This policy shows the next future government needs more ACT to go further and faster in the right direction on welfare reform.”

Seymour said someone is “not work ready if they’re stoned”, adding, “Why should people get up early and go to work to pay for other people’s drugs?”

Will he go one further, then, and demand that anyone and everyone whose wage comes from the taxpayer also be subjected to drug testing? One imagines there might be a few more empty benches in the Beehive.

National leader Christopher Luxon says he is open to random drug tests at parliament, as he campaigns to introduce random drug tests for beneficiaries. […]

Labour’s Kieran McAnulty said that if politicians wanted to randomly drug test welfare recipients, then politicians should be willing to be randomly drug tested, too.

He might want to be careful what he wishes for. He seems to imagine that his is some kind of knock-down argument against drug-testing the taxpayer-funded, when a great many Kiwi voters may well be perfectly happy to see it go ahead.

On the other hand, Hipkins seems a little put out by the idea.

Labour leader Chris Hipkins has called National “desperate” after they announced a policy for random drug testing for people on jobseeker support […]

“There are people out there today desperately looking for work. They want to get jobs. They are doing everything right, and they can’t find jobs,” he said.

Does that mean Hipkins will support slashing New Zealand’s per-capita massive immigration? Why import hundreds of thousands of new workers when, so he says, there are hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders desperately looking for work?

It’s not the only area where Labour are contradicting their own ideological claims. Labour are so committed to ‘climate action’, or so they say, that the party has released an entire manifesto for the election: “Labour is fully committed to the Paris Agreement and will put New Zealand on course to meet its targets,” Hipkins says. To that end, they want to “incentivise genuine emissions reductions rather than relying on offsets”.

Yet, here they also are, encouraging people to use one of the most emissions-intensive forms of travel going.

Leader Chris Hipkins said, “Flying is expensive, and on many regional routes there is little or no competition”.

“Labour will make prices more transparent, open opportunities for smaller airlines to compete and give passengers more rights.”

Izzy Cook will be old enough to vote this election. Labour sounds like just the party for her and her bourgeois, ‘rules for thee, not me’, finger-wagging.

Elsewhere, in what seems almost a re-run of the last Australian election and the Queensland state election before it, the legacy media are ginning up a ‘controversy’ in order to try and nobble the conservatives.

New Zealand First leader Winston Peters has labelled late-term abortion as “shading” into “murder and assassination” depending on the timing […]

On Thursday, Luxon was asked about Peters latest comments, but reiterated that New Zealand’s abortion laws are “settled”.

Nice try, but 10 bucks says the legacy media won’t let this one go. They know perfectly well that the make-or-break issue for left-wing women is being able to murder their children, whether unborn or not (as per their latest heroine, Lindsay Clancy). The media are almost certain to go into full hysterics on abortion, trying to spook the conservative horses.

The only consolation for Good Oil readers, at least, is that so far (so far) National haven’t run their campaign as appallingly badly as the Dutton-led coalition last year in Australia.