Andrew Dickens: My thoughts on Luxon's State of the Nation speech

Election Year is off and running with Christopher Luxon’s State of the Nation address. 

We should know the election date later this week. 

What we do know is the theme of National’s campaign: “Fixing the basics and building the future”. 

Not a shock.

It’s a variation of the way they’ve positioned themselves for a while. The party that concentrates on the need to haves and not the nice to haves - Labour trashed the economy in six years with their spending, we’re the guys who’ll fix it up. 

But the real question is what are they fixing and what are they building. 

Treasury’s figures from the Half Yearly Economic and Fiscal Update delivered just before Christmas, show the Government has both cut capital expenditure since its election and lowered forecasts for new spending.

Capex fell by $6 billion between the 2023/24 and 2024/25 fiscal years, and spending was $1.6 billion less in 2024/25 than was budgeted. 

There’s not a lot of fixing of leaky hospitals and rickety courtrooms going on.

And yet despite that, their spending has gone up.

And that’s because the big ticket items like benefits and pensions have gone up, and so have costs in services like education and health.

So there’s not a lot of invigorating news in the near future.  

Our fundamentals will remain unchanged. The great hope is that private sector just gets on with it understanding the limits to our capacity.

And so we get back to the unofficial slogan: "Vote for us, we’re not as bad as the other lot". 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
So election year is often running with Christoga Laxon's State
of the Nation address yesterday, where he declared the recovery
has arrived. We should know the election date later this week.
What we do know is the theme of National's campaign.
He was telling everybody yesterday. He told Mike it's fixing
the basics and building the future, which is not a shock.

(00:20):
It's just a variation of the way they've positioned themselves
for a while. They are the party that concentrates on
the need to haves, not the knights to haves. They're
the party that says that Labour trashed the economy in
six years with their spending. They're the party that is
said all along, we're the guys who'll fix it up.
But the real question is what are they fixing and
what are they building. So Treasury's figures from the half

(00:42):
Yearly Economic and Fiscal Update delivered just before Christmas showed
that the government has both cut capital expenditures since its
election and lowered forecast for new spending. So capex fell
by six billion dollars between the twenty three, twenty four
and twenty four to twenty five years, and spending was
one point six billion dollars less in twenty four to

(01:03):
twenty five than was budgeted. So that's not a lot
of fixing of leaky hospitals and rickety courtrooms going on.
That's a lot of cutting or spending. And yet despite that,
their spending has gone up, and we know that from
their borrowing. And that's because the big ticket items like
benefits and pensions keep going up, and so have the
costs and services like education and health. So what can

(01:26):
you fix and what can you build? There's not a
lot of invigorating news in the near future. It seems
as though our fundamentals room will remain basically unchanged. The
great hope for all of us is that the private
sector just gets on with it, understanding the limits to
our capacity, and we get back to what I would
say is the unofficial slogan, which is we are the

(01:46):
national party. Vote for us. We're not as bad as
the other lot. For more from Early edition with Ryan Bridge,
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or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.