It's the System, Silly
2025 Political Highlights and Lowlights. And what should be done differently in 2026?
Mountain Tūī has brought you 261 articles in 2025. Thank you to all who subscribe and support to enable me to continue this work. Happy New Year, everyone.
Out of the many policies the National Party Coalition has enacted this year - whether it is indefinitely extending cruel pig farming practices, defying a 2020 court order to spring it on Kiwis without consulting anyone but the pig industry, or bringing in American voter manipulation tactics to help the right win an election despite the policy breaching human rights and making it harder to vote for tens of thousands of Kiwis, or just consistently and flagrantly breaking the law and hurting the most vulnerable and our natural environment protections - there’s one that stands out to my mind.
And that is the pay equity repeal, an action that took tens of billions of dollars away from 180,000 Kiwis, many whom are our valued essential workers, to boost the budget and ‘financial reputation’ of this government.
It was a law brought in years ago by Labour Minister Andrew Little and Green MP Julie Ann Genter under a Labour/Green government, and as I recorded at length on Mountain Tūī, celebrated by National Party MPs at the time - including Erica Stanford who said this was all about seeing a better future for her grandchildren, and Nicola Willis, who claimed credit for the pay equity law at the time.
The 2025 Nicola Willis was a different story - redacting all government advice on the subject and refused to ring fence the “saved” money for impacted workers or related industries in crisis, such as hospices which face closures, and instead claiming that the workers would actually “benefit” because she intended to boost “frontline services” - something which we’ve failed to see.
This government can’t even meet its 500 police promise, has canned critical boat tug facilities and marine police operating hours, overseen record homelessness spikes thanks to it “saving money” on emergency housing, attacked Māori rights and families with disabilities, and seen well over 80% of frontline health professionals assert that this government is undermining equitable access to healthcare, as it funnels untold millions to private hospitals and corporate GPs to systematically weaken public health.
And it’s not the opaqueness, the double speak, or the hypocrisy that is of note here - those things are now par for the course in a flagrantly disrespectful right wing coalition.
But it’s the fact that National and ACT plotted the pay equity repeal in secret for well over a year, stringing the 33 claims and tens of thousands of claimants along in negotiations, including offering better terms and promises along the way, even as they planned in secret to kill it all.
Nurses, teachers, carers, hospice workers, and Kiwi icons such as Kristine Bartlett were apoplectic, with Bartlett breaking down in tears. But the right managed to quickly flip the switch on the dialogue, seizing on a comment by Labour leader Chris Hipkins that impacted workers would see a pay cut to claim that the left’s dialogue on the issue were “lies”.
Technically, Hipkins was correct: many soon to be completed pay equity negotiations processed over painstaking years were now eliminated - meaning the promised back pay and pay equity increases were made non-existent, and their pay would be effectively diminished. But National MPs issued press releases and social medias en-masse, claiming that Hipkins lied, and that no-one was going to see a pay cut.
The right also seized on an article by journalist Andrea Vance where she pointed out the absolutely f***ery of the move, using the word “c*nt” to describe the move, and The Post/Stuff gave front page and maximum exposure for Finance Minister Nicola Willis to respond the next day, flipping the narrative to make herself the victim of “sexism” and ‘abuse’, and attacking Vance in the process.
The show was as sickening as it was effective, befuddling many with the assertion that their actions were “good for Kiwis”.
Ultimately, the right prey on the “what’s in it for me” mentality prevalent in those with the most fear and insecurity. Or simply take advantage of the lack of detail available to most to confuse. And their co-opting of media networks and commentators, whether Mike Hosking on Newstalk ZB or Jason Walls on TVNZ 1News or Stuff/The Post’s editorial direction, is tantamount to their success.
It’s hard to pinpoint what has worked best, and what hasn’t. According to one Reddit post, National’s Coalition has put through 104 bills under urgency (including the cruel pig farming practice bill, the anti-democratic, anti-environment fast-track bill, the voter suppression bill, and the pay equity repeal bill).
That is an extraordinary assault on New Zealand’s democracy, and while the right will point out Labour used urgency during their term, that was largely in response to Covid and accounting for its lost time - including the COVID-19 Wage Subsidy Scheme, and housing measures - a completely different context and motivation.
At the time of Labour’s government, right wing “think tanks” such as the Maxim Institute, and NZ Initiative, issued pleas to “let’s not abuse urgency” while calling Labour the “least transparent government”, and yet under sustained and overwhelming levels of assault, concealment and lies under the right wing, these junk tanks are fundamentally silent.
The fact is our system has been co-opted by those with the intent to abuse our democratic processes of government, and has the resources and wealth to do so. By holding significant mouthpieces, and taking advantage of peoples’ short attention spans, and habits of headline news consumption, it has been relatively easy to do.
In an end of year piece reviewing media performance for the year, Newsroom’s Tim Murphy gave a nod to NZME Director James Jim Grenon, who spent $30 million to acquire 20% of NZME (NZ Herald, Newstalk ZB, radio stations, OneRoof etc) - upping his stake through the year and establishing an editorial board to oversee content.
It’s hard to imagine how much farther right NZME could be and yet this is where we are.
So what do we do?
My fellow writer Ryan Ward has an excellent piece on what the left can do - and in it, he surmises that protest, while it has its value and function, is largely ineffectual when it comes to systemic change.
Instead, Ward posits to establish an opposing force to “disrupt” and “think strategically about how to shut the capitalist machine down”. He writes: “The only real thing that capital fears is a shutting down or expropriation of the means of production.”
True, except figures such as Peter Thiel have no doubt already thought of this too. The latent political environment we see is a very clear takeover of governments and democracy to enact the vision and world view of a frequently callous and elite uber wealth class.
Related:
Note: A correction has been made - pay equity legislation was brought in by Labour/Greens. An earlier version only credited the Green Party.
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