Andrew Dickens: National's state of the nation address was blame game politics

Andrew Dickens Afternoons

When National formed it's new government there was a snappy little phrase that supporters were fond of using.

Thank God the adults are back in charge.

Suggesting that the left wing Labour Government were naive, inefficient fools who had driven the country into the ground like a 12 year old in a ram raid.

National would lead a government run by grown ups who know what to do and how to do it and then actually DO it.

So when Christopher Luxon presented his State of the nation address yesterday, the expectation was that the grown ups were about to tell us how all our problems will be fixed.

What we got was a warning that times were going to get tough. What we got was a promise that our PM would not shy away from tough talk. What we got was a lot of talk about beneficiaries. They were told the free ride was over. And then at the end an admission to reporters that the Government was yet to explain how it would address and finance the solutions to our woes.

We also got a lot of talk about how bad the last Government was and the implication that they were the root of the parlous state we find ourselves in.

That our water problems and our transport problems and our health problems and our labour problems and our housing problems and our energy problems and our weather problems and our farming problems and of course our economic problems all rest with one cohort of politicians who were in power from 2017 to 2023

It's that sort of blame game that got the Labour Government called childish. I would like to think that this government might have resisted that urge. To be the adults.

I think what many of us want is governance that is future focussed. That considers a time 30 years in the future when our population has doubled or even tripled.

That acknowledges that the mess we're in has taken many different governments and decades to create and will take many different governments to fix.

The most powerful part of Christopher Luxon's speech was the line that New Zealand is fragile.

We are. At a very fundamental level. And have been for a long time. And will be for a very longtime.

So the sooner the adults turn up with a real plan that we can all get behind and that will work, the better.

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