Parliament left speechless as Winston walks, Māori leaders absent

Newsroom

22-05-2025

The next razor gang that's convened at Parliament needs to take a blade to the time allocated for speeches by party leaders on Budget Day.
Though they demand efficiency and effectiveness, outputs and outcomes from everyone else, the nation's biggest political celebrities need to look to themselves: their contributions following Budget 2025 were variously bloated, unfocused or Just. Too. Long.
Most made their points, strove for arcs of ideology and philosophy, reached natural conclusions and then just started up again, rhetoric on repeat, filling in the 20 yawning minutes allowed on the big day.
Nicola Willis' Budget speech is exempt from the time limit, a fixed set-piece that has to say what it says and take the time it needs to say it. She carried off her second attempt with a measured purpose, having had the advantage of knowing its contents and working on its wording for weeks.
The Leader of the Opposition, who goes next, has almost no time to prepare, anticipating and winging it to form a passable response. Then the Prime Minister and leaders of other parties in the House in descending order of MMP representation. The governing ones know the details in advance; the opposing ones are instantly reactive.
Both Te Pāti Māori's co-leaders were absent, their courtesy copies of the big document hand-delivered by Willis to empty pews, ironic in the extreme given the House had ostensibly adjourned Tuesday's Privileges Committee punishment debate so they could take part in the Budget. Whether intended or not, it was a very 2025 trolling of their accusers.
And the New Zealand First leader, Winston Peters, a stickler for parliamentary propriety, heard Willis and some of Hipkins and then disappeared as well, an astonishing act for someone who relishes the main event and could be expected to claim victory for the Budget's many triumphs.
His deputy and the fill-in NZ First orator Shane Jones told the House Peters had advised him he was to take over the speaking role only at 1.15pm, 45 minutes before the Budget speech. Peters' sudden exit was linked by his office to his need to fly north and prepare for an official visit to Australia on Friday. But why leave it so late to drop the surprise on Jones? How could Winston Peters not claim his place at the annual leaders' showpiece?
Soon to step down from the deputy prime ministership, perhaps he is grooming Jones for an earlier than expected elevation to the party leadership?
Willis, and four party leaders did get to speak, stretching out over more than two hours with a festival of rhetoric.
Willis may have promised a 'No BS Budget' but sadly couldn't control some of the BS that followed. Here's a summary of their performances, and how they rated:
Nicola Willis, holder of the Budget – 7.5
The format of the Budget speech is good for Willis, requiring a relatively straight and formal delivery and restraining her natural impulse to condescend to those on the other side of the House. There was no escaping that the Budget had served up an easy ball (in the form of the $12 billion cut in projected contingency funding to cover pay equity settlements) for Hipkins to hit, sitting across from her. But Willis fronted that, talking up the 'repurposing' of $2.7b a year for other things.
She denied her document was austere, and claimed it was 'deliberate' and for the medium-term, and revealed the hidden centrepiece, Investment Boost, which allows businesses a tax write-off for a portion of new kit, buildings, and machinery.
A possibly unprecedented, humanising moment came when Willis talked of the need to limit debt to protect kids of the future. Both in her scripted speech and unscripted, she acknowledged her own children in the public gallery above her, apologising to one that Mum had been too busy to attend a show on Wednesday night.
And it was for the kids, on education, that she broke ministerial mask again, telling the education minister: 'The Honourable Erica Stanford – we did it! It is a great Budget.'
Willis' biggest applause, however, was when she teased the Greens that the coalition 'would not be defunding the police'. Whoop, whoops from an excited Government side.
Her sign-off, that 'every Kiwi can know that this is a government that has their back' was hardly climactic. But it elicited a standing ovation from her side, hugs from the PM and Christopher Bishop. And a modest clap from Winston Peters.
Chris Hipkins, for the prosecution – 7.0
Hipkins had the advantage, this year, of knowing that the pay equity law change gave him material to work with, and for much of his speech he hammered Willis and the Government for taking money for pay equity settlements to cover for their 'bad choices and failures' elsewhere.
Other than an occasional breaking note in his voice, he spoke strongly and had the line of the session, declaring that when Willis had promised no lolly scramble she had been right. 'This is a scramble without the lollies' he pressed, noting the Government's moves to take monies from one place to pay for others. On the $200m Crown investment into offshore mining, the Labour man remarked 'they are adept at mining the pits of division'.
Hipkins played up Willis' 'No BS Budget' line, offering alternatives that it had no 'bold solutions, bread and shelter, backpaid settlements, or better society' but did have 'big subsidies' for oil and gas.
He checked off the incumbents' failures – record numbers leaving for overseas, more people living on the streets, more children hungry, women earning less. 'They are offering growth but it's growth in all the wrong places.'
His pace and hitting of raw nerves was good until it kind of reached an end point, but didn't end, reached another and didn't end and another and finally a tame round-off: 'New Zealanders deserve better from their Government than what they are being offered today.'
Christopher Luxon, for the defence – 6.0
Luxon, oddly, dedicated much of the first half of his Budget speech to attacking Labour and the Greens at length.
He won clubroom cheers from his backbench with several taunts of Hipkins as 'Mr Bo Jandals', a line he felt the need to explain related to his opponent's flip flopping and once holding a press conference in thongs. Luxon elicited groans when he asked the Government team to imagine Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori trying to run the economy. 'They can't run a bath, let alone the economy.'
Copying Willis from the general debate on Wednesday, he spent time highlighting differences between Hipkins and his finance spokesperson Barbara Edmonds on debt.
It all seemed a bit beneath the position of PM, particularly when there was so much to talk about in the main event of the day, the Willis document – the Investment Boost, debt track, infrastructure spend. The Prime Minister did eventually get to it, after saying what every political strategist in the building had been muttering: 'Enough about the Labour Party.'
Luxon praised his National number two as 'the great Nicola Willis. How lucky is New Zealand and how lucky are we?' Education Minister Erica Stanford was declared 'brilliant' and Simeon Brown went global: 'Our fantastic, world-class Minister of Health, Simeon Brown.'
The PM praised the Budget for its growth aspects, and rattled off dozens of New Zealand towns in an 'I've been everywhere, man' style to emphasise investment in extra urgent and after hours healthcare.
After a 'back on track' to wrap up, Luxon also won an ovation from his side, but it seemed less than ecstatic.
Chlöe Swarbrick, for radical change – 6.5
Parliament got the full finger-thumping, hand-chopping, arm-waving, frowningly expressive Swarbrick, not content for this big moment to criticise a Budget as much as to critique a system – 'a game' – of the neoliberal order from the last 40 years.
Her vigour threatened to overwhelm the message at times, but it was as clearly articulated a view of anti-neoliberalism, of challenging the prevailing economic orthodoxies, as the House has heard for some years.
Swarbrick eviscerated the coalition for its changes to Best Start, the funding for new parents, contrasting taking $200m away from young families with a similar investment in gas exploration. 'In a planet on fire they're taking money away from babies and setting it on fire.'
She reached for a moniker for the Budget, trying 'the trickledown … the child poverty is all good … the Let them Eat Cake' budgets and ending with a label about pay equity that was too long to note.
Throughout, the Green co-leader derided the narrative adopted by Willis and governments over the past decades. 'They say 'don't hate the player, hate the game'. Well, we hate the game. The rules of the game were made by those politicians 40 years ago, outdated, self-imposed targets in this made-up game.'
Again, Swarbrick could have wound up earlier but saw out her time with memories back to the 1930s and 1940s and an era of public education, healthcare and housing right up until before she was born. Public goods and assets were sold and 'regular people have been left fighting for crumbs'.
David Seymour, for 'firms, farms and families' – 6.5
Seymour said an Act Budget would have been different (cough, better) but played nice, saying how proud he was to be part of the coalition that had saved taxpayers billions when inflation and the population were rising.
He saluted another year of stable government, but diverted off to ridicule the Greens' alternative Budget and Swarbrick for what he called 'thundering cliches', Te Pāti Māori for 'not knowing what a Budget is, or that it is on today' and more about unicorns and TikTok.
The Act leader did try to strike a high-minded pose, musing on virtuous circles and (surely not a cliche) that 'the government that governs best is the government that governs less'.
So philosophical did he get that he said Budgets weren't about who gets what, but about values.
'Making the most of your time on Earth.'
Then, with the luxury of the 20-minute speech slot, he moved to extol the value of his coming Regulatory Standards Bill, how it would 'punish the bad lawmakers' and adding in something about 'frickin cones'.
He riffed off into the right to be 'safe in our bodies from thugs abroad and at home', praised Defence Minister Judith Collins and declared the $500m Act had lobbied for for more prison beds was 'the best money you will ever spend'.
His grab-bag flicked at RNZ, which is losing 7 percent of its public funding over the next four years: 'Should help focus the organisation on high-quality news reporting.' And he had a swipe at former National education minister Hekia Parata's 'communities of learning', which had been axed, saving $375m.
'There are so many savings I'm going to run out of time.'
He didn't.
Shane Jones – from the bench – 5.0
Jones had 45 minutes' warning, he told the House, that he was to take his leader's speaking slot. Peters had teased him about always wanting to challenge himself without notes. 'Please talk about rail' Peters had urged his deputy.
As it turned out rail got a glancing sentence or two in a feat of on-your-feet oratory that wasn't saved by its structure, content or conclusion.
Matua Jones started by holding up a little lidded bottle that he claimed contained Maui oil and offered to let the Greens sniff it, but also to protect it from Te Pāti Māori who might lay claim to it.
His forceful words careened across the NZ First-inspired $200m investment in mining 'to keep the lights on, power prices down and energy flowing' through Chris Hipkins kissing frogs in search of a future coalition prince and Kaikohe meth, the RMA and victimhood haka.
Like Seymour he hit out at the Greens, complaining of their MPs' 'conceit and false superiority' and seemed like he was heading for a soaring conclusion multiple times, before, eventually holding aloft his oil bottle and abruptly taking his seat.