Prime Minister Christopher Luxon yesterday continued to bask in the warm glow of farmer approval at the New Zealand Field Days, even though some cracks started to appear in his rhetoric.
Meanwhile, his principal opponent, Labour Leader Christopher Hipkins, mounted what amounted to a retreat as he confessed that his party in Government had not got their relationship with farmers right.
And NZ First Deputy Leader Shane Jones was the talk of the Field Days site for a typically theatrical performance at a charity debate associated with the Field Days and then in an equally theatrical address to Federated Farmers yesterday morning.
That was despite the line of the debate belonging to Labour’s Kieran McAnulty, who reminded the audience that Jones was known as The Prince of The Provinces.
And like “The Prince”, he is only waiting for the King to die, said McAnulty.
But overshadowing everything was the Ministry of Primary Industry’s six-monthly Situation and Outlook report for the primary industries.
The Director General of the Ministry of Primary Industries, Ray Smith, was fizzing when he told a breakfast to launch the report that if last year was a blockbuster with 13% growth in the food and fibre sector, then this year had seen “a massively commanding performance” with another six per cent on top of that.
“We’ve grown 19% in two years; that’s an extra $10 billion in export revenue that we piled up. It’s a massive performance,” he said.
In the report itself, Smith wrote that Food and fibre exports were expected to deliver record revenue of $64.3 billion in the year to 30 June 2026, including dairy export revenue lifting 5 percent; meat and wool export revenue jumping an impressive 14 percent; horticulture export revenue growing by 7 percent and processed food and other products export revenue increasing 5 percent.
“We expect food and fibre exports will build even further to $70.1 billion in the year to 30 June 2030,” said Smith.
Not surprisingly, the Prime Minister was also fizzing.
“All this mumbo-jumbo that we had for many years about the tyranny of distance, that is absolute rubbish,” he said.
“We are bang-smack in the middle of the most exciting region in the world, period.
“And the question is, what are we going to do about that?
“We’re going to go out there with ambition and aspiration and positivity and candor.
“We’re going to smack it, because we’re going to get the money out of that region and bring it back home to New Zealand to power up our regional economies and to get incomes and jobs moving up for our people here in New Zealand.”
Agriculture Minister Todd McClay was also excited by the prospects the sector faces.
“We have to produce more,” he told the breakfast.
“But we have to do so in such a way that it actually keeps up the reputation we have for caring about the environment.
“There is no longer competition between the environment and producing more.
“We actually don’t have that luxury. We must do both together.”
However, whether that was just political rhetoric or pointed to a fundamental plank underpinning primary sector policies was far from clear when McClay was later questioned about the comment.
He was invited to nominate some specific environmental policies which gave New Zealand producers a comparative advantage in overseas markets.
He didn’t.
Instead, his reply was broad and general with no specifics.
“We’re going to find ways to work with the sector, the private sector, to continue to meet environmental obligations but at the same time to produce more,” he said.
“There are countries of the world and the last Labor government, which said that the way to do these things is to shut down farms and produce less.
“We have an obligation to feed people, and the way we make New Zealand richer is to produce more to sell, but we have to do that hand in hand with better environmental outcomes.”
What those might be remains a mystery.
But what was evident from McClay’s statement is an understanding within National that Labour’s prescriptive environmental standards for freshwater and methane emissions got farmers’ backs up.
Therefore, their strategy appears to be to hope that Fonterra and the meat companies will impose environmental standards on suppliers, leaving the Government out of it.
Labour Leader Chris Hipkins appears to understand the political damage the last Labour Government’s farm environmental standards caused.
“We’ve had the opportunity to reflect on some of the areas where things got a bit sticky,” he told a Federated Farmers audience.
“Things like methane pricing, clearly in He Waka Eke Noa, became very controversial and very difficult for us towards the end of our time in government,” he said.
“And we want to learn from those experiences around how we can have difficult conversations, how we can work through difficult issues, but to do those in a more collaborative and constructive way, so hopefully we can arrive at the right place.”
He also implied Labour had got it wrong on freshwater.
He thanked Federated Farmers for inviting him onto farms to see the practical implications of policies.
“ I’ve really appreciated the generosity that we’ve seen in terms of the welcome that we received and the conversations that we’d been able to have about some of the practical considerations that often get overlooked in decision-making that gets made in Wellington,” he said.
“So, you know, water quality standards that actually don’t reflect the quality of the water when it’s first arriving on farm, let alone when it is leaving the farm.
“Things like that are things where that practical on-the-ground perspective has actually been really valuable for us as we’ve been going through the process of finalising the policies we’ll be taking into this year’s general election.”
Hipkins also had to deal with farmers’ suspicions about any Government he might form, including the Greens and Te Paati Maori.
There were questions about how he would deal with any potential coalition partners’ bottom lines.
“I still think that people should get what they vote for, and that means that the bigger parties in government should exercise more influence than the smaller parties in government,” he said
“My goal is to make Labor the largest possible party that I can make it.
“As we go into any post-election discussions, I won’t be agreeing to things that we haven’t campaigned on.
“So things that, and particularly if we’ve said that we won’t do something, I’m not going to change my mind in post- election negotiations.”
“There are some things that you can negotiate on, but there are things where you’ve got to stay true to the people who vote for you and not do things that are contrary to what they thought they were voting for.”
But if Hipkins was on the back foot, the Prime Minister was happy to spend the day acting as the sector’s cheerleader.
“We can do better. We can do so much better,” he said.
“And so let’s go out with the right growth mindset. To go out there in the world and really make something happen. Rather than have our future happen to us, we’re going to happen to our future,” he said.
“And I think that’s what we need to do as a collective country.”
This is the first laying down of a marker for the election campaign by the Prime Minister.
He is returning to the politics of aspiration that worked so well for Sir John Key.
Clearly, Chris Hipkins recognises that and is attempting to blunt any argument that Labour is a hindrance to growth.
But some in his party will not appreciate him making too many concessions on environmental limits, particularly to freshwater, which has been a core Labour policy for over 10 years now.
For Luxon, the campaign just got easier.
He can now argue that National is the party of economic success. Why endanger it?
