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National Party leader and prime minister Bill English takes on opposition Labour party leader Jacinda Ardern in Saturday’s election.
National Party leader and prime minister Bill English takes on opposition Labour party leader Jacinda Ardern in Saturday’s election. Photograph: Marty Melville/AFP/Getty Images
National Party leader and prime minister Bill English takes on opposition Labour party leader Jacinda Ardern in Saturday’s election. Photograph: Marty Melville/AFP/Getty Images

New Zealand election policy by policy: how National and Labour compare

This article is more than 6 years old

As New Zealanders prepare to go to the polls on Saturday, where do the parties stand on key issues such as immigration, the environment – and Australia?

New Zealanders go to the polls on Saturday to choose their next government. Much attention so far has been focused on the meteoric rise of new Labour leader Jacinda Ardern, who is attempting to unseat the incumbent National party of prime minister Bill English. But where do the parties stand on key issues?

Immigration

Labour’s drive centres on infrastructure – housing and roads – with a focus on New Zealand as a country that is not keeping up. It plans to cut net immigration numbers by about 20,000 to 30,000 a year, partly by cutting student visas for courses considered to be “low value”.

Labour will introduce a stricter labour market test, forcing employers to prove they have sought to employ New Zealanders before they can recruit overseas. Skilled migrants will be required to stay and work in the region for which their visa is issued.

Tightening the belt is National’s focus: foreign workers earning less than NZ$42,000 (AU$38,000/£23,000) a year will be classed as low-skilled and will be able to stay in the country for a maximum of three years.

National initially planned to count migrants as “skilled” only if the job they were coming to was paying more than $49,000 a year. They backed down slightly after backlash from the horticulture, restaurant and dairy sectors, which said they would be at risk if the foreign workers they relied on were stopped.

The National government has increased the refugee quota in New Zealand from 750 to 1000, from 2018. Labour says it would lift that to 1,500.Relations with Australia

Just a month before the election, Labour and the Australian government quarrelled over the revelation of Barnaby Joyce’s dual citizenship, in which NZ Labour MP Chris Hipkins turned out to be – albeit indirectly – involved. Australia’s foreign minister, Julie Bishop, said it would be “very difficult to build trust” with a Labour government in New Zealand, accusing the party of collaborating in a plot to destabilise the Australian government.

Ardern was quick to register her displeasure: “It’s highly regrettable that the Australian foreign minister, Julie Bishop, has chosen to make false claims about the NZ Labour party. I have been utterly transparent about this situation.”

English and National have a close relationship with Australia’s governing Liberal party. But it has been tested, with New Zealand citizens in Australia losing university fee subsidies, potentially quadrupling the cost of their degrees.

English said he was “pretty unhappy” with the changes and with a pattern of “announcements made either without telling us or at short notice”. Ardern threatened to crack down on Australians studying in New Zealand in return: “If they lock us out of tertiary education we’ll lock them out here.”

Education

Labour’s major sweetener is the gradual rollout of three years’ free tertiary education, and paying around NZ$9,500 to employers for every new apprentice they take on between the ages of 18 and 24. Labour will spend an extra NZ$27m a year on career advice to secondary students and would restore adult education funding.

National is offering very little for tertiary students. It has proposed to offer a second language in all primary school and to fund more maths courses and support for primary teachers. It would create digital academies for 1,000 senior students and digital internships for 500, as well as a target of 80% of year 8 students achieving national standards in maths and writing by 2021. It would fund an extra NZ$81m over four years for support staff in schools and learning support.

Child poverty

English tried to upstage Ardern during the first televised leaders’ debate by setting a target to lift 100,000 children out of poverty – something the opposition leader said she had been pressing National to do for nearly nine years. For some the National plan seemed a little too late, after former prime minister John Key refused to set targets and English did not state what baseline measure of poverty National would base its target on.

English and Ardern disagree on the number of children living in poverty in New Zealand: he says there are 155,000; she says 290,000. Labour has set further targets, if elected, to lifting 100,000 children out of poverty by 2020. It proposes changes to a programme that would see an extra NZ$60 a week for families in need and has also committed to fulfilling the children’s commissioner request to reduce material deprivation by 10%.

Environment

Labour has set an ambitious target of making all rivers swimmable within a generation and fencing off all intensively stocked land beside waterways over a five-year period. Young unemployed people would be offered jobs to clear up waterways, and water bottlers and other heavy consumers of water would be charged a per-litre rate – something farmers have warned could drive up prices.

Labour backs legislating for carbon emissions targets – the government would need to set carbon budgets and establish an independent climate commission to work toward net zero carbon by 2050. Labour would bring all gas forms and sectors into the emissions trading scheme (ETS), requiring state-owned enterprises and government departments to pursue low-carbon options.

National would continue its Paris agreement pledge to cut emissions by 30% below 2005 levels, and review and improve the ETS. It would fund additional agriculture greenhouse gas research; increase the amount of electricity from renewable energy from 80% to 90%; and spend NZ$2bn on public transport and encouraging the uptake of electric vehicles.

Trade and Brexit

Labour opposes the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), saying it makes no provision for governments to ban house sales to non-resident foreigners. It would likely withdraw from it if it could not renegotiate. National supports the TPP and would continue trade negotiation with the Pacific Alliance and launch trade talks with the EU, Britain, Sri Lanka and South American countries. It would resume talks with Russia.

A free trade agreement between New Zealand and the UK will be finalised when Britain leaves the EU. In July, National trade minister Todd McClay met with Lord Price, then the UK’s trade minister for Brexit, in Auckland to discuss relations between the two countries.

Ardern has said Brexit came as a result of financial insecurity and has spoken of the need for politicians to respond to that with messages of hope to make sure there is a future for New Zealand’s workforce, particularly young people.

Abortion

Ardern has promised to decriminalise abortion, which remains a crime in New Zealand, permissible only in limited cases. The Labour leader said during a televised leaders’ debate: “I accept there will be people out there who will disagree with abortion, and I want them to have that as their right, but I also want women who want access to have it as their right too.”

English, who is a practising Catholic, said the current regulations were “broadly satisfactory … I would be opposed to liberalising the law.”

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