Jacinda Ardern’s ministers started this term keen to build a lasting legacy. They were wielding the party’s first full majority since 1987, so looked to have the tools to do this, with no pesky coalition partners getting in the way of major legislative nation-building.
These projects addressed long-term issues Labour had with the way New Zealand works, rather than urgent crises. These included our strange hodgepodge of public media entities, which features a fully commercialised TV network (that can get away with not always making a profit) and an entirely non-commercial radio station, our inequitable system of payments for the recently unemployed, and hate speech laws that protected some groups but not others.
