If you look closely at what new National Party Leader Chris Luxon has been saying, many of his lines on policies appear to bear an uncannily close resemblance to NZ Initiative ones.
For example, on education, this is how he's been quoted, "The education system needs to dump 'child-centred' education in favour of 'teacher-structured' learning if NZ is to turn around its declining educational achievement relative to other countries, says National party leader Christopher Luxon".
Turns out that the Chair of the NZ Initiative, Roger Partridge, wrote back in October of last year, before Luxon became leader, "As the future of work evolves, the education system's child-centred delusion is setting up for failure those who need the most help".
But there's more. On property prices, Luxon has informed us, "What I can tell you is that we need to get moving with building houses & opening things up. We've got a country the size of Japan & the UK with more population in those places & we've got more expensive house prices." Funny that. When the Chair of the NZ Initiative wrote awhile back that, "The UK has 14 times more people in a landmass roughly the same size as NZ’s. Less than 1% of this is built on, including the roads" and so "Constraining the supply of land for new housing has caused a housing affordability crisis from which Auckland will take years to recover".
And on it goes. Here's another example. Luxon has rejected one of the most basic foundation stones of the modern welfare state, Unemployment Insurance. What a coincidence - the same proposal was slammed by the NZ Initiative, with its Executive Director calling the "basic idea" of UI "silly" during an interview with Mike Hosking!? Luxon's recent words on NZ's poor productivity record would have also made the Initiative proud.
Yes, there has practically been a one-to-one mapping of National Party policy with NZ Initiative "policy" these past months. What does it mean? Probably that the party is intent on marketing a new look, but is selling the same old product.
Sources: