Election Year is off and running with Christopher Luxon’s State of the Nation address. 

We should know the election date later this week. 

What we do know is the theme of National’s campaign: “Fixing the basics and building the future”. 

Not a shock.

It’s a variation of the way they’ve positioned themselves for a while. The party that concentrates on the need to haves and not the nice to haves - Labour trashed the economy in six years with their spending, we’re the guys who’ll fix it up. 

But the real question is what are they fixing and what are they building. 

Treasury’s figures from the Half Yearly Economic and Fiscal Update delivered just before Christmas, show the Government has both cut capital expenditure since its election and lowered forecasts for new spending.

Capex fell by $6 billion between the 2023/24 and 2024/25 fiscal years, and spending was $1.6 billion less in 2024/25 than was budgeted. 

There’s not a lot of fixing of leaky hospitals and rickety courtrooms going on.

And yet despite that, their spending has gone up.

And that’s because the big ticket items like benefits and pensions have gone up, and so have costs in services like education and health.

So there’s not a lot of invigorating news in the near future.  

Our fundamentals will remain unchanged. The great hope is that private sector just gets on with it understanding the limits to our capacity.

And so we get back to the unofficial slogan: "Vote for us, we’re not as bad as the other lot".