Watching the speeches from the Labour Party conference this weekend, I was struck less by what was said than by what was quietly, and consistently, left out.
Climate Change.
Education.
Te Tiriti o Waitangi.
Jobs, health, homes, cost of living. These are all matters we care deeply about. But they describe what is hurting right now, not where the country is going or how we will fund the tools to fix that hurt.
Every political party in this country talks about “lifting the economy”. Almost none talk seriously about how we generate real, sustained economic uplift.
Lifting GDP is treated as an abstract outcome rather than as the result of a deliberate national strategy.
That is the core failure.
In 1990, when we started Animation Research in Dunedin, New Zealand’s economy was roughly comparable in scale to countries like Ireland. Similar population. Similar small, open-economy challenges.
Today, Ireland’s economy is more than twice the size of ours.
I am not suggesting that New Zealand should copy the specific path Ireland took.
Their journey was shaped by European integration, tax regimes and multinational capital flows in ways that are neither fully replicable nor necessarily desirable here.
But what Ireland did have was a shared, long-term vision for national economic transformation - a cross-party understanding that small countries cannot afford small ambition.
By contrast, New Zealand politics seems to have sunk into a cycle of petty point-scoring and childish theatre, with the serious work of building a future economy sacrificed for short-term noise.
We endlessly redistribute a pie that is not growing fast enough. We promise opportunity while exporting tens of thousands of young people offshore each year.
We speak about being “world-class” while under-investing in the very foundations that make world-class outcomes possible.
A striking absence from the Labour conference was any serious attempt to reframe the climate conversation as a unifying national economic opportunity rather than a theatre of guilt and blame.
There was no hint of how we could harness climate ambition into an inclusive, solutions-focused growth strategy that genuinely engages business, technology and innovation as partners rather than adversaries.
In this, Labour is not on its own.
The current coalition Government has moved backwards on climate policy, and that retrenchment is being driven by the “drill baby drill” cohort that seems determined to fast-track us to the past rather than the future.
Climate change is not just an environmental issue. It is a once-in-a-century economic transformation. Countries that lead it will prosper.
Countries that politicise it into paralysis will not. Yet across both Government and Opposition, we are watching the long-term opportunity being steadily sacrificed to short-term electoral posturing.
Then there’s education. Once universally acknowledged as the engine of our future prosperity, it barely rated a mention at the conference.
Our tamariki are facing a world of unprecedented change. As parents and grandparents, we are looking for some sign, any sign, that our politicians fully grasp the magnitude of this change.
What are the jobs of the future? Are we giving our rangatahi the tools they will need?
The silence was deafening.
And finally, Te Tiriti, our country’s foundational framework for partnership and shared progress, was reduced to ceremonial greetings.
At the same time the Labour Conference members were singing their “ra ra’s” in Auckland, down the road in the Tainui waka, the new Māori Queen, Ngā Wai Hono i te Pō, was challenging Māori to move beyond “hongi, hangi and haka”.
Her message was unmistakable. Māori should not wait for political permission to build the future.
They should design it themselves - with capital, with structure, with accountability and with intergenerational discipline.
In launching a multi-million-dollar Māori investment platform, her message was both economic and deeply symbolic: an investment in our own brilliance, in our own people, and in the future we choose to build.
The fact that there were trillions of dollars in offshore investment funds represented at the summit points clearly to the fact that the world takes this Māori economic engine seriously.
They heard from a young wahine toa representing the rising generation, walking deliberately in the footsteps of great rangatira such as Dame Whina Cooper - proud of her past, but carrying it forward with a message that was solution-focused rather than blame-driven.
There is, however, one caveat that must be acknowledged if that vision is to succeed.
It remains to be seen whether some of the old traditional Māori men who have sat at the tables of power for decades are prepared to genuinely take up the wero laid down by this young Queen. To make room for the next generation, to think differently, to come together.
That same challenge, in truth, applies across all of New Zealand society. Yet once again it seems all we got from the Labour conference were slogans in place of well-thought-out strategies.
And we have been here before.
During COVID, many of us who engaged directly with government watched well-meaning catch-phrases substitute for disciplined, long-term economic thinking.
The consequences of that era still sit with us today - in degraded trust, stalled innovation, fiscal constraint and institutional fragility. Good intentions without structural design leave countries weaker, not stronger.
Clearly Labour has identified where it thinks the Government is weakest, and where it can pitch generalised slogans that require little or no explanation. Of course they won’t be doing that on their own, every political party narrows its pitch to win elections.
But hopefully there is still time for someone to start that deeper, inclusive discussion about where New Zealand could be heading.
The shared vision that shows us how we move from a low-productivity, commodity-weighted economy to a high-value, innovation-driven one. How we keep our young people here rather than losing them overseas. How we turn climate challenge into global leadership rather than economic fear.
And, most importantly, how we do this together.
The answers are out here. We just need somebody to listen.
In 1882 we built the world’s first refrigerated ship, a ship called Dunedin, that opened a highway to global markets and helped make us one of the richest countries in the world.
We did it once. What we need now are politicians who believe we can do it again.
But this election cycle already feels crowded with promises about managing decline. What is missing is a serious, shared conversation about how we generate progress again - real progress - in ways that create opportunity, restore confidence and give the next generation a reason to build their lives here.
Hope, in a national sense, does not come from slogans. It comes from credible pathways. It comes from long-term thinking that survives election cycles. It comes from political courage to move beyond managing today’s pain and instead design tomorrow’s prosperity.
At present, I see no party, in Government or Opposition, articulating that future with the clarity or ambition the moment demands.
And that absence of vision, more than any individual policy failure, should concern us all.
