The union points out that Willis is now taxing, spending and borrowing more than Robertson, while bureaucrat numbers have fallen by fewer than 1000 and still sit around 63,000.

Largely as a result of this ongoing growth in the size of government, according to the union, real GDP per capita has fallen nearly 4%, real wages are stagnant, record numbers of New Zealanders are leaving and unemployment is up over 40,000.

Inflation is still at the top of the 1-3% target range and, while it has fallen from the peaks under Labour, even the cheapest brand of milk was up 13.5% over the last year, the cheapest eggs up 18.5%, the cheapest instant coffee 25.5% and the cheapest cheese 30.1%.

Meat, poultry and fish were up only 7.6%, but electricity prices rose 11.8% and gas by 14.4%.

Progress on coalition promises to tackle the supermarket, electricity and banking oligopolies is glacial.

The Taxpayers’ Union has always professed to be 100% politically independent, and denies it is affiliated with any political party the way other unions are with Labour.

Richardson and her board have decided the credibility of those commitments demands it speak out strongly against Willis’s economic and fiscal record.

The Government’s critics from its right argue among themselves over whether Willis or Prime Minister Christopher Luxon is most responsible for the coalition’s failure to even slow the rate of borrowing compared with Robertson’s two years after Covid.

Willis will borrow $2.7 billion more in 2025-26 than Robertson did in 2023-24 and gross and net debt are at record levels. Both will continue to rise, reaching $283b and $238b respectively by the end of the decade.

That’s despite the tax take continuing to soar, since Willis plans to keep increasing spending by even more.

Those who lay most of the blame on Luxon point firstly to his unilateral tax-cut promises made in January 2022, which precipitated his finance spokesperson, Simon Bridges, departing from the role and Parliament altogether.

Willis’s defenders say she can hardly be responsible for fiscally irresponsible promises made before she was even put in charge of finance. If anything, they say, she managed to get Luxon to drop some elements of his original package, reducing the fiscal impact.

Moreover, they argue, Willis does not have in Luxon the sort of leader who can build the necessary broad public support for reform that David Lange could for Sir Roger Douglas or Helen Clark for Sir Michael Cullen when he raised the top tax rate or introduced his then-controversial KiwiSaver scheme.

Attempts to build a narrative for reform are left to Willis herself and Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop, while Luxon spends his time saying how fantastic everything is.

How, it is asked, can Willis cut spending when her Prime Minister is unable to articulate why there is no alternative?

But Willis’s critics are having none of that.

They point out that Richardson and her successor, Sir William Birch, hardly had a Lange, Sir John Key or Dame Jacinda Ardern in Jim Bolger yet managed major reforms that delivered record economic growth for at least the following decade.

Counterwise, Sir Bill English and Robertson did have Key and Ardern to sell the need for reform – either spending cuts or tax hikes – but decided just to borrow and spend instead.

Thus, it’s argued, it is the ability of a Finance Minister to develop and sell an ambitious programme to her colleagues that matters much more than the media talents of their Prime Minister.

The debate is somewhat academic right now since the National Party caucus has decided it daren’t move against Luxon before Christmas, enabling him to face down internal dissent, including by promising to change his personal communications style.

Two things this month might break the current standoff, one way or the other. First is the next Taxpayers’ Union poll, conducted by Farrar’s Curia, also due next week. The other is Treasury’s Half-Year Economic and Fiscal Update on December 16. If either shows a significant deterioration or improvement, the current political uncertainty at the top of the Government will be resolved.

The Taxpayers’ Union’s planned assault against Willis is, like criticism of Luxon, always at least somewhat unfair given MMP.

It is that system which has encouraged – and almost requires – the two main parties to focus primarily on the most imbecilic low-information voters, especially since neither will countenance even the theoretical possibility of a Grand Coalition as in Germany and other proportional representation systems.

National and Labour strategists are probably right that neither can win an election by promising to meaningfully cut spending, raise taxes or disrupt industry structures – so New Zealand’s descent into the second half of the world in terms of living standards is probably locked in.

As economist Michael Reddell has recently pointed out, New Zealand’s policy stagnation has meant that New Zealand’s labour productivity has already slipped behind former communist states such as Slovenia, the Slovak Republic, Czechia and Lithuania, and will soon fall behind the likes of Romania.

Ironically, Williams’ first foray into politics was as a 20-something in 2011, campaigning for voters to reverse the disastrous 1993 decision to adopt MMP, and instead consider other alternatives such as Supplementary Member or Single Transferable Vote.

Good on him for trying but, sadly, he failed. Had he succeeded, the fiscal wreckage and economic stagnation we have suffered since then would most probably never have happened, and Willis or another Finance Minister would today be presiding over the strong, robust economic and fiscal outlook New Zealand enjoyed until things went so awry after 2008.

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