Post-Cabinet Press Conference: Monday, 17 November 2025

Well, kia ora, good afternoon, everyone. Today I’m joined by our great Transport Minister, Chris Bishop, who has an announcement about changes we’re going to make to ensure that Kiwis don’t face higher prices for new and used vehicles, but first I just do want to take a moment to acknowledge some positive economic data that’s been out this last week.

I was very pleased to see the stats showing us that visitor arrivals from Australia reached 1.48 million in the year to September 2025. That’s an increase on 12 percent on the previous year and it reflects the increase in trans-Tasman flights but also the success of Tourism New Zealand’s “Everyone must go” campaign. Overall, New Zealand welcomed 248,600 international visitors in September 2025. It’s an increase of almost 10 percent from the previous month a year ago, which now puts us back at 95 percent of pre-pandemic levels. We see tourism, as you’ve heard us say over the recent weeks and months, as having a very significant part to play in our economic growth, and that’s why we’ve seen such a big push from our Government to get more tourists into the country. The data from last week, I think, sends a very positive signal that our focus on the tourism sector is beginning to pay off.

Another set of data I was pleased to see last week was the number of households now receiving Family Boost payments. As you’ll recall, in July this year we expanded the scheme so that some households could claim a rebate on the ECE fees that they pay. Following that change, 11,584 households are now receiving at least $150 a fortnight, and in total over 78,000 households have now received a Family Boost payment. That is 10,000 more than at the end of last quarter and I know that these payments are making a real difference for young families at what is a very expensive time in their lives, so I’m pleased that more families are now benefiting from Family Boost.

Families with young children are also among those set to benefit from the changes that that we are making today to the cost of vehicles, which is what we’re here to announce. If you’re a young couple about to have your first child, you might be thinking about getting a bigger car to fit in your baby’s car seat and the many other bulky items that you need to squeeze into the boot for future family trips. And the last thing they need to be doing is paying hundreds, possibly thousands more for a car than they would otherwise be doing. Today we’re announcing necessary, urgent changes to the clean vehicle standard, which will help avoid big increases to the cost of imported cars. And with that, I’ll pass over to Chris to talk you through some of the detail.

Thank you, Prime Minister. As I think everyone knows, Kiwis buy cars for any number of reasons, whether it’s upgrading for a family as we had to do, buying an affordable first car, or investing in a vehicle for their business. But unless we make urgent and necessary changes to a thing called the clean vehicle standard, we do face the risk of cars, both used and new, going up by many hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars.

It’s very technical but I’ll just give you the simple take-home point. The clean vehicle standard, or clean car standard as it’s sometimes called, was introduced in early 2023 by the previous Government and the aim of it is a good one, which is to encourage New Zealanders to buy more efficient cars and ultimately, over time, reduce emissions. So the way it works is it sets CO2 targets for vehicle importers, and they’ve got to balance higher-emitting models of cars with enough low-emissions vehicles to meet the overall target. If you fall short as an importer, you face charges, and if you exceed it, you get credits. And the point is that over time, as the standard gets tighter, the number of—the type of cars coming into of the fleet gets better from a fuel economy and emissions point of view.

The last Government introduced it in 2023, as I say. We made some changes to it in 2024 to align the clean vehicle standard with Australia. The 2023 scheme was wildly out of whack with the rest of the world. However, market conditions have changed again in the meantime. There is a supply shortage of cleaner used vehicles and demand for new electric vehicles has dropped. Most importers are now unable to meet the passenger vehicle targets. In fact, 86 percent of importers are facing a net charge rather than net savings from credits. The scheme is ultimately pretty out of whack with reality. So some hybrid vehicles, not all but some hybrid vehicles actually attract charges rather than credits.

So ultimately, for Kiwis that the Prime Minister and I have been talking about, it means that these import charges are almost certain to be passed along to consumers. And that means young families needing a bigger car or tradies wanting to invest in a ute will face higher prices and reduced choice. So we are determined to avoid that situation. So we are announcing today some critical changes to ease pressure on importers and keep cars affordable for families and businesses.

The first thing we are doing is temporarily slashing charges by nearly 80 percent in terms of the CO2 standard, from a top rate of $67.50 to $15 per gram of CO2 for new vehicles, and a top rate of $33.75 to $7.50 for used vehicles for 2026 and for 2027. We are protecting credits currently held by importers, ensuring none expire before 31 December 2028. And we’re also launching a full review of the clean vehicle standard with recommendations due to Cabinet by mid next year, June 2026.

In total, it is estimated these changes will avoid $264 million in net charges that could have been passed on to New Zealand consumers through higher vehicle prices, and if there’s one number to remember, that is the number, that if we don’t act, there will be $264 million in net charges that could have—and likely will be—passed on to New Zealanders through higher vehicle prices.

Clearly, the standard is not working in its current form. We’ve had two goes as a Parliament at getting it right and have failed. We are acting urgently to protect New Zealand consumers and New Zealand families. There is an existing legislative vehicle before Parliament right now, which is the Land Transport (Clean Vehicle) Amendment Bill. It’s just been reported back from select committee. The Government’s intention is to lodge an amendment paper to that bill and put that through the House this week so the changes we are announcing today will be law by the end of the week, and that will provide certainty to importers and ultimately to New Zealand consumers. Thank you, PM.

Well, thanks, Chris. We’ll take some questions, but why don’t we deal with the announcement first, and then we’ll move to other orders of the day—questions of the day.

Well, ultimately, that would require the Government and taxpayers, ultimately, who fund the Government, to put their hands in their pocket for expensive subsidies to clean cars and to EVs. And we just have a fundamental philosophical objection to that as a policy. That’s why we campaigned on removing it.

As I think some of you know, I love EVs. We’re a two EV family. They make sense and ultimately, over time, they will be good for New Zealand, and, you know, the running costs of them are lower. They’re good. They’re fun to drive and, you know, for a country like New Zealand with 85 percent renewable electricity, they make a huge amount of sense, and we’re making good progress on our campaign to roll out, you know, thousands more EV chargers. However, we have a short-term problem, which is that supply out of Japan has been constrained. For example, the demand simply has not been there as was forecast, you know, two, three, four, five years ago. So for 2026 and 2027, these are short-term changes while we do a full review of the scheme.

Well, the feedback from the industry is that some of the demand a couple of years ago was, in some cases, artificial because they had a whole lot of what they regard as stranded electric vehicles that they kind of pumped into the market and maybe sold at a discount at various different points. So it—the reality is we’ve got to deal with the facts that are in front of us, which is that demand for EVs are not there, and I think people understand that in a difficult economic environment with cost of living, paying the upfront capital costs of EVs is challenging. So we are making some changes in the short term while we do a full review of the standard.

Well, they will be out of whack with Australia in the short term. So the 2023 scheme that was introduced by the previous Government was extremely aggressive and ambitious and if we were still having that situation now, the numbers that we’ve laid out for you in terms of the offset costs that would otherwise be passed on to consumers would be far worse. So we made some changes when Simeon Brown was Transport Minister in 2024 to bring the scheme into line with Australia, and we will now—we will now be—we will now be more generous to New Zealand consumers than we would have been.

No, I don’t think that’s the case, and that’s not the feedback from the industry. This is a pragmatic, short-term step that is fully supported by the motor vehicle industry, and both used and new. They have been really clear with us in Government that unless you act, the scheme will fall apart on 1 January 2026, to the extent that prices will rise, almost certainly, because of the aggressive nature of the targets that they are simply unable to meet. That is just the economic reality that we face as a Government, and we are not prepared to put New Zealanders through the pain of paying thousands of dollars more, in some cases, for ordinary petrol cars at a time when, you know, a lot of New Zealanders are still doing it quite toughly.

Sorry, the only thing I would say to that, Craig, is that, you know, 86 percent of the importers now are actually in a charge situation, not in a credit situation, and, you know, there’s a real risk that you actually also get—you know, New Zealand, a small market, a price taker. Ultimately, you end up with a smaller range of cars, smaller—less choice for New Zealanders. So, you know, the real benefit and motivation is primarily to make sure that we’re actually supporting Kiwis at a difficult time. They’re not going to be loaded up with hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of extra charges, and equally while we do the review, suspend it for a period of time while we undertake that review.

It doesn’t mean that, and I just want to be really clear about that. Exactly what price consumers pay at the car yard varies, obviously, between competitive price tension between used and new importers, the particular localised sector of the market. It will depend on what the importer has in terms of penalties and credits. Some importers are in different situations than others. What this is an attempt to do, because I you would ask us about what this actually means for particular prices of cars, what this is an attempt to do is to put into real terms what it means in a per vehicle maximum charge.

So in the relation to the example you used, the Mitsubishi, on its current trajectory, if we didn’t make the changes at $67.50 per gram, that would result in a charge of just over $6,000 for the Mitsubishi ASX. The proposed charge of $15 per gram that we will have into law by the end of the year creates maximum savings for that particular vehicle of close to $5,000.

Correct, and it—and it may be that the price goes up by a lesser amount than around $4,700, or it may be that it gets passed on in full. It will just depend on the particular car, the dealer, the individual. You know, these things are dynamic.

Those charges.

We’re just trying to illustrate the level of savings that are being created for consumers.

That’s an understatement.

Well, you’re right, it is exceedingly complicated, as my, hopefully, attempts to explain it have demonstrated. One option out of the review will be that it gets scrapped. A couple of points I’d make to that: (1) almost all countries in the OECD have some form of vehicle efficiency standard or clean vehicle standard. So the only other country in the OECD that doesn’t have one is Russia. So every other country, bar Russia, has a standard.

The question is what that standard is, and we’ve had a couple of goes now at designing a standard for New Zealand, which is essentially a technology and price taker from the rest of the world when it comes to used and new vehicles, and we haven’t got it right. The industry itself supports a standard, so it’s worth noting that. The used and new vehicle industry supports having a standard because they think greening the fleet over time—EVs are good for New Zealand. They support one. It’s just that the standard that we’ve got at the moment is out of whack with the economic reality that they face.

So we will work pretty hard over the next six months to do a full review. We’re not ruling out scrapping it entirely, but complexity with that too because there’s a whole bunch of people with penalties that they’ve got, and there’s a whole bunch of people with credits, and those are essentially a form of property right. There’s money on their balance sheet, so unpicking that is quite complicated too. So we’ll do a review, but let’s wait and see where we get to.

Well, the scheme itself was established in 2023. We made some changes to bring it into line with Australia, which was supported by the industry at the time and supported by many people. I think most people said that’s pretty reasonable. At the time, the advice was that it was going to be essentially a sensible change. It was going to lead to a glide path over time that people could meet, and it would essentially, you know, work in the way that it’s intended. That hasn’t transpired. Now, at that point Government’s got a choice. We can either put our hand in the air and say well, you know, we’re not going to make any changes, that’s life, deal with it. Or—

Well, we stand by our decision to scrap the clean car discount. The clean car discount, just so we’re really clear what it was, was general taxpayers paying for people to buy cheaper EVs. So that is basically people who could already afford to buy an EV, so, on average, middle to upper-income New Zealanders, being subsidised by every other New Zealander at a time when the Government is running enormous budget deficits. We do not think it was justifiable for general taxpayers to use borrowed taxpayer money that we will have to repay at vast expense later to subsidise middle-class and wealthy New Zealanders to buy EVs. That is not a defensible public policy position. That’s why we scrapped it.

No, the advice was in 2024 that the changes that were made then were the right thing to do and would work. They haven’t. As I say, you can either say, “Oh well, deal with it, lump it”, or you can make changes.

No, we stand by the decisions that were made on the best available information to us at the time. We are now acting in accordance with what we think the public deserve and need, and what the industry need, and we’re responding to their calls and doing the right thing.

The problem is the feedback is that over the next two years they simply can’t get the EVs because there are supply constraints in the market, so they simply can’t get the EVs to get the credits in to sell. And also you’ve got a double whammy problem where the supply is not available and the demand is not there either. So you’ve got a double whammy situation going on and so that’s why we’re doing it for a couple of years, 2026 and 2027, and, you know, making some other ancillary changes through to 2028, while we do a full review of the scheme. And, you know, I’m not going to predispose where that gets to.

I mean we can give you some stuff on that. There’s a whole range of different reasons. I mean one is that, you know, just literally the side of the road that we drive on. There’s a whole range of other technical things. We are a technology taker in terms of this, but we can put you in touch with officials who will give you chapter and verse about the various things there.

Yes, and there is good progress that I can’t get ahead of. But as I think you probably know, just the short story is we put the National Infrastructure Funding and Financing company in charge of essentially running, like, a UFB-style rollout by working with the private sector, recyclable capital, to get ahead of demand. That has gone very well and we’ve received a number of very good bids, so to speak, and they’re just negotiating those at the moment. We’re hoping to make announcements about that before Christmas.

Negligible. So—

28 kilotonnes.

During the emissions ERP2 budget, it’s 28 kilotonnes, so the impact is so negligible this didn’t get a climate impact assessment during the Cabinet process because it’s negligible.

No, it’s more, as I said before, we made the changes. They haven’t worked. You can either put your—you know, you can put your neck out and say, “Oh, well, we’ll just—” you know, “Like it or lump it”, or you can actually just pragmatically respond to the situation that you find in front of you. And we’re a pragmatic Government doing what needs to be done to protect consumers at a pretty tough time for many people still. And we want to avoid a situation where people go to the car yard and buy a second-hand car in early 2026 and are slugged with an even higher bill as a result of a scheme that we have the power to fix. So we’re doing that.

Yes, we can. Any other questions? Sorry, any other questions on the announcement? Otherwise—oh, sorry, Thomas?

Sure.

Yeah, no, he’ll be staying.

I’m not aware of that paper trail per se. What I’d just say on that one is that we’ve asked, you know, DIA, as you saw us do, to do a deep dive to say what more could we be doing in terms of information-sharing between the agencies to make sure that we’ve got the vetting as robust as it possibly can be. They’ve completed that work. There are things that they will do, particularly between police and DIA, and police and other agencies across Government, so that they actually are communicating and sharing that information.

I’m aware police were aware of that subsequently, as we found out subsequent to his, you know, leaving.

No, I just think that the information-sharing processes that we should expect between police to share information around those sorts of things should be made available, and that’s what the DIA have put in place as a mechanism so that police can share that information with the Government agencies, as they should, in my view.

Look, I mean, I’m not going to—I saw that poll. I’m not going to comment on polls, whether they’re good or bad. I don’t comment on them, as you well know. But, you know, I’m focused on making sure we’re trying to fix this economy. There’s no doubt about it, we inherited a pretty tough situation, a 35-year recession, big COVID hangover, difficult trading environment. But we—my job is to fix it and so, you know, that is what we in our team are doing.

Again, I don’t comment on polls. I know—there’s so many polls each and every week, I would spend more time commenting on polls than actually trying to fix this country, and so I’m very focused on it.

Again, I’m—well, the capital gains tax is a terrible idea. There is—you know, we can see very clearly—

Disagree. I disagree. That’s a tax on businesses, it’s a tax on KiwiSaver, it’s a tax that actually is not what New Zealand needs at this time of its economic cycle. What New Zealand needs right now is to grow this economy. And we’ve seen it before from Labour, this is just more of the same, spend more, borrow more, tax more. I mean here’s the insanity of that proposition: you’re going to institute a capital gains tax so that Chris Hipkins and myself can get three free GP visits, but yet you won’t support an extension of prescriptions to 12 months that actually saves people $105 a year. On the other hand, you’ve actually taken $700 million worth of dividends for the so-called Future Fund, which you can’t recycle those assets through, unlike Temasek, and you end up taking that money out of health and education as a result. So none of it’s all making sense. And I’m just saying to you Labour has not learned its lesson. Hipkins wants to take up the inflation target. He said that he’ll borrow more, and he’s clearly taxing you more. wait till Chloe Swarbrick joins them and then you’re going to have an inheritance tax, you know, a death tax, a trust tax and a bunch of stuff.

Sorry, with what?

Again, our focus has been to leave that with the Public Service Commissioner. It’s his job to make sure that it’s dealt with as an employment matter. I have to be careful what I can say legally in that context. Suffice to say, I think all of us reading that report found it pretty shocking and appalling.

In what regard to?

Not that I’m aware of.

Look, again, I’m not going to comment on that particular case. I would, again, you know, encourage anyone across the country where they see an assault happen to report it to police and to hold the authorities, you know, accountable, in this case, if it’s a school, for doing so as well.

Look, again, you’d need to direct those questions to the Ministry of Education.

Yeah, look, it’s a court ruling that’s only just come through. We need some time to digest it and obviously that’ll be something that Minister van Velden will be looking into very closely.

Yeah, in fairness, the court ruling has only just come through and we do need time as a Government to digest that and understand that judgment.

Yes.

Well—

We’ll be getting Wellington moving.

We’ll be getting Wellington moving.

Unlike the last lot.

There’s some stuff happening already. So there’s geotech work happening in Mount Victoria right now, for example, where they are literally drilling into the ground right now, and there’s property acquisition that will be underway, consenting processes, early works. There’s a whole lot of stuff that’s going to be happening over the next year or so. And, you know, it’s a long-term project and we’re keen to make progress.

Well, I’m sure we’ll have a debate about that, but the point is we are getting on with the project. So there’s a lot of money, you know, being approved by the Transport Agency for early works and for land acquisition. My notes in front of me tell me that there’s 176 properties that potentially need to be fully or partially acquired, 146 properties where—and on top of that, to enable the construction, there’s over a couple of hundred landowners impacted. There’s quite a bit of work to be gotten on with over the next year or so, and beyond after that.

Well, firstly, it’s four weeks, Monday 17 to Sunday 14 December. But, you know, look, it’s not like this project hasn’t been consulted on.

Hasn’t been consulted on before, yeah.

Some of you with long memories have been here before.

Wellingtonians have been here before. This project goes all the way back, if you want to get technical about it, to the 1970s. That’s how long we’ve been talking in Wellington about a duplicate Mount Victoria tunnel. So it’s not like Wellingtonians are unaware of the general plan. So a lot of Wellingtonians will just go, “Oh, here we go again, another round of consultation. Can you just go and build it?” But, you know, we’re going through the process. It’s four weeks. People can see what is planned and there will be work after that.

That’s not a reason not to do it, is it?

All state highways in Wellington are controversial, as you know—you know, as I think you well know. I mean there’s a long history here, but my view—my general sense out of Wellingtonians is they just want us to get on with it. The tunnel was built in 1931 and it would be really good to actually get one underway before the 100-year anniversary of the existing tunnel, which by the way carries 40,000 vehicles through it, through a narrow tunnel that people, you know, take their lives into their hands when they go through. They just want us to get on with it and that’s what we’re doing. But these things are not going to happen straightaway.

Yeah, well, you know, they’re welcome to their views. The point I often make to Julie Anne and the others, and Tamatha, is once you take traffic off the quays and round Oriental Bay, Oriental Parade and Oriental Bay and send it through an actual dedicated

State Highway, which is Vivian Street by the way, and Mount Vic and the Terrace, and you’ve got more capacity along that corridor and you can use it, all of a sudden the quays become freed up for lesser amounts of traffic and the modelling suggests there’ll be fewer cars on it, which means you can do buses on the quays, for example. And going around the harbour, that becomes a much more attractive place to run, walk, cycle, spend time on the beach, because you haven’t got cars rat-running around Oriental Parade and the bays to get to the airport. So—

Sean.

—all these things make a difference.

Yeah, look, congratulations. It’s fantastic news and I wish them both incredibly well.

Look, again, I’ll just say to you we know it’s been incredibly difficult for New Zealanders. I’ve said this, you know, recently, you know, over the last 18 months since we’ve been in power, two years almost. You know, we’ve done an incredible job of trying to get the basics and the fundamentals sorted. I mean, you cannot increase spending by 84 percent, triple the debt from $60 billion to $180 billion, costing us $9 billion in interest each and every year. Just to think about it, you know, the Dunedin Hospital that we build will be the most expensive hospital in the history of mankind in the southern hemisphere, and that’s basically four to five of those every single year that we’re just paying out in the interest bill of the debt that Labour ran up. And as you saw from the Treasury, $66 billion went walkabout and nobody can tell you where it is. Hipkins and co didn’t even front—to have the audacity to front and actually explain that to the New Zealand people.

So, you know, my job is—I’m not—I genuinely—and you—I’ve been trying to say this to you guys from day one: I do not—I am not worried about polls, good or bad, or whatever they may be, any given week. I am very much focused on waking up each day and going to work and getting this job done. It’s why I came to politics four or five years ago. It’s what we’ve got to do to realise the potential, the immense potential that’s in this awesome country of ours. But we’ve got to get the show on the road and we are going to get things done and we’re going to get things built, and New Zealanders, you know, some New Zealanders are experiencing that. I was down on the South Island last week and, you know, you’ve got a very buoyant response to growth. You’re seeing that in primary industries, rural communities. But no doubt about it, in our urban centres has been difficult, in part because of high interest rates that impact on building and construction in particular. But we’re doing everything we can, pulling all the levers, and the good news is job ads are up three and a half percent, exports up four percent, farmer confidence is high, business confidence up another eight points. All of that stuff is positive.

Yeah, look, it is really concerning for parents and educators and guardians. Again, it’s been good to see that the company has voluntarily withdrawn the products. And again, I’d just say to everybody impacted, can you please go to the MBIE website, where—the information there about safe handling and disposal of that sand is important. So, at the moment, we just want to make sure we get the message out to everybody, make sure that we deal with the handling and the safe disposal of those sands.

Yeah, look, we really welcome it. I mean, as you know, red meat is our biggest import—export to the US. It represents anywhere from 25 percent to 30 percent of our total exports to the US, back at a level of tariffs below what it was on Liberation Day. So, it’s a very positive move and, you know, If you talk to our red meat exporters in New Zealand, that’s a very good thing. What you’re seeing is all around the world, probably up to 2030, there is more demand for red meat than there is supply in livestock across the world, and that just creates a huge opportunity for us. So, you know, 70 percent of our products still carry the 15 percent tariff. We’ll continue to make the case, as we have been doing, to the American administration, about that.

Well, there are two separate issues. One’s about tourism, and the other’s about immigration, so let’s just not mix the drinks.

Well, the first thing is the thing that can affect the economy most is to power up our tourism sector. You know, it’s our second biggest earner of GDP. It’s a really important sector for us. Our efforts that we’ve had, as you’ve seen Louise Upston and myself announce and talk about, marketing campaigns in Australia driving Australians to New Zealand in the way that we have been is incredibly positive.

You know, we know we’ve got a challenge around—you know, net migration is, I think, 12,500. It’s about half what it has been over this average period. There’s still more people coming to New Zealand than are leaving. But certainly, you know, we understand New Zealand citizens in particular, there’s more leaving than there are coming home, and that’s part—and we’ve seen that in our history and that’s a function of the economic opportunity and the conditions that we are dealing with. But we are working our way through that to build a better economy, to make sure people feel safer, they’ve got better housing and education and health outcomes for them and their families.

Well, look, I think that’s a bit cute. I mean, like, honestly it’s been a very successful campaign. I think even you’d have to admit that as a media. Isn’t it great that we’ve got Australians coming to New Zealand that are powering up a big part of the Queenstown economy and the New Zealand economy, and good on Louise Upson and the Tourism New Zealand team for creating a campaign that’s driven more Australians here. That’s only good. OK, thanks guys. Appreciate it. Have a good day. Thanks.