Follow that car! Leap out in the rain and tell us you’ve changed! New Spinoff editor Veronica Schmidt says Aotearoa needs a rom-com turning point.

All we had to do was survive until 25. Remember that jaunty little phrase? Now, here we are, limping to the end of a year in which we’ve experienced the highest unemployment numbers since 1994 and felt GDP contract like we were 10cm dilated. 

Living in New Zealand in 2025 has resembled living in a dying marriage. You can remember a time when things were good, but that feels so long ago now and you’re struggling to see a future. 

It’s a dangerous place to be. When night after night you’re eating dinner in silence – tossing weak smiles at the kids – you start longing to be somewhere else, with anyone else. Then, one night, there’s Australia in a tight-fitting top and you find yourself ogling its assets.

In the year to September, a record number of New Zealand citizens – almost 73,000 – left the country, with an estimated 58% of them heading to Australia.

The rest of us just keep hanging on, hoping – even after years of high inflation followed by a slow grind through economic wasteland – that we can still work it out. 

New Zealand, with its dead marriage vibes, desperately needs a rom-com, act-three turning point. Flag down a taxi, dammit. Follow that car, leap out in the rain and tell us you’ve changed, that it’s all going to be different now.

But, we all know we’re unlikely to feel a dramatic change before the end of this miserable year, which was talked up to such great heights, whence it squatted and shat on us. 

As December closes in, we must, instead, turn our rheumy eyes to 2026 and attempt to gather a fresh bunch of hope. Some have attempted a new rallying cry: Stay in the mix until 26. Bwa bwa bwaah. Even the type of folk who like coining phrases are too ground down to do their best work.

It will fall to next year’s campaigning politicians to convince us they are the key to turning it all around, and soon. When voters continue to rank the cost of living, the economy, the price of housing and unemployment in their top six concerns, they have to – never mind that no government can control the dicey international landscape, the AI bubble risk or the Reserve Bank’s decisions. 

It will be quite the assignment given we’re now primed for suspicion. Haven’t we been told every few months there are green shoots, only to watch as they failed to flower? How many times have we heard we’re at the bottom, that we’ve reached the turning point, that the building blocks are all moving into position for a recovery? We’re over being reminded what a win it is to have inflation under control and interest rates down, when buying butter remains a stretch goal.

It’s a particularly difficult mission for prime minister Christopher Luxon and finance minister Nicola Willis, who have spent two years telling us they’re cooking up a solution before emerging from the kitchen to ladle out another serving of damp squib.

In March, Willis put out a media release with an opening line that must now haunt her dreams: “Finance minister Nicola Willis has welcomed confirmation the economy has turned the corner.” It was quarterly GDP growth to December 2024 of 0.7% (later revised to 0.9%) that had her calling the act-three climax. Six months later she was left blaming Trump’s tariffs when GDP caught us all off-guard (and hollering for an epidural) by contracting 0.9% in the June quarter.

So, how, next year, do they convince us that this time the recovery really is coming? Surely, the only way they’ll shake their boy-who-cried-wolf reputation is if the wolf appears. If we see convincing signs earlyish next year, indicators then keep tracking up through 2026 and, crucially, we actually feel the effects, they can dance through the election campaign, bragging, “See! See! We totally told you there was a wolf and there is! Trust us with all your future wolf-related needs.”

But while the long, slow grind through the economic doldrums continues, their opposition (does coalition partner NZ First now count as opposition given leader Winston Peters is publicly savaging the government’s attempts at fixing the economy? Will Te Pāti Māori even exist come the election?) has the ideal election year script, already testing well in preview performances. They appear, stage left, a concerned look on their face and offer us all a shoulder to cry on. “There, there,” they say, as they pat our collective backs. “This whole economic situation has been awful for you and they’ve done nothing to help you, even kicked you when you were down! Don’t worry, we’re here now and we’ve got some ideas for how to clear all this up.”

It will be a much harder task for Labour, if, come election time, the recovery party is already in full swing and we’ve all had a few drinks. The faithful aside, no one with a gullet full of lager, dusting off their dance moves, wants to listen to Chris Hipkins telling them that Barbara Edmonds would be better on the decks and if he was in charge of party planning, he’d have strung up more fairy lights. 

The sell will be even harder if National is propping up the bar, telling the same old story of how the last Labour government overcooked its fiscal response to Covid and ruined the economy, but finally with the compelling ending the party has been missing: “Then we came along and cleaned up the mess.” 

All of which is to say, while there’s a year of policy releases and posturing ahead, much of election 2026 will be determined by when the economy turns and how fast it gathers steam. But if “survive until 25” has taught us anything, it’s that trying to guess the timing is a fool’s game. So instead, let’s all join hands and pray to the gods of next year: please deliver us the fucken fix some time in 2026.