Luxon: Kiwis should back farmers like they back the All Blacks

New Zealanders need to back their farmers like they back the All Blacks, National Party leader Christopher Luxon says.

But the amount of regulation coming at the sector in the past five years had been ‘‘like 10 balls hit over the net at once – you don’t hit any of them’’, he said.

Luxon was speaking to a crowd of about 300 people at a public meeting at the Gore Town and Country Club yesterday, where he said there needed to be a reset on how people thought about the nation’s farmers.

Many in the audience were farmers or had businesses that support the agricultural sector.

‘‘The country has got into a very negative mindset about agriculture.

‘‘I want to be very clear to the New Zealand people – this is our number one sector . . . they got us through the global financial crisis and they got us through Covid,’’ he said. ‘‘We are the best farmers in the world and we need to rethink the regulatory burden on farming.’’

There had been a huge amount of unworkable regulation forced on the industry that was badly drafted and badly thought out, and farmers were spending up to 40% of their time dealing with compliance instead of doing what they needed to do on farm, he said. ‘‘It is tough at the best of times but they [Labour] have made it a hell of a lot tougher.’’

But if the controversial He Waka Eke Noa agricultural emissions policy was passed before the election, National would not repeal it straight away. ‘‘The sector knows what it needs to do, so we would let the sector go off and work out how it needs to happen.’’

Immigration settings also needed changing, he said.

Luxon had sat outside a Te Anau cafe yesterday morning to have a coffee with Southland MP Joseph Mooney and there was a notice up asking customers to be patient because they were short-staffed, he said. ‘‘An ambitious immigrant adds to New Zealand. We also need to get young people off the unemployment benefit and into work.’’

Speaking later in Invercargill, again to a crowd of 300, Luxon gave Invercargill MP Penny Simmonds a cabinet benediction, following her recent promotion to 20 in the party ranks. Before entering Parliament she had been chief executive of the best polytechnic in the country, the Southern Institute of Technology, and she would ‘‘make a great minister of vocational education and training’’, he said. Simmonds was quick to add afterwards that the party first had an election to win, ‘‘so nobody is counting their chickens before they hatch’’.

Luxon also told the meeting a National government would revive the social investment strategies developed by former finance minister and prime minister Sir Bill English, which put more focus on trusting resources to proven community organisations. ‘‘And as long as they can guarantee that they can deliver an outcome that is all I’m interested in,’’ Luxon said after the meeting.