This week, 2026 got under way in earnest. Workers are back at work, children are back at school and New Year’s resolutions have faded into distant memory.

Our politicians are back at work too – and they have an exciting year ahead. As our more politically astute readers may be aware, 2026 is an election year.

Like New Year’s resolutions, the promises made before the last election have also faded into distant memory. Politicians count on it. If voters remembered all the things they had promised but failed to deliver, there might be consequences for their reelection prospects.

So, as a fan of political accountability, I thought it would be timely to remind readers of one of the government’s big promises back in 2023 – road cone reduction.

Before the last election, PM Christopher Luxon opined that there were “far too many road cones in the country.” He promised that a National-led government would cull their numbers significantly.

Like any complex policy area, developing a road cone reduction strategy took time. But by mid-2025 the government had a plan. It established a ‘road cone hotline.’ Motorists were invited to ring in and report incidents of excessive cone use.

The hotline attracted more than 200 calls in its first four days. But Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown, self-styled enemy of road cones, was unimpressed. He called the hotline ‘hot air.’

Brown may have had a point. More than a hundred complaints from Wellingtonians in June 2025 resulted in the removal of just two cones. Nationwide, for every complaint to the hotline less than a single cone was banished from our roads.

The best we can say for the initiative is that, compared with a similar approach in UK, it was a roaring success. Back in 1991, a British road cone hotline resulted in just one cone removal for every 3,400 calls.

New Zealand’s hotline was quietly terminated just before Christmas, a favoured time for putting failed policies out of their misery.

Workplace Relations and Safety Minister Brooke van Velden put a brave face on it. "We now understand what's really causing the excessive use of road cones,” she said.

Apparently, the culprit is local councils. "The real issue lies with the councils signing off on needing excessive use in the first place,” van Velden claimed.

That reminds us of another thing we can expect a lot of in election year – blame shifting.