New Zealand has become " a society divided" under the Labour Government, National leader Christopher Luxon claims.

This included pitting the vaccinated against the unvaccinated in its Covid response.

"The Prime Minister talks about the team of five million, but actually she leads the most divisive Government in recent memory," Luxon said in a speech today.

"Renters versus landlords. Business owners versus workers. Farmers versus cities. Kiwis at home versus those stuck abroad.

"The vaccinated versus the unvaccinated."

The protest outside Parliament was the culmination of "underlying issues that have been rumbling along in our communities for some time", he said.

"It's driven by Covid and vaccine mandates, yes, but the frustrations shared by many Kiwis are also driven by a Government that seems to be stalling."

Luxon said Labour's approach to Covid "relies far too heavily on controlling all aspects of everyday life, rather than using tools like rapid antigen tests to manage risk and give Kiwis more personal responsibility".

Prime Minister 'missing in action'

He accused Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of being "missing in action".

The "truth" of how good the Covid response had actually been "lies somewhere in the middle", between people who think the response has been "without fault" and those who thought it was flawed".

"We must chart a path back to that middle ground that unites us, and not allow ourselves to be divided into warring factions, inextricably and increasingly opposed."

Luxon said people should be "able to sympathise with some of the issues being raised by protesters on Parliament's grounds without being framed as condoning illegal behaviour or siding with anti-science conspiracy theorists".

Luxon said his vision for New Zealand was a "society of opportunity".

The Government's "unwillingness to engage" with the issues behind the protest "has amplified division."

"The dismissal of anyone who questions the Government approach has fed a growing distrust."

Luxon said the Government's Covid strategy needed to be change, recognising that "Covid is very different in February 2022 to what it was in February 2020".

"Back then we had no vaccines, limited testing and no effective treatments," Luxon said.

But scientists now recognised "Covid has transformed from a deadly disease to one that is much less serious".

"Omicron is highly infectious, but milder. Covid is now manageable for the vast bulk of people at home," Luxon said.

He believed that the transition to a more permissive approach would be challenging for some people who wanted more Government intervention in their lives.

But he also pushed back on people who wanted a "let it rip" approach.

"But Covid would trump everything else – elective surgery and other important procedures would grind to a halt," he said.

Instead, Luxon said there was "a third way through this".

This included using "effective public health measures like vaccination, boosters, testing and treatments, but to start returning normality to people's lives".

New Zealand needed to slowly roll back the use of vaccine mandates and he called on the Government to phase out mandates.

Luxon said two places to start rolling back mandates would be at the border and for children.

He said border vaccinations "made a lot of sense when we had an elimination strategy and border worker vaccinations were the tool for keeping Covid out of the community".

"It obviously makes much less sense when we have thousands of community cases and as
the border reopens to the world. They need to go," Luxon said.

He described mandates that were the "most objectionable" were the ones that applied to "children taking part in extracurricular sport after school".

"They make no sense. They should be gone."

Luxon said New Zealand needed to "aggressively reopen to the world".

He criticised the slow speed of the Government's border reopening.

The Government did not have a strong case for asking people to self-isolate on return to New Zealand.

"We should quickly move to a rule where people take a test on arrival in New Zealand. If it is positive then they should isolate.

"If it's negative, they should be free to go about their business – just like Kiwis do within New Zealand," he said.

Luxon closed with a pitch for his own leadership. He said the country needed "new leadership", which "knows how to get things done and get our Covid toolset in place," which "isn't too proud to call it when we get things wrong and admits mistakes" and which "shows up when times are tough, not just in the glory moments".

Luxon previewed the speech in an op-ed published in the Herald this morning, which probed whether the protest outside Parliament was symptomatic of a deeper post-Covid malaise.

Luxon questioned what the protest said about the direction of the country, and asked what could be done to "heal the chasm of division that has opened up".

The op-ed tried to position Luxon as a leader of the political middle ground, and make the case for why the problems that led to the occupation of Parliament are the responsibility of Jacinda Ardern's Government - moving the debate from the Police and the Speaker, who have been responsible for the response to the protest so far.

Luxon wrote this morning that voters had been asking him about healing divisions and the path forward.

"They are not questions the Speaker can drown out with sprinklers or loud music. Good policing can't resolve them," Luxon wrote.

"What we are seeing outside Parliament, and the reaction to it, is the culmination of underlying issues that have been rumbling along in our communities for some time".

Luxon will be careful not to fall into the traps of previous National leaders and launch a broadside against the Prime Minister and her approach to Covid-19.

In his op-ed, he paid tribute to her "wise decision to put New Zealand into lockdown".

"[W]e were united in our resolve to combat Covid-19, and we felt good about it".

He will also try to hedge against the allegation that National wants to quickly junk all Covid measures.

He wrote this morning that while it was "reasonable for non-vaccinated Kiwis to ask what conditions must be met for them to once again be able to go to work, go to restaurants and participate fully in civil society," it was also important that any plan to get rid of mandates "take into account both the evidence about Omicron and the need to protect our health system from being overwhelmed".

It's possible to see signs of growing division, despite the fact that 94 per cent of the eligible population is double vaccinated, and a recent snap Horizon poll showed 64.5 per cent of people supported the mandate policy.

A recent Taxpayers' Union poll from Curia, the firm that also polls for the National party, found that 42.9 per cent of New Zealanders believed the country to be on the right track, versus 42.3 per cent who thought it was on the wrong track - it's the closest those two numbers have been since the end of last year.