Prime Minister Christopher Luxon says New Zealand needs to stop looking inward and begin selling itself on the world stage to improve its standing in sectors such as trade, international education and tourism.

"We're five million people in a world of seven billion people in 195 countries," he told The Mike Hosking Breakfast this morning.

"A lot of those relationships in tourism, international students, export markets have gone cold - they need to be fed and maintained, that's why we need to get on planes and start hustling to get moving around the world and do business for NZ again."

The coalition-led Government enters its first parliamentary week today and has already laid out its 100-day plan to resolve issues identified as high priority.

Hosking asked Luxon about the scrapping of the Lake Onslow project - a $16 billion energy project that the Prime Minister believes will result in large over-runs in delivery, time and budget.

"We've got a private market that wants to [invest in it] and needs to make it - we need that to happen so we can speed up the process to improve renewable energy."

Luxon said the project was having a "chilling effect" on other investment, particularly when it came to renewable electricity. He said several power companies wanted to use their profit-generated funds to invest in alternative sources of energy such as solar, wind and geothermal.

However, he said the time it took to gain consent to carry out such projects was an issue.

It takes power companies 10 years to get consent for a wind farm, a timeframe Luxon is keen to reduce to one year for 35 years of use.

"And, if you want more investment in infrastructure and transmission in local lines, you don't need consent to do that upgrade as well," he said.

"We have that on our agenda for the first six months, so we're very focused on getting that up and running in what we call fast-tracking resource consenting."

When asked about international students returning in droves to countries like Australia - which had a 30% increase in students entering the country for study, compared to New Zealand's 15% spike - Luxon agreed the data was frustrating.

He said countries like Canada and Australia had bounced back to pre-Covid levels relatively quickly, while New Zealand was only at 50% of what it was before the pandemic. This resulted in the country's standing in the world and share in the market significantly dropping.

"We need to go back to all the places we had a fantastic reputation and make sure we build the case back again," he said.

"The other worrying thing is if you go to places like India, [if they read] regional newspapers reporting about crimewaves across New Zealand, that doesn't help a parent think about New Zealand being an okay place to send their child. So we've got a lot of work to do to build back NZ's reputation in the markets and education."

The Prime Minister also wanted to drop the number of immigrants from approximately 118,000 a year when the country's unemployment numbers were also too high for comfort.

He called the unemployment figure a "short-term blip" as the country recovers from the Covid-19 lockdown, but that moving into the workforce needed to be incentivised for some.

"That's why we'll have a traffic light-sanctioned system to make sure our under 25s in particular are getting into work," he said.

"We know work is a pathway forward for people. The deal is pretty simple in New Zealand - yes, you get access to a social security net when you need it, but it's not a place you park up for life. That's not gonna work."

Finally, Luxon reassured that public sector leaders would be held accountable for their results during the three-year coalition Government term and pointed to intense meetings over the past week with key figures to express his expectations.

He said Steve Maharey's recent resignation from the Ministry of Education was "entirely appropriate" and, when Hosking asked if there would be more names that Luxon wished to encourage to resign, the Prime Minister laughed and suggested more leaders should be reconsidering their futures.

"We are here to deliver things, to get things done for NZers and therefore we expect delivery and outcomes and expect massive clarity from my ministers," he said.

"There's no point beating up on a public service if ministers haven't been clear about what they're there to deliver and do, so I'm going to hold them to be accountable and they're giving clarity over what their tasks are, but also we expect public service to get on board with delivering."