It’s likely a future left-wing government will reintroduce these funds. The problem is the ratcheting effect: it takes no time at all to destroy something like this. Society reacts; people leave, people retrain, we lose the ability to do the thing we used to do. Then, a new government arrives and we rehire into these positions: it takes a lot more money to find people, attract them back to the country, get their programs established… and then the next government arrives and says “wow this is inefficient” and cans it again.

NZ in general is starting to suffer from the swings in partisan politics, despite our MMP system. Similar problems happen with bread and butter infrastructure projects.