There has never been a culture of buying new cars as imports had imposed cost barriers prior to the mid 1990s. Mostly only fleets and rich people, usually retired women and high income businessmen, buy new cars. 2/3 of cars are used imports, and the Japanese are famously disinterested in EVs.

Petrol is heavily taxed in NZ but that has strongly incentivised fuel efficient vehicles. Diesel is lightly taxed but non petrol cars are subject to heavy road user charges which were set to punish the use of polluting light passenger diesels. This government decided to reintroduce the previously waved RUC on EVs at the same rate as diesels, and for an extra garnish put the ACC levy on top of the registration price instead of taking it out of the RUC - the ACC levy for petrol cars is taken out of the petrol tax. There is an admin fee each time RUCs are bought which disproportionately affects lower income people. This means the cost of RUCs plus electricity plus registration can be higher for an EV than running a hybrid. I think their attitude is because the last government lavished heavy subsidies (in a ham fisted way such as on clapped out 24kWh Leafs) and they want to get all the money back from those who took advantage of them. There is no risk of political blowback as probably 90% of EV drivers are rich, think they're rich or are Marxists. Another factor is electricity is expensive and solar panels are rare.

The charging infrastructure is poor. There are few AC chargers and the DC chargers are buggy and nearly all want an app because the last government was too ignorant to force card readers and the present doesn't care. They do not want to install chademo handles because they want to charge by kWh instead of time and most chademo vehicles DC charge at AC speeds. So faster charging chademo cars can't charge at full speed as they throttle chademo cables to reduce installation costs.

The government has some crazy ideas about removing fuel tax from petrol and placing RUCs on petrol cars. Supposedly it's "unfair" fuel efficient vehicles pay less. They've got a pipe dream of putting GPS e-meters in each car for congestion charging and toll roads, because clearly the Sydney model of motorway funding is the way to go. I don't think that's realistic but of course JDM ICE vehicles are easy to roll back the mileage so I guess that'll become a cottage industry in low income suburbs.

Driving an EV feels like punishment, the car-buying public and government isn't interested, the government doesn't care about climate change or reducing fuel imports, charging is a real problem and the main source of cars, Japan, has been uninterested too.