CHINA MISSILE TEST AND PACIFIC SECURITY
Barbara Dreaver (1News): Barbara Dreaver: China’s missile test sends unmistakable Pacific message
Lillian Hanly (RNZ): China missile test sends strong signal to South Pacific - law expert
1News: ‘Deeply concerning’: China fires nuclear-capable test missile in South Pacific
Jamie Ensor (Herald): New Zealand warned by China of incoming missile test in South Pacific
Henry Cooke (Post): China flexes: Test ballistic missile fired in South Pacific after Australia-Fiji defence pact (paywalled)
Mike Smith (The Standard): Official talk of independent foreign policy is farcical

INDIA VISIT AND TRADE
Lillian Hanly (RNZ): Prime Minister downplays absence of Foreign Affairs Minister during Narendra Modi visit
Taylor Rice (1News): Modi’s NZ visit ‘convenient’ timing with Peters’ Asia trip – expert
Amelia Wade (Post): ‘Concerned about Hindutva? No’: PM will be at controversial Narendra Modi party (paywalled)
Anneke Smith (Post): Indian nationals face tougher pathway to residency from August - lawyer (paywalled)
1News: Govt touts rising India trade – PM condemns anti-immigrant rhetoric
RNZ: Free Trade Deal discrimination claim ‘just wrong’, Luxon says
Tom Rose (Herald): Christopher Luxon says Indian PM Narendra Modi visiting NZ will be ‘historic’
Chelsea Daniels (Herald): Why National’s trade plan is about not falling behind
Dileepa Fonseka (BusinessDesk): Indian govt wants ‘mobility’ not ‘migration’ out of India-NZ FTA (paywalled)

PARLIAMENT, ELECTION AND GOVERNMENT
Russell Palmer (RNZ): Commissioner calls on politicians to avoid hateful speech
Katie Bradford (Herald): Outspoken developer Matthew Horncastle referred to police over political billboard
Stuff: Property developer Matthew Horncastle referred to police over political billboards
Chris Trotter (Interest): In any struggle between Parliament and the Courts there can be only one winner – and it’s not the Courts
Chris Trotter (Law News): Election 2026: the committed, the courageous, the tired and the timid
John Gregoriadis (Spinoff): Are we really the fastest repealers in the west? I counted
Henry Cooke (Post): ‘Oppressive’: Government looks at VPN ban or restrictions as part of under-16 social media ban (paywalled)
Nick James (Post): Political scientist says NZ stands apart on one-year voting rule (paywalled)
Lauren Crimp (RNZ): Compulsory reporting of pay gap data worth a conversation, National leader says
Michael Swanson: Hamilton West: The ‘Guess the Government’ Bellwether
Richard Harman: Negotiating with Winston (paywalled)
Hanna McCallum (Newsroom): Boost for local innovation but scepticism hangs over Opportunity economic policy
Derek Cheng (Herald): Covid-19: Minister asks officials what to do following Royal Commission’s incorrect finding (paywalled)
Qiulae Wong (Stuff): ‘We stand by our numbers’: Opportunity responds to tax policy attack
Matthew Tukaki (Waatea News): Te Pāti Māori Focused on Campaign Despite Leadership Questions and Funding Gap
ODT: Editorial: The solid South? (paywalled)

RESERVE BANK AND OCR
Justin Hu (1News): ‘Popcorn time’: Is a ‘nail biter’ OCR hike coming tomorrow?
Liam Dann (Herald): OCR preview: Economists split as RBNZ weighs knife-edge cash-rate call (paywalled)
Nicholas Pointon (NBR): OCR preview: the case for holding or hiking (paywalled)

AI AND DATA CENTRES
Anna Whyte (Interest): Unpacking AI: How the govt plans to change NZ’s dysfunctional digital agency
Chris Keall (Herald): Crown agency pushes for $30 billion investment in new data centres (paywalled)
Joel MacManus (Spinoff): NZ Inc is going all in on AI data centres
Herald: AI paradox: New research gives insights into AI behaviour in Kiwi workplaces
RNZ: NZ workers slow to adopt AI, but many hide how much they use it - report
Nona Pelletier (RNZ): Infratil’s share of data centre company CDC blooms in value

CRITICAL MINERALS
RNZ: Two West Coast critical minerals projects get government funding
Kate MacNamara (Herald): Westland and Taiko to get $50m in public loans for mineral plants, Rua Gold waits to hear (paywalled)
Kate MacNamara (Herald): Regional Infrastructure Fund loans buy social good (we’re told) so why hide details for commercial reasons? (paywalled)
Joanne Naish (Post): Government loans $50m for two West Coast mining projects (paywalled)
Greg Hurrell (BusinessDesk): Critical minerals mining: Tāiko, Westland get Government funding up to $50m (paywalled)
NBR: Taiko Critical Minerals announces capital raise, govt funding (paywalled)

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PARLIAMENT, ELECTION AND GOVERNMENT
Bryce Edwards (Democracy Project): Don’t underestimate NZ First and Michael Laws
Toby Manhire (Spinoff): Are we about to elect our least popular prime minister for 33 years?
Danyl McLauchlan (Listener): Ministerial spend-ups are a symptom of a deeper sickness buried beneath the state (paywalled)
1News: Ardern tougher than public saw, sacked ministers with ‘steel’ - new book
Phil Smith (RNZ): The outcomes of a long week of lawmaking
David Harvey (Herald): Jefferson’s vision of individual liberty shows New Zealand’s constitutional gap (paywalled)
Alice Peacock (Newsroom): Govt board members’ fees soar as private sector directors tighten their belts
Rachel Pannett (BusinessDesk): Why officials’ AI experiment is testing trust in policy work (paywalled)
1News: ACT announces policy to prevent abusers from ‘weaponising’ pets
Tuwhenuaroa Natanahira (RNZ): ACT policy aims to stop abusers ‘weaponising’ pets to control victims
Victor Billot (Newsroom): An Ode to .. Qiulae Wong

TRADE AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS
RNZ: National promises to prioritise seven trade deals if elected
Stuff: National promises trade talks with seven new markets in bid for ‘next billion customers’
Herald: National pledges new trade deals with seven economies if re-elected
Anneke Smith (Post): National lifts trade stakes in direct challenge to NZ First (paywalled)
Anneke Smith (Post): National promises to chase seven new trade deals (paywalled)
Dileepa Fonseka (BusinessDesk): Dairy dash: National targets Bangladesh amid US tariff deal (paywalled)
Russell Palmer (RNZ): Todd McClay says no reason for concern about India migration changes
Anna Fifield: Modi comes to NZ, Penk goes to NATO
Phil Pennington (RNZ): New Zealand joins US project to accelerate AI warfighting
Kaya Selby (RNZ): New US ambassador to New Zealand says Cook Islands is a top priority

NZ FIRST AND VOTING RIGHTS
Tom Rose (Herald): Winston Peters announces citizens-only voting policy
RNZ: NZ First announces policy to restrict voting to citizens only
The Post: NZ First to campaign on voting rights for citizens only (paywalled)
Stuff: NZ First to campaign on ending voting rights for permanent residents

HEALTH
Jim Kayes (Stuff): Bad, but not the worst. Chris Bishop says other hospitals in worse shape than leaky Hutt
Kate Green (RNZ): More temporary beds added to hospitals around NZ to meet winter demand
Heather du Plessis-Allan (Newstalk ZB): The attention on the Waikato ED case could increase the odds of fixing the problem
ODT: Editorial: Horrors of ward 10a exposed (paywalled)
Bonnie Sumner (Newsroom): What is going on at Starship’s child protection unit?
Cass Mason (Newsroom): ‘If we think it’s abuse, it’s abuse’
Laura Walters (Newsroom): Health NZ’s silence on child abuse misdiagnoses
Amanda Gillies (RNZ): The ‘Trumpian’ Disability Support Services that critics say strips workers of help
Jimmy Ellingham (RNZ): Health NZ apologises over paused bowel cancer procedures - but what next?
1News: Cancer specialists call for rehab to become standard part of treatment
Isaac Davison (Stuff): More Kiwis are too sick to work. What can be done?
Paula Penfold (Stuff): How one woman’s eight-year fight raises questions about ACC’s ‘abhorrent’ new approach to weekly compensation

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Pauline Hanson’s One Nation in Australia and Nigel Farage’s Reform in Britain are no longer fringe curiosities. They are now serious political forces, feeding on public disillusionment with establishment politics.

In those countries, political journalists and commentators struggle to understand why they are having such huge popular success. And political journalists, commentators and opponents end up just sneering at those political forces, only to be shocked when such fringe politicians prove popular.

Of course, largely these fringe forces are doing well because they are surfing a wave of anti-Establishment populism, capturing the ordinary public’s discontent with the status quo and political systems that don’t seem able to channel people’s political preferences or even relate to ordinary people anymore.

That’s the context in which NZ First should also be understood in this country. The party is having its best polling performance in decades, and could end up having an even more formidable impact on the election and the next government. It’s vital, therefore, not to underestimate or dismiss that party and the politicians involved.

This certainly doesn’t mean that NZ First shouldn’t be criticised. There is plenty about Winston Peters and his colleagues – to say nothing about Hanson and Farage – that is objectionable. Yet, this doesn’t mean they should be underestimated or just sneered at. Such an approach is a dead end for democracy. Dismissing populists like Peters and showing a disdain for his supporters might be reassuring for those in their own political bubbles, but the resulting polarisation and ignorance is a recipe for making populism even stronger.

Michael Laws re-joins NZ First

The sneering aimed at NZ First at the moment is largely related to the return of Michael Laws to the party. Laws was briefly a NZ First MP in the mid-1990s (after six years as a National MP), and ran the party’s very successful 1996 election campaign. He then went into local government and broadcasting.

On Friday he announced that he is standing for the party in the electorate of Waitaki (he lives in Cromwell), and is likely to be given a winnable place on the party list. And he says he hopes to continue his regular show on the online talkback site, The Platform.

The chorus of condemnation and derision started immediately, and rose to a fever pitch today with Andrea Vance’s Sunday Star Times column, which comes across as rather sanctimonious, even though she makes many good points. Titled “Welcome to the NZ First manosphere: now featuring the undead”, Vance eviscerates the party’s latest recruits — Laws, Stuart Nash, Alfred Ngaro and Taine Randell — painting a picture of NZ First giving “sanctuary to refugees of collapsed political movements.”

Vance pushes a culture war theme: “Winston Peters’ roll-call of candidates is basically a doomscroll through the darkest, most aggrieved corners of the internet. It’s an algorithmic collection of outrage merchants, culture-war hobbyists, and men convinced Western society is on the brink of collapse, and they’re only one homemade podcast away from saving it.”

Laws, in particular, is called out by Vance (his “hypocrisy is spectacular”) for his political career: “Laws has spent the better part of four decades finding new and creative ways to keep his snout firmly attached to the public trough. For a man who built a lucrative talkback brand railing against bureaucratic waste and privilege, Laws has spent almost his entire adult life being paid by your rates or your taxes.”

Much of the criticism is justified. Laws has a long record of recklessness, provocation and political self-combustion. But the tone of some of the criticism is also revealing. The more NZ First is portrayed as a grotesque collection of throwbacks and misfits, the easier it is for Peters to tell his supporters that the media despises them.

Peters responded today exactly as you would expect, denouncing Vance as part of a “Wellington Bluesky bubble” of “lanyard-wearing woke lefty losers” and boasting that NZ First was “packing the halls with ordinary Kiwis”. It was crude, but politically revealing. For Peters, the attack was not a problem to be managed; it was campaign material.

Other criticisms of Michael Laws

Andrea Vance is hardly alone in criticising the candidacy of Laws. Today’s Herald editorial argues that NZ First is doing well in the polls at the moment because of its moderate nature, and that Laws risks that with “his polarising comments and controversial history.” The newspaper says that, unlike Laws, the other recent recruits Alfred Ngaro, Stuart Nash and Taine Randell are in line with the moderate direction that Laws now threatens: “The general consensus from political commentators is these three all fit that middle New Zealand mould, are well established names, and have personal support.”

Newstalk ZB’s Heather du Plessis-Allan has now written two columns condemning Laws’ recruitment. On Friday she wrote on the Newstalk ZB website that Laws will only damage NZ First: “It’s not a good move for New Zealand First, it’s a bad move. Michael Laws is trouble. He was trouble in the National Party when he was an MP. He was trouble in New Zealand First when he was an MP. He was trouble at Radio Live. He was trouble when he was Mayor of Whanganui. He is trouble right now in his role on the Otago Regional Council.”

As with the Herald editorial, du Plessis-Allan approves of the Nash and Randell recruitments and believes that NZ First needs to be more credible and centrist, and “convince voters they are capable of running this country”. In this regard, she says, “Michael Laws is not their guy. He is fringe. He’s been running a show on a media outlet – no disrespect to it – that has a very small audience of loyal followers and to everybody else it looks a bit weird and fringe.”

Today in the Herald on Sunday, du Plessis-Allan has a second column on the matter, titled “NZ First’s revival of Michael Laws feels desperate”. Her main argument today is that Laws is from a very different era: “Laws is a reheat from 1996. Announcing him really leans hard into NZ First’s retro appeal – the nostalgia for the good old days that the party is so openly courting… It also feels a bit desperate. Because, yes, Laws is indisputably bright and NZ First could do with lifting its collective IQ, but surely there was someone intelligent from this side of the past three decades who wanted to join the party in Parliament. Laws brings with him a whiff of stale controversy that the others don’t.”

The paywall now starts partway through all Democracy Project newsletters. Please take out a paid sub if you want to support this service and access the full content, including the following sections: “Laws chooses his targets: RNZ and the public service”, “What impact will Laws have on NZ First?”, and “Laws as heir to Peters?”.

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NZ FIRST AND MICHAEL LAWS
Herald: Editorial: Is Michael Laws a step back for NZ First? (paywalled)
Heather du Plessis-Allan (Herald): NZ First’s revival of Michael Laws feels desperate (paywalled)
Andrea Vance (Sunday Star Times): Welcome to the NZ First manosphere: now featuring the undead (paywalled)

ELECTION, PARLIAMENT AND GOVERNMENT
Damien Grant (Stuff): The maths behind TOP’s biggest promise falls apart
Phil Pennington (RNZ): Paul Goldsmith seeks advice on protection of electoral systems from growing AI threat
Bruce Cotterill (Herald): Election 2026: Why more ‘free’ policies could cost New Zealand dearly (paywalled)
Tom Peters (WSWS): New Zealand: Labour’s hollow promises in lead up to November election
Moana Ellis (LDR): ‘Duties as normal’: National’s Te Tai Hauāuru candidate keeps council seat during election bid
Louis Collins (RNZ): Ten bills to cross the lawmaking finishing line during urgency
Mike Hosking (Newstalk ZB): Stop focusing on the trivialities
Kevin Norquay (Sunday Star Times): Mike Munro memoir: Death threats, rage and a toxic shift in political life (paywalled)
Mike Houlahan (ODT): A plate of roast rat please, with plenty of tomato sauce (paywalled)
Anneke Smith (Post): Farewell after 30 years at the heart of events that shaped our democracy (paywalled)

KIWISAVER AND RETIREMENT INCOME
Liam Dann (Herald): Time for a bipartisan approach: Why Labour should get on board with compulsory KiwiSaver (paywalled)
Bevan Graham (Herald): NZ needs a retirement income strategy, not three separate debates (paywalled)
Rob Stock (Sunday Star Times): Dollars and Sense: Compulsory KiwiSaver has a property loophole banks will exploit (paywalled)
Vernon Small (Sunday Star Times): When it comes to savings, does nanny state really know best? (paywalled)

MEDIA
Amelia Wade (Sunday Star Times): The Google files: Inside the lobbying that stalled New Zealand’s media law (paywalled)
Jordan Meyers (Sunday Star Times): The media Kiwis trust most are the ones under attack (paywalled)
Stewart Sowman-Lund (Sunday Star Times): ‘We’re just three dudes that made a documentary that blew up’ (paywalled)

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PARLIAMENT, ELECTION AND GOVERNMENT
Bryce Edwards (Democracy Project): Off the record, off the hook
Thomas Coughlan (Herald): Men and women have never been so polarised; who will decide this year’s election? (paywalled)
Jonathan Milne (Newsroom): Here’s how Willis and Edmonds will really dodge the fiscal potholes along the campaign trail
Brent Edwards (NBR): Recycling old policies and old politicians (paywalled)
Harriet Laughton (Post): MBIE chief executive to submit to cross examination on pay equity changes (paywalled)
Adam Pearse (Herald): NZ First opposing clauses in Government’s Crimes Act reform
Lyric Waiwiri-Smith (Spinoff): Echo Chamber: Death by a thousand amendments
Matthew Tukaki (Waatea News): Rawiri Waititi Faces Questions on Health, Leadership and Te Pāti Māori’s Election Vision

MICHAEL LAWS AND NZ FIRST
Adam Pearse (Herald): New NZ First candidate Michael Laws wants broadcasting portfolio to scrap RNZ
Toby Manhire (Spinoff): Luigi and the Ferret ride again: the long, dazzling double-act of Michael Laws and Winston Peters
RNZ: Former mayor, broadcaster Michael Laws to stand for NZ First in upcoming election
Mike Houlahan (ODT): Laws NZ First’s Waitaki candidate (paywalled)

THE OPPORTUNITY PARTY
Ben Thomas (Post): Opportunity’s positioning not new, but it has a radical idea (paywalled)
Nigel Haworth (The Standard): Opportunity knocks
Josh Drummond: Should you vote for the Opportunity Party?

US AMBASSADOR TO NEW ZEALAND
Sam Sachdeva (Newsroom): Trump’s man in NZ wants to prove US is no boogeyman
Henry Cooke (Post): Trump’s new man in Wellington will need a lot more than self-deprecation to turn the tide (paywalled)
Henry Cooke (Post): New US ambassador says there ‘has to be give and take’ on Kiwi film subsidies (paywalled)
Anneke Smith (Post): NZ need not worry about a nuclear power ‘bogeyman’, says new US ambassador Jared Novelly (paywalled)
Lillian Hanly (RNZ): New US Ambassador would like chance to work on New Zealand’s nuclear policy
Zar Lilley (Stuff): New US ambassador to NZ: I want to get in a DeLorean, go back to 1985 and fix this nuclear thing

MODI VISIT AND NZ–INDIA RELATIONS
Russell Palmer (RNZ): India’s Modi to visit New Zealand this month
Stuff: India PM Modi set for ‘historic’ visit to NZ, flying in for one night next week
Amelia Wade (Post): Where are the tickets to Modi? Confusion mars lead-up to Indian PM’s Auckland visit (paywalled)
Mohan Dutta (Post): What is Hindutva and why should New Zealand care? (paywalled)

EX-LOTTO HOST PAID SUSPENSION
Catrin Owen (Stuff): Ex-Lotto presenter suspended on full taxpayer-funded-salary for five years after global FBI sting arrest
Catrin Owen (Stuff): ‘Utterly unbelievable’: Prime Minister responds after criminal paid by taxpayers for five years
Heather du Plessis-Allan (Newstalk ZB): What real employer would do what the Ministry of Justice did?
1News: Ex-Lotto host’s 5-year paid suspension from Govt job amid criminal case
Dubby Henry (Herald): Paul Goldsmith demands answers after ex-Lotto presenter gets taxpayer-funded wage for five years while on leave

KIWISAVER AND RETIREMENT
Brian Easton: The Origins of KiwiSaver
Post: Editorial: National’s KiwiSaver conversion is Labour’s historical victory (paywalled)
Mary Holm (Herald): Compulsory KiwiSaver - the pros and cons and the group that risks being left behind (paywalled)

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“No company should be above the law and no government should be allowed to close the courthouse doors on ordinary people.”

Mike Smith said that this week as Parliament passed the first reading of legislation specifically designed to kill his court case. Smith has been pursuing Fonterra, Z Energy and other major emitters through the courts for climate damage for seven years. The Supreme Court had allowed the case to proceed. Then the Government moved to wipe it out. And this week we learned, officially and in detail, just how they did it.

The Chief Ombudsman John Allen released his report on Wednesday. It is written in the usual bloodless language of official Wellington. But strip away the restraint and the finding is brutal: the Prime Minister’s Office failed to release documents it should have released. The documents, prepared by Fonterra and Z Energy, proposed a specific two-sentence amendment to the Climate Change Response Act. That amendment appeared, almost word for word, in the Government’s legislation. And none of it was disclosed in an Official Information Act response, because most of it never made it onto the official record at all.

The Fonterra briefing was hand-delivered in hard copy and also sent to a personal Gmail account. A second document, from Z Energy, followed. None of it was filed correctly. When an OIA request arrived specifically seeking records of any meetings or communications regarding the case, the person who had received those documents was consulted on the response, and still didn’t produce them.

The Ombudsman found this “unreasonable.” He said he found it “surprising” that the former chief policy adviser, Matt Burgess, had “no recollection” of what he had done with documents relating to “a prominent issue” provided by “high profile companies,” whose “wording for the suggested legislative change was ultimately reflected in the proposed changes.” He has referred the matter to the Chief Archivist. He expects follow-up.

The Prime Minister accepted all the findings. He said it was a “fair report.” He reiterated that Burgess “no longer works for us.” He claimed “It’s a good teachable moment, to remind staff of their obligations.” And he insisted he had seen no widespread evidence of personal email use among his staff.

That is nowhere near good enough.

The Gmail problem is bigger than one inbox

Gmail is not just a quirky workaround for busy ministers and staffers. In this case it was the side door through which corporate lobbying material entered the Prime Minister’s Office and then failed to appear when the public went looking for it. And that material subsequently disappeared from the official record when someone came looking for it.

Maybe it was innocent. Maybe it was not. But the defence that this was some bizarre one-off now looks very thin.

About a year ago I wrote about Erica Stanford’s systematic use of her personal Gmail for ministerial business, including the sending of pre-Budget documents (Why Erica Stanford’s Gmail use matters). At the time, Nicola Willis and Chris Bishop admitted they had also used personal email.

Then Act MP Simon Court’s office received lobbying material from Beef+Lamb NZ on a staffer’s private account. Green co-leader Chloe Swarbrick put it plainly: “I think a one-off you could say is a problem, but when we have two very clear examples now of private emails being used to communicate with lobbyists we’re starting to see a bit of a pattern.”

At some point, “pattern” becomes too polite a word.

Danyl McLauchlan’s analysis in the Listener last month goes further than most people in Wellington will say on the record. “In reality,” he writes, “everyone in politics and the public sector routinely routes information via their Gmail accounts, or apps such as Signal and WhatsApp, deliberately avoiding any transparency or oversight, knowing the chances of being caught are close to zero. And even if you are found out there are effectively no legal consequences for failing to comply with the OIA.”

McLauchlan may be overstating the universality of it. “Everyone” is a big word. But anyone who has spent time around Wellington politics will recognise the behaviour he is describing. The question is not whether every ministerial office does it. The question is why the system makes it so easy.

Luxon says he’s seen no widespread evidence of this in his own office. His chief policy adviser got a corporate lobbying document sent to his Gmail. His education minister used hers for pre-Budget documents. One of his parliamentary undersecretaries had lobbying material arrive in a staffer’s private account. So, what would widespread evidence look like?

The hard copy detail

Then there is the hard copy itself. The original documents were hand-delivered on paper.

A printed page does not leave much of a trail. It does not turn up in an email search. It does not sit neatly in a document-management system waiting for an OIA adviser to find it. A hard-copy briefing, hand-delivered to the right person, is almost designed to disappear unless someone deliberately logs it. Add a private Gmail account and the problem is no longer accidental-looking. It starts to look like a method.

The Ombudsman didn’t find deliberate concealment. He said he found no evidence that “contradicts” Burgess’s account that there was no deliberate decision to exclude the documents. But he also said he found it “surprising.” That word carries more than it seems to. It is the language of a regulator who suspects more than he can prove.

Audrey Young, who has been tracking this story as carefully as anyone, was blunter in her Herald column: “It might have been believable that one document handed to the PM’s office might be forgotten, not recorded or mislaid. But to have it happen twice suggests it was deliberate. And that suggests it is not an office that respects basic requirements of transparency under law.”

The ODT editorial today (“Putting it right counts”) took a different line. More measured: “A mistake has been made and it has been owned up to. The Prime Minister’s Office must now demonstrate that the suspicions of the Opposition that something is rotten in the state of Denmark are misguided.”

That’s a fair-minded position, and one would like to share it. What makes it hard is the question the ODT also raised: how many other staff might have had no training or guidance on file management? If the then-chief policy adviser at the heart of the nation’s executive government told the Ombudsman he didn’t recall receiving any training from the Department of Internal Affairs on how to manage official files, then what does that say about everyone else?

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THE OPPORTUNITY PARTY
Sam Smith (Stuff): The Opportunity Party ‘would be happy’ to go into coalition with National
Natalia Albert: What The Opportunities Party Is Attempting to Do Is Nearly Impossible. Yet…
David Farrar: No, TOP is not a centrist party
Brent Edwards (NBR): Opportunity Party outlines its plans for economic growth (paywalled)

TE PĀTI MĀORI
Lillian Hanly (RNZ): Former Te Pāti Māori co-leader suggests party may need change in leadership
Karanama Ruru (Stuff): Te Pāti Māori former co-leader calls for leadership change
1News: Te Pāti Māori needs to balance protest with relationships – Flavell
Julia Gabel (Herald): Former Te Pāti Māori co-leader calls for party leadership change amid ‘infighting’, ‘personal attacks’
Nick James (Post): Debbie Ngarewa-Packer responds to ex-Te Pāti Māori leader’s calls for leadership change (paywalled)

LABOUR PARTY
Martin Van Beynen (Post): Labour’s cautious pragmatism and a ‘fair go’ may be a recipe for regret (paywalled)
Peter Dunne (Newsroom): Why Labour’s cringing return to ‘kindness’ can’t mask its polling mountain
Lyric Waiwiri-Smith (Spinoff): Damien O’Connor on how shovelling shit prepared him for parliament

GOVERNMENT
Matthew Hooton (Post): Murkiness around India deal takes gloss off PM’s triumph (paywalled)
Anneke Smith (Post): ‘Major worry’: Winston Peters says he fears India has been misled over trade deal (paywalled)
ODT: Editorial: Putting it right counts (paywalled)
Alexia Russell (RNZ): Fixing our ad hoc, inconsistent refugee rules
Henry Cooke (Post): Is the coalition cracking, or just cranky? (paywalled)
Tom Pullar-Strecker (Post): National will ‘continue to listen to feedback’ on just-passed heath and safety bill (paywalled)
RNZ: Business to back health and safety changes despite Labour’s repeal threat

PUBLIC SERVICE AND GOVERNMENT REFORM
The Post: Editorial: Fixing the public service without building another Death Star (paywalled)
RNZ: Eyes turn to Immigration’s new IT project after it misses first milestone
Tom Pullar-Strecker (Post): Review calls for urgent reset of Government’s digital projects (paywalled)
Nick James (Post): NZTA says $22k India trip gave staff confidence boost in $1.36b ticketing system (paywalled)
Tom Pullar-Strecker (Post): Union expects pay negotiations at MBIE to end in strikes (paywalled)
RNZ: Digital revamp of government services not effective review finds

PARLIAMENT AND ELECTION
Thomas Coughlan (Herald): Michael Laws to announce candidacy for NZ First tomorrow morning
Heather du Plessis-Allan (Newstalk ZB): Michael Laws won’t be a good get for NZ First
Chlöe Swarbrick (Herald): Jonathan Ayling’s criticism of Greens’ tax policy is out of line with economists (paywalled)
The Post: ‘We are so much more than just the job’: Marama Davidson on returning to work after cancer (paywalled)
Katie Bradford (Herald): Detain, Search, Use Force: Act’s big security guard overhaul
Andrew Dickson: Staining the Poor: The Cruelty and Coercive Control of Seymour’s New Card
Grant Duncan: How much does money count in an election?
Phil Smith (RNZ): The House: The ‘not my circus’ defence versus the rules
Henry Cooke (Post): Wigram to Westminster: Kiwi Labour hand Hayden Munro running Andy Burnham leadership campaign (paywalled)
Audrey Young (Herald): Life-saving law change comes years too late; the low-key political veteran everybody loves (paywalled)

HOUSING AND HOMELESSNESS
Jamie Ensor (Herald): Kāinga Ora chairman gets $54k pay hike, despite believing his agency will become ‘smaller’
1News: ‘There’s gonna be a war’: Former rough sleepers on move-on orders
Julia Gabel (Herald): Should Auckland have an all-access, night shelter? The debate over the best way to help the homeless (paywalled)
Cordelia Stewart and Suzette Jackson (The Conversation): Homelessness has been framed as a housing problem in NZ. The reality is more complex
Zoe Mills (Herald): Gisborne misses out on share of $14.5m rough sleeping support (paywalled)
Matthew Theunissen (RNZ): Local board votes for widespread intensification in Auckland’s central suburbs
Lauren Crimp (RNZ): MSD boss defends linking staff performance with cutting emergency housing
Hayden Donnell (Spinoff): The supposedly progressive campaign to restrict housing in posh suburbs
RNZ: Performance targets for emergency housing up to MSD - Tama Potaka
Kate Newton (RNZ): Flood-risk homes defy analysts’ expectations, gain value faster than unaffected properties

The paywall now starts partway through all Democracy Project newsletters. Please take out a paid sub if you want to support this service and access the full content, including the following sections: CLIMATE, ENVIRONMENT AND CONSERVATION; FISHERIES; RETIREMENT AND KIWISAVER; HEALTH; EDUCATION AND SCHOOL LUNCHES; ECONOMY AND BUSINESS; DISABILITY SUPPORT SERVICES BILL; WELLLINGTON CITY COUNCIL; LOCAL GOVERNMENT; MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY; CARTOONS

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OMBUDSMAN RULING: PM’S OFFICE AND CLIMATE LOBBYING
Russell Palmer (RNZ): Second Z Energy lobbying document will be released: Luxon
Henry Cooke (Post): ‘Stinks to high heaven’: Hipkins suggests PM’s office deliberately withheld missing lobbyist memo (paywalled)
RNZ: Watchdog finds decision by Prime Minister’s Office about official information request unreasonable
Emma Ricketts (Stuff): Ombudsman upholds OIA complaint against Prime Minister’s Office
Julia Gabel & Adam Pearse (Herald): Ombudsman rules against PM Christopher Luxon in climate lobbying document blunder
1News: PM’s office breached OIA over climate note - Ombudsman
No Right Turn: Completely unsurprising

GOVERNMENT
Jenna Lynch (Stuff): Revealed: The talking points Christopher Luxon failed to nail on Iran
Audrey Young (Herald): Coalition insults escalate as Peters labelled ‘confused’ by top National figures (paywalled)
Giles Dexter (RNZ): Treasury reveals its advice to government during early days of fuel crisis
Jamie Ensor & Thomas Coughlan (Herald): Inside Government’s fuel disruption response: Document dump reveals how ministers decided on financial support, worst-case scenario (paywalled)
RNZ: Defence minister received no advice over nuclear comments
RNZ: Improved learning support for kids with disabilities considered by Audit Office
Russell Palmer (RNZ): Government to recognise United States and European children’s toy standards
James Ball (1News): One entity to rule them all: What’s in the Govt’s new mega-ministry?
Erin Jackson (Newsroom): When the rule of law was torched overnight
Mary Argue (RNZ): Minister accuses Forest and Bird of ‘unnecessary scaremongering’ over game animal bill
Andrew Bevin (Newsroom): ‘Brazen’ plan to rescue NZ’s racing industry with high-risk gambling

THE OPPORTUNITY PARTY
Bryce Edwards (Democracy Project): Opportunity is no longer a wasted vote
Peter Dunne: Since 1996 no new party has entered Parliament without a sitting or former MP leading it
Ashley Church: TOP is a Trojan horse for the left

LABOUR PARTY
Janet Wilson (Post): Will tired, stale Labour seize this Opportunity? (paywalled)
The Post: Editorial: The limits of Labour’s small-target strategy (paywalled)
Mike Hosking (Newstalk ZB): This is why Labour will lose the election
Jamie Ensor (Herald): Chris Hipkins calls rental support ‘subsidy for private landlords’ – Labour increased it in Govt

NATIONAL’S GREEN ATTACK AD
Emma Ricketts (Stuff): National backs attack ad after Greens claim ‘gross misrepresentation’
Giles Dexter (RNZ): ‘AI slop’ - Greens criticise National attack ad
1News: National’s attack post spreading ‘misinformation’, Greens say

PARLIAMENT AND ELECTION
Richard Prebble (Herald): Why MPs who travel least may be failing the people they serve (paywalled)
Louis Collins (RNZ): Rare ‘inconsistency’ debate starts Parliament’s week
Michael Swanson: What Maungakiekie can and can’t tell us
Sam Sachdeva (Newsroom): Labour and National signal bipartisan push for trade transparency
Hanna McCallum (Newsroom): ‘I’m not a scientist’: MP defends sex definition bill that omits intersex Kiwis
Elspeth McLean (ODT): The magic of snake lollies needed to corral MPs (paywalled)

IMF VISIT AND REPORT CARD
Jenée Tibshraeny (Herald): IMF releases NZ report card. How do political parties’ policies stack up? (paywalled)
Tom Pullar-Strecker (Post): IMF backs superannuation reform and public service cuts during visit to NZ (paywalled)
Gyles Beckford (RNZ): IMF calls on Reserve Bank to raise interest rates soon
Brent Edwards (NBR): IMF’s capital gains tax recommendation gets short shrift, again (paywalled)
Richard Harman: We may not be able to afford Willis’s spending cuts (paywalled)
Ryan Bridge (Newstalk ZB): Should we care what the IMF thinks?

MICHELIN GUIDE
Glenn McConnell (Stuff): Government defends $6.3m Michelin deal despite no three-star restaurants
Emma Stanford (Stuff): Michelin Guide’s NZ debut called ‘an absolute joke’ by chef
Jonathan Milne (Newsroom): Disgraced Amisfield chef Vaughan Mabee is the new govt-backed Michelin man
Brent Melville (NBR): Michelin campaign pushed to $8m over three years (paywalled)
Emma Gleason (Spinoff): The top tidbits and takeaways from New Zealand’s first Michelin ceremony
Heather du Plessis-Allan (Newstalk ZB): Here’s why I’m so stoked about the NZ Michelin launch
Peter Williams: Selling food and tyres on the news
Kim Knight (Herald): Michelin Guide launch: Tourism NZ adds $1.7m for global ‘invitation to dinner’

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Something unusual has happened in the 2026 election campaign: a new party has started to matter. The Opportunity Party has moved from being a minor-party curiosity to being a possible parliamentary entrant.

This does not mean Opportunity will definitely make it into Parliament. It might not. It could still collapse back to 2-3%, as small parties often do. But it has now crossed the first and most important psychological line for a party outside Parliament: it has stopped looking like a wasted vote. The barrier it’s crossed is in voters’ heads, not yet at the ballot box.

The recent 1News-Verian poll put Opportunity on 4.6%, just under the 5% threshold. The latest Roy Morgan poll put the party even higher, on 6.5%, which would deliver it eight MPs. Roy Morgan can be more volatile than other polls, and no one should treat one poll as prophecy. But the pattern is no longer easy to dismiss.

Opportunity is no longer marooned in the world of 1-2%. Cross 5%, and the whole post-election arithmetic changes.

Which is why the knives are suddenly out from every direction.

The wasted-vote trap

Under MMP, a party needs either 5% of the party vote or an electorate seat to enter Parliament. For Opportunity, the electorate route has always been difficult. When he was leader, Gareth Morgan didn’t have one. Nor then did Geoff Simmons. Raf Manji tried hard in Ilam in 2023 but fell well short. New leader Qiulae Wong is now campaigning in Mt Albert, which is more interesting than previous efforts, but the party’s real path is still the party vote.

So the party has always been stuck in the classic minor-party bind. Voters won’t back it until they think it can get in, and it can’t get in until they back it.

Polling near the threshold changes the sum. The constitutional law academic Andrew Geddis has made the point directly. Once a party polls near “the magic 5 percent mark”, he argues, the voters who had dismissed it as a wasted vote “will have permission to consider them seriously”. The vote no longer feels like it is being thrown into the sea.

The only surprise in a stale campaign

Opportunity is getting the coverage because it is the only surprising thing in the entire campaign.

Most of the rest feels grimly familiar. National is trying to hold together a governing coalition while watching support leak to Winston Peters. Labour is trying to return to office without saying too much about what it would actually do. The Greens are fighting for influence while also fighting the perception that they have become too self-indulgent. Act is struggling to rediscover its insurgent energy from opposition. Te Pāti Māori is engulfed by internal conflict. NZ First is doing what NZ First does: creating leverage, grievance and theatre.

The party is not rising because New Zealanders have suddenly become disciples of land-value taxation or citizens’ assemblies. It is rising because the old parties look exhausted, the parliamentary minor parties look compromised, and a portion of the public is open to a new vehicle for dissatisfaction.

Voters are sick of a political class that talks about long-term problems while practising short-term managerialism. Housing, infrastructure, power prices, water, supermarket prices, banking profits, climate adaptation, the state of public services. Everyone knows the list. Everyone hears the speeches. Then the system carries on.

New Zealanders are used to hearing about broken economic markets: supermarkets, banks, building supplies, electricity. Election year is exposing another one: politics itself.

For the first time in years, a serious new entrant is at least knocking on the door.

Media coverage

Of course the media is covering it. It would be bizarre if they didn’t.

Some on the right complain that Opportunity is being inflated by favourable coverage. Journalist Chris Lynch says there is “something unhealthy happening” in the attention being lavished on a party that has never won a seat, and Ani O’Brien has argued much the same.

There is something to it. Coverage confers legitimacy, and a party that is ignored stays invisible. The New Conservatives are the obvious control case here: they polled in Opportunity’s range for years and got nothing like the same airtime. Journalists, like everyone else, find a socially liberal, urban, professional-class party more interesting than a provincial one with religious overtones. The people who staff the newsrooms and the people who front Opportunity tend to look, and think, alike.

But it’s more than this. Once a party is polling at 4.6%, the argument becomes much weaker. At that point, the media is not inventing a story. The story already exists. A party that could bring six or eight MPs into Parliament and potentially hold the balance of power is big news.

The real question is not whether Opportunity deserves coverage. It does. The question is whether the coverage will now become tougher. And of course it should.

Everyone suddenly hates Opportunity

One of the clearest signs that Opportunity has become relevant is that everyone is now finding reasons to attack it. Hayden Donnell caught the comedy of it in the Spinoff. Qiulae Wong had been calling for less bickering and more unity, and in a sense she got it: “in being hated by the left for being corporate shills and by the right for being communists in disguise, Opportunity has one aspect of centrism down pat”.

The leftwing critique is that Opportunity is stealing Green ideas, watering them down, and selling them back to voters in centrist packaging. Green co-leader Marama Davidson has dismissed Opportunity’s policies as recycled Green ideas, saying “there is nothing that they add to the solutions that we aren’t already offering”. Labour’s Chris Hipkins has suggested the party still needs to work out what it actually stands for.

From the right, the attack is the reverse. Opportunity is not centrist at all, they say, but a radical leftwing party with a nice Auckland businesswoman out front. Christopher Luxon dismissed the party as a vote for Labour and the Greens, pointing to its land tax and citizens’ income. Heather du Plessis-Allan has called it “a radical left-wing party with a land tax and a universal basic income, fronted by a nice lady from Auckland.”

Ashley Church ran a piece headlined “TOP is a Trojan horse for the left”, arguing that a vote for Opportunity is simply a vote for the Greens and Labour by other means.

Winston Peters has reached for the most cutting line available to him, calling it a “party of consultants”. Like most good insults, it lands because it carries enough truth to wound.

The paywall now starts partway through all Democracy Project newsletters. Please take out a paid sub if you want to support this service and access the full content, including the following sections: “What Opportunity is actually offering”, “A revolt of the competent classes”, “The integrity opening”, and “The real test of MMP”.

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PARLIAMENT, ELECTION AND GOVERNMENT
Farah Hancock (RNZ): RNZ political donations tracker: Who’s bankrolling the party campaigns?
Farah Hancock (RNZ): How private donors fund political campaigns
Bryce Edwards (Democracy Project): Entitled to the entitlements
Roy Morgan: National-led Government holds narrow majority (51%) of support in June
1News: Māori voting strategy: To split or not to split?
Nik Dirga (RNZ): Explainer: What is the Opportunity Party and what are its policies?
Hayden Donnell (Spinoff): Unity at last: the Opportunity Party is being hated on by both left and right
Hamish McNeilly (Stuff): ‘Why are you asking me?’ Winston Peters evasive on broadcaster’s potential return to NZ First
Emma Ricketts (Stuff): Greens accuse National of ‘gross misrepresentation’ in tax policy attack ad
Rachel Pannett (BusinessDesk): Seymour defends Regulatory Standards Board $1m cost: ‘no extravagance anywhere’ (paywalled)
Nadine Roberts (Stuff): Death threat, conflict claims and an 850-home subdivision: The row engulfing Matt Doocey
Emma Gleason (Spinoff): The world’s social media bans and NZ’s plans explained
Joanne Naish (Post): Disability bill criticised for ‘picking on the most vulnerable’ (paywalled)
Poppy Clark (Stuff): ‘Don’t malign the Matua’s name’: Shane Jones finally explains ‘limo’ use in Canada trip with huge cost blowout
Audrey Young (Herald): Government makes corded blind safety standards mandatory after child deaths
Sam Stubbs (Stuff): National has pinched one of Labour’s proudest achievements
Henry Cooke (Post): Ministers prepare for slimmed-down official advice from today as Regulatory Standards Act comes into force (paywalled)
Phil Smith (RNZ): MPs to spend a long week in the trenches
1News: Hipkins says he will scrap ‘morally bankrupt’ MSD staff metrics
No Right Turn: The fastest legislature in the west strikes again!
Adam Pearse (Herald): Minister accepts ‘natural’ impact of Police Commissioner allegations on frontline cops
1News: Wellington ACT candidate quits after political group link revealed

TREASURY AND PUBLIC SECTOR
Thomas Coughlan (Herald): Treasury Performance Improvement Review finds ministers losing confidence, criticises ‘weak’ economic forecasting, missed cost blowouts at ACC and Health NZ (paywalled)
Richard Harman: The Department of No (paywalled)
RNZ: MBIE told to look at financial processes after ‘unexplained variance’ in immigration revenue
1News: Ministers losing confidence in Treasury advice, review finds
Giles Dexter (RNZ): Treasury ‘losing ministers’ trust’, independent review finds
Henry Cooke (Post): ‘Weak’: Review finds Treasury not helping with ‘Going for Growth’ agenda (paywalled)
Ian Llewellyn and Thomas Manch (BusinessDesk): Business of Government: Shrinking the public sector, capital charges and more (paywalled)
Susan Hornsby-Geluk (Post): Silence is the advisable policy for politicians weighing in on Immigration’s IT blow-out (paywalled)

HEALTH AND SAFETY REFORM
Tom Pullar-Strecker (Post): Health and safety overhaul pushed back by months until after the election (paywalled)
Thomas Coughlan (Herald): NZ First secures win in health and safety reforms, delaying commencement until after election
Craig McCulloch (RNZ): Government pushes back date of health and safety shake-up
Emma Ricketts (Stuff): Health and safety wedge drives deeper between coalition partners

The paywall now starts partway through all Democracy Project newsletters. Please take out a paid sub if you want to support this service and access the full content, including the following sections: ECONOMY AND BUSINESS; HEALTH; SCHOOL LUNCHES; ENVIRONMENT; HOUSING; TRANSPORT AND INFRASTRUCTURE; HOOTON VS BRASH; CRIME AND JUSTICE; BRIAN TAMAKI; EDUCATION; LOCAL GOVERNMENT; MĀORI POLITICS; DEFENCE AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS; MICHELIN GUIDE; CARTOONS

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“Stop laundering these lies, you breathless hobbits”. That was Shane Jones’ reported response this morning when interviewed by Ryan Bridge about the controversy of his $63,000 trip to Toronto.

Jones has been pushing back strongly against scrutiny, especially from Stuff’s Jenna Lynch, who has now run six stories about the Minister’s trip to a conference that cost twice as much as he had got permission to spend, and included a three-day hire of a chauffeured limousine, reportedly to take him from his hotel to a conference venue that was only a three-minute indoor walk away.

Jones has characterised the ongoing stories as a media beat-up and an attempt to kneecap NZ First. And party leader Winston Peters has also pushed back, refusing to answer Lynch’s questions, saying: “Yours is a crap story, you know that” and “I’m not putting up with your unprofessional crap any longer, next question”.

For much of the public, seeing NZ First’s contempt for scrutiny will itself be the evidence that all is not well. And there is always significant public interest in these perks, travel, and allowances stories about politicians. Stuff’s Isaac Davison wrote last week that, “Few political stories generate as much reader debate as the perks and expenses available to politicians.”

The scrutiny is not a beat-up. Nor is it mainly about whether these sums matter in the overall Budget. What the public is really judging is whether a political class that preaches restraint to everyone else is willing to accept the same discipline itself. The perks are relatively small; the breach of reciprocity is much larger.

Jones’ Toronto scandal explained

Shane Jones’ trip to Canada occurred in March last year, and has only arisen because Stuff’s Jenna Lynch obtained documents from the Government to show that Cabinet approved a budget of $33,068 for the trip, but about $63,000 was spent, which led to internal communications in the Beehive to address the over-spend.

According to Lynch, “In May 2025, Ministerial Services began chasing an explanation, asking if any extra budget had been approved as there was a $20,000 overspend. If not, they said, the PM would need to approve a supplemental budget. There were several follow-up emails.” But it wasn’t until earlier this year after “yet another prod from Ministerial Services… Jones wrote to the prime minister’s chief of staff Cam Burrows seeking retrospective approval.”

Lynch then followed up the story with more about Jones’ expenditure on his trip to the world’s largest mining conference, including that the hotel cost was “$1674.69 a night”. But more colourfully she had details of the limo used: “A private driver was kept on standby for three hours one day, seven hours the next and 14 hours the following day – totalling 24 hours of standby time across three days. The full charge for the limousine service was just under C$4000.”

Questions were then put to Jones about the limo spend, as Lynch reports that “it appears he stayed in a hotel that is connected via an indoor passage to the conference he was there to attend – raising questions about why he needed the limo.”

Did coalition partners throw Jones under the bus?

There has been speculation that the travel scandal may have been leaked to the media by Jones’ coalition partners, as part of the heightening cold war between National and NZ First. Certainly Finance Minister Nicola Willis has gone out of her way to condemn Jones’ travel budget blowout.

Willis told Stuff: “when I go to Cabinet and seek approval for my budgets for international travel, I take that spending limit extremely seriously, as does my office”, and “You should never exceed what Cabinet grants you in terms of your travel budget, and I think this reflects significant errors on the part of the minister and his office.”

Willis was clear to make this an integrity issue: “Because there are so many New Zealanders who are doing it tough, they look at us and they know that on average we’re paid more than typical members [of Parliament], and they therefore expect from us the high standards of delivery”.

She also talked about the need for accountability and transparency, in a very strong but veiled critique of Jones. Political journalist Richard Harman commented that “Willis’s response bordered on the pious”, constituting “the visible sign of much more fundamental gaps that are opening up between National and its coalition partners.”

It wasn’t just National, either. Yesterday, Act leader David Seymour went on TVNZ’s Breakfast and pointed out that Workplace Relations Minister Brooke van Velden had been in Singapore on ministerial business and “Didn’t have her own limo, by the way”. Seymour was then asked if Jones should pay back the limo cost, and he replied: “I probably would. I’d be so embarrassed, but what he does is up to him.”

Jones has responded publicly to his colleagues, saying: “I will compose myself and keep political firepower to the six weeks before the election, but I’ve got a message from my coalition partners: Provoke the matua at your peril.”

More media of ministerial international travel

Stuff isn’t the only media outlet focusing on politician perks, travel and allowances – The Post and the Herald have also recently published some strong investigations and stories on this area.

Today in The Post, Harriet Laughton has an extensive article looking at “overseas tax-payer funded trips in the first quarter of this year”, and she discovered that many such trips were actually more expensive than Jones’ Toronto controversy. The most expensive was a five-MP trip to Latin America, which cost $126,264, including accommodation costs of “$5404 for one night in Tahiti, $772 per person.”

A trade delegation to Cameroon by Todd McClay and Damien O’Connor cost $122,015, and was “$45,349 over budget.”

Similarly in The Press, Charlie Mitchell “has analysed hundreds of pages of expense disclosures, invoices, receipts and credit-card records to identify more than 30 hotels used during taxpayer-funded trips.” The point of his investigation is to work out whether ministers are being booked into more extravagant accommodation. He found they were: “About two-thirds of the hotels we’ve identified are advertised as five-star properties, with nightly rates commonly ranging from $600 to $800. Ministers often travel with a staffer, increasing the cost.”

Former Cabinet Minister Judith Collins was one of the most extravagant: “At least two ministers have stayed at the historic Royal Horseguards Hotel in Central London, overlooking the River Thames. On a trip in September last year, then-Defence Minister Judith Collins and a staffer stayed there for seven days, resulting in a combined bill of more than $11,000. On another trip, Collins stayed at the five-star Dupont Circle Hotel in Washington D.C.”

The paywall now starts at halfway through all Democracy Project newsletters. Please take out a paid sub if you want to support this service and access the full content, including the following sections: “Domestic travel for MPs and Ministers”, “The most important MP entitlement story”, and “Why the public cares about these scandals”.

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MPS’ TRAVEL AND ACCOMMODATION ALLOWANCES
Harriet Laughton (Post): The $63,000 Toronto trip isn’t the only costly ministerial journey (paywalled)
Ethan Griffiths (Herald): 3 MPs racked up $20,000-plus travel bills as Parliament sat for 6 weeks
Stuff: ‘I’d be so embarrassed’: Seymour takes swipe at Jones over $5k limo bill
Gordon Campbell (Scoop): On the Shaky Iran Truce and MPs’ Housing Rorts

NZ FIRST
Chelsea Daniels (Herald): Winston Peters says no to Labour, so why do doubts remain?
Hayden Donnell (Spinoff): Political curse: Winston Peters keeps voting for legislation he hates
Jack Riddell (Herald): More than 600 gather in Hawke’s Bay to hear Winston Peters’ attacks and vision

PARLIAMENT, ELECTION AND GOVERNMENT
Bryce Edwards (Democracy Project): Labour’s broken-politics congress
Chris Trotter (Interest): Political parties threatening to pare back the conservation estate, even by ‘bits and bobs,’ do so at their electoral peril
Russell Palmer (RNZ): Christopher Luxon hits back at Labour’s spending plans, brushes off Winston Peters on India FTA
Anneke Smith (Post): Prime Minister Christopher Luxon ‘compartmentalises’ coalition dispute over India FTA (paywalled)
Glenn McConnell (Stuff): Two MPs took a photo, then debated whether they could take credit for breast cancer policy
Henry Cooke (Post): Simon Watts overrules officials to keep ‘cumbersome’ Working for Families rule (paywalled)
RNZ: ‘No one wants to be sick forever’ - ACT Party’s new welfare policy slammed
Stuff: ‘We’re gonna die trying to do something’ on social media ban, PM says
RNZ: Political candidate files complaint with police over threats
Azaria Howell (Herald): Oranga Tamariki defends $3m consultant spend on Royal Commission support
Jean Edwards (RNZ): Out of office? Oranga Tamariki takes months to respond to Gloriavale child safety concerns
1News: Bird flu ‘on its way’ to New Zealand, says Biosecurity Minister
Anneke Smith (Post): New US ambassador, billionaire businessman Jared Novelly, takes up NZ post this week (paywalled)
Dave Armstrong (Post): Inside the mind (and mines) of the Mātua (paywalled)
Mike White (Post): Labour MP claims gold mine’s promised benefits ‘absolute bullshit’ (paywalled)
ODT: Editorial: Reading the riot Act (paywalled)
Tom Peters (WSWS): New Zealand Greens advance fraudulent wealth tax policy
Michael Swanson: The Future of New Zealand’s Democratic Institutions
Anna Fifield: Europe’s warning for New Zealand
Tom Rose (Herald): Police Minister Mark Mitchell suffers two broken ribs in charity rugby match
Caron Copek (Stuff): How old is too old for contact sports? Minister Mark Mitchell breaks two ribs during golden oldies rugby
Peter de Graaf (RNZ): Rumble in Russell: Politicians have a bruising encounter with ex-All Blacks

HEALTH
Bill Hickman (RNZ): Staff warn of ‘disgraceful’ leaks at Hutt Hospital
Jim Kayes (Stuff): ‘Do we need gumboots and hard hats?’: Nurses sound alarm over hospital leaks
Rachel Maher (Herald): Leak forces repairs at Middlemore Hospital’s ageing maternity block
Nikki Macdonald (Post): Delays, missed treatment opportunities in boy’s death at Wellington Hospital ED, review finds (paywalled)
Aaron Smale (Listener): If anyone has an ‘ideological agenda’ in healthcare, it’s Simeon Brown (paywalled)
RNZ: ‘It is a challenge’ - Health NZ denies poor planning led to lack of gastro doctors at Palmerston North Hospital
RNZ: ‘We’re running out of specialist blood cancer scientists in NZ’
1News: ‘Health system is dangerous for Māori’ says Dr Lance O’Sullivan
Louise Duffy (Post): We all deserve a dignified death, which is why I’m fighting for this law change (paywalled)

CLIMATE, INSURANCE AND ADAPTATION
Kate Newton (RNZ): 1 in 2 people worried about insurance affordability as risk of climate disasters grows - poll
Deborah Morris (Post): Storms are getting closer while insurance is getting further away (paywalled)
Katie Bradford (Herald): Climate change: New Zealanders have little confidence in plan to cut threat, survey finds
Brent Edwards (NBR): Majority believe Govt should act on climate adaptation (paywalled)
Kate Newton (RNZ): Climate change activist files High Court proceedings over government ruling
Shaun Eaves, Cathrine Dyer and James Renwick (The Conversation): As communities face more frequent hazard warnings, we need better systems to avoid emergency fatigue

SUPERANNUATION
1News: 1News Verian Poll: Voters split on raising superannuation eligibility age
Amelia Wade (Post): ANZ CEO says age and means testing should be on the table (paywalled)
Jenée Tibshraeny (Herald): Why taxing a shrinking pool of workers more isn’t the way to pay for our ageing population, ANZ chief economist Richard Yetsenga argues (paywalled)

HOUSING
Julia Gabel (Herald): Homelessness: Christopher Luxon unaware there is no night shelter in Auckland amid emergency housing crackdown
Lauren Crimp (RNZ): Prime Minister Christopher Luxon admits he didn’t know there was no night shelter for rough sleepers in Auckland
Mina Martin (NZ Adviser): NZ had one of the world’s deepest house price falls — so why aren’t prices cheap?
Mina Martin (NZ Adviser): Labour’s landlord tax question looms large over NZ property market
Amy Williams (RNZ): Broad support for boarding house landlord register
Giles Dexter (RNZ): National abandons 2023 campaign policy to allow KiwiSaver for rental bonds
1News: National quietly ditches under-30s KiwiSaver rent bond policy
Martin Hawes (Post): The welcome return of first home buyers (paywalled)
Mandy Te (Interest): Mandatory home warranties: Positive signs of ‘potential increased competition’
Lucy Gestro (Newsroom): All in together: why we need houses designed for multi-generational living

The paywall now starts partway through all Democracy Project newsletters. Please take out a paid sub if you want to support this service and access the full content, including the following sections: POLICE AND JUSTICE; SPEECH DEBATES AND RACE RELATIONS; MEDIA AND AI; TELECOMMUNICATIONS; ELECTRICITY AND ENERGY; TRANSPORT AND INFRASTRUCTURE; ECONOMY AND BUSINESS; LOCAL GOVERNMENT; TE AO MĀORI; LES MILLS; FINANCIAL MARKETS AUTHORITY; CARTOONS

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The unofficial theme of Labour’s annual congress in Wellington at the weekend was that “New Zealand is broken”. It is, of course, the same diagnosis National used to take power in 2023, and it is a fair one: putting the country’s biggest problems on the political agenda is exactly what an Opposition is for. Labour deserves credit for naming what needs fixing.

The problem, however, is that Labour also showed in the weekend that they aren’t willing to advance the sort of innovative, bold or radical solutions to fix the broken elements of New Zealand.

Big rhetoric, no appetite for the fix

The sharpest version of this critique came from the Herald’s political editor Thomas Coughlan, whose column today carried the perfect headline “Labour thinks New Zealand is very broken — it’s not promising to fix it”. The rhetoric from the stage, he wrote, was that the country is “quite fundamentally broken — and it resonated”. The catch was what happened off it: “away from the stage and away from the audience, it’s clear Labour has little appetite to live up to this rhetoric.”

That gap between what Labour condemns and what it will commit to undo runs right through the weekend. Coughlan noted that despite a roomful of supporters cheering Hipkins’ attacks on the Coalition’s spending cuts, the leader “wouldn’t even commit to not following through on the $2.4b in public service cuts” the Government has scheduled for the next three years, offering only that a public service policy was on its way.

Asked directly whether Labour would reverse the cuts, Hipkins would say only that the party would eventually set out a “difference in priorities to this Government”. Pressed further, he fell back on the line that did a lot of work all weekend: “We’re going to focus on winning the election first.”

Coughlan’s verdict on the underlying problem was blunt. Labour, he wrote, is “very keen to make the case that everything is broken — it’s very reluctant to promise anything that lives up to fixing it.”

A congress light on substance

The press gallery was underwhelmed, and said so. RNZ’s Craig McCulloch acknowledged the hype — around 500 supporters, kapa haka, a red-washed room — but found that “beneath the noise lay a tepidity and sense of caution which the party has struggled to shrug”. The speeches open to media, he reported, were “forward-looking, but light on substance”.

Stuff’s Glenn McConnell reached a similar conclusion, writing that Labour “hasn’t quite shaken off its caution, timidness and indecisiveness which took hold after it lost power in 2023”.

McCulloch singled out Hipkins’ best applause line — his invitation to voters to ask whether they were better off than three years ago — and identified exactly what it left out: “It was an effective line, but missed the obvious follow-up: would it be any better under Labour?” On the plans to turn things around, he found the detail “thin on the ground”, and located the deeper failing in Labour’s comfort with its own polling. The party, he argued, “has been in desperate need of a gearshift, with its year defined to date by an almost belligerent policy paucity”, and was missing the “untapped despondency in the wider electorate” that its lead disguises.

Even the rebrand drew his scorn. The slogan “jobs, health, homes” was reissued, McCulloch noted with audible weariness, as “your job, your health, your home” — “yet another symbol of the surface level change on offer”. The Spinoff’s Lyric Waiwiri-Smith captured the same thing more genially: Labour, she wrote, is “back in a major way, wielding its majorly moderate policies”.

What the public wasn’t allowed to see

Perhaps most revealing feature of the weekend was not a speech but a door being closed. As Coughlan reported in a separate piece, Labour ran its congress with extraordinary message discipline — “slick presentation, tight audio-visual game” — and locked the media out of anything that might have shown the party arguing with itself.

National, by contrast, lets journalists watch some of the back-and-forth between members and the leadership. Labour does the opposite. Reporters were admitted to the set-piece speeches delivered to adoring members and, in Coughlan’s words, “moving them on for more sensitive speeches.” The Saturday addresses by campaign chair Kieran McAnulty and Māori campaign chair Willie Jackson were closed to media entirely. The party, in Coughlan’s phrasing, “pulled out all the stops to get the media to scram from the more sensitive parts of the congress”.

This is worth dwelling on, because it is the same instinct that produces the policy caution, expressed as stagecraft. A party that rations what voters are permitted to see at its own conference is unlikely to be expansive about what it will actually do in government. The message control and the policy caution are the same instinct, not two separate ones — a party that won’t let voters watch it argue is unlikely to be frank about what it would do in office.

The bill nobody will name

Underneath the caution sits an unanswered question about money. Several reporters converged on it. Waiwiri-Smith noted that Labour’s various spending promises “will rely on the party’s proposed capital gains tax for funding”, a tax that “is beginning to look like the party’s bottomless pot of gold”. Richard Harman put the leader’s difficulty plainly: “because Labour has not produced much policy and because it has yet to produce its fiscal plan, he can’t actually say much.”

Pay equity is where the question bites hardest. Labour has promised to restore the regime the Government scrapped, which Treasury has costed at roughly $11 billion. Harman recorded the exchange when journalists pressed on how it would be paid for. Hipkins: “On pay equity in due course. This is going to be paid for out of future budget allowances.” But those future operating allowances, Harman pointed out, currently run at just $2.4 billion a year. As the reporters in the room put it to the leader, there are only two levers, cutting something or raising taxes, and Labour will name neither.

Coughlan drew out the consequence that makes this more than a process complaint. Labour has locked in its superannuation settings and pledged no new taxes beyond the capital gains tax. On a Treasury briefing originally written to warn the Government, holding to those settings would mean real-terms cuts to health and education over the coming decade — what Treasury described as “reducing access to health and education services” and an “implied reduction in their quality”. As Coughlan observed, no one thinks austerity is Labour’s policy, “and yet with its superannuation commitment locked in, alongside a pledge for no additional taxes beyond its CGT, it very much is.”

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LABOUR PARTY
Thomas Coughlan (Herald): Labour thinks New Zealand is very broken — it’s not promising to fix it
Craig McCulloch (RNZ): What’s in a name? Labour’s congress and ACT’s rally fail to find election-year reset
Henry Cooke (Post): Labour looks to reframe election around jobs as parties stick to comfort zones (paywalled)
Sam Sachdeva (Newsroom): Hipkins echoes Reagan: ‘Are you better off than three years ago?’
Lyric Waiwiri-Smith (Spinoff): Labour’s hype train has finally arrived in Wellington
Richard Harman: Hipkins goes back to the future (paywalled)
1News: Labour ‘won’t’ work with ACT, but NZ First ‘highly unlikely’ – McAnulty
Glenn McConnell (Stuff): Labour’s Chris Hipkins calls for a ‘Fair Go’: For apprentices, workers, and even on TV
Thomas Coughlan (Herald): Labour to expand Covid-era subsidy for apprenticeships if elected, expands eligibility to road-builders and hairdressers
Giles Dexter (RNZ): Labour proposes Apprenticeship Boost expansion
Nick James (Post): Labour pledges to restore two‑year apprenticeship boost and widen eligibility (paywalled)

ACT PARTY
Tuwhenuaroa Natanahira (RNZ): ACT Party leader David Seymour takes aim at parliamentary allies, opponents - but especially Labour
Hanna McCallum (Newsroom): Act kicks off campaign with a hint of a Trump-style rally
Katie Bradford (Herald): ‘Lock Labour out’ the rallying cry as Act kicks off election campaign
Joel MacManus (Spinoff): Aura edits and protests: Field notes from the Act Party’s big flash rally
Rob Stock (Post): Former gun lobbyist Nicole McKee named as ACT Party deputy leader to replace Brooke van Velden (paywalled)
RNZ: Nicole McKee announced as ACT’s new deputy
1News: ACT reveals its new deputy leader: ‘My whakapapa is mine’
Mandy Te (Interest): ACT Party leader David Seymour shares details of plan to make government smaller
Glenn McConnell (Stuff): ACT campaigning to halve number of Government departments, and limit Jobseekers’ spending

THE OPPORTUNITY PARTY
Isaac Davison (Stuff): What is TOP? A left-wing party in disguise, pure hype, or something else?
Ryan Bridge (Newstalk ZB): The Opportunity Party needs more time to hit five percent this election
Ryan Ward: ACT version 2.0
Lindsay Mitchell: TOP’s Citizen’s Income policy

PARLIAMENT AND GOVERNMENT
Chris Knox (Herald): MP Housing Perks: See how the number of MPs claiming all their housing allowance has skyrocketed (paywalled)
Danyl McLauchlan (Listener): National & Green policies may have fishhooks but they leave Labour in the shade (paywalled)
Verity Johnson (Stuff): Chloe Swarbick and Winston Peters are the same person in different pants
1News: Ex-National minister returns, but this time for NZ First
1News: ‘Temu Napoleon’ and ‘kleptomaniacs’: Shane Jones punches left and right
Anna Whyte (Interest): Trust in Parliament is a valuable currency, and right now, the ledger is looking shaky
The Post: Editorial: Failure without consequence (paywalled)
Nick James (Post): Winston Peters says clause in India FTA contradicts NZ First’s coalition deal (paywalled)
Sam Sherwood (RNZ): Labour’s Ginny Andersen received complaint about Police Commissioner last year
Penny Smith (RNZ): English Language Bill: No changes suggested by Justice Select Committee
Jonathan Milne (Newsroom): The story behind National donor Chris Meehan’s sudden exit from his own firm
Rebecca Graham: Legislation must embed disabled people’s rights
Louis Collins (RNZ): Question time not campaign time

TAX AND FISCAL POLICY
Bryce Edwards (Democracy Project): The Greens should be making NZ’s tax reform debate much bolder
Brent Melville (NBR): Devil’s in the detail on ‘Valuation Day’ CGT: tax expert (paywalled)
Janika ter Ellen (Stuff): Will Labour cancel ‘tax breaks for landlords’? Here’s what it could mean for rents and house prices

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New Zealand’s tax system is broken, and by now, almost everyone knows it. Not just the leftwing economists and welfare advocates who have said so for decades, but Treasury, Inland Revenue, the OECD, the IMF, the CEO of ANZ, the accounting profession, and even rightwing commentators like Matthew Hooton.

In April 2026, Hooton wrote in the Herald that the IRD’s economists had nonetheless concluded that taxes must rise. He concurred with IRD, and he warned that politicians were avoiding any real acknowledgement of fixing the fiscal settings: “Don’t listen to anyone this election year who promises more spending on anything, or that they will reduce the tax you pay… The best case is that they are lying to you. The worst is if they believe it.”

The old consensus — that New Zealand’s tax settings were broadly fine, that capital gains didn’t need taxing, that fiscal drag wasn’t a serious problem — has dissolved. What has replaced it is not yet a new settlement, but a widening conversation, the first one worth having in a generation.

Economist Shamubeel Eaqub captured it precisely when he reflected on the Greens’ new tax proposals released this week. He told BusinessDesk that the Overton window around wealth and capital taxes has shifted: “It’s gone from it will never happen to I think more of a question of when might it happen.”

All of this is what makes the Greens’ new tax policy so puzzling. The consensus is breaking down, the window is opening, the chance has arrived for the first serious tax debate in a generation — and the Greens have chosen this moment to water down their own tax agenda. What they have put up this year is barely radical at all by international standards. They are retreating on major reform at exactly the point the ground is shifting in their favour.

What the Greens announced

Last Sunday Chlöe Swarbrick and Marama Davidson unveiled “A Tax System for All of Us” — seven tax changes built around a 2.5% levy on net wealth above $10 million, dressed up as the boldest economic offer of the campaign. In response, Christopher Luxon called it “economic lunacy.” David Seymour reached for “Hunger Games policy.” And Chris Hipkins, the one man whose support the Greens actually need, killed it before lunch.

The wealth tax is the centrepiece: 2.5% a year on net assets above $10 million, family home exempt, the threshold lifting to $20 million for couples. Bolted on beside it is a Capital Acquisitions Tax, which is an inheritance and gift tax wearing a more clinical name, charging 33% on anything passed on above a $1 million lifetime threshold. Homes and farms are exempt there too. The company rate climbs back to 33%, but only for the largest 0.7% of firms, those turning over more than $30 million; everyone smaller is left alone. There is a 0.06% levy on the liabilities of the four big Australian-owned banks, and a 5% withholding tax aimed at the profits big tech books offshore. On the income side, the first $10,000 anyone earns becomes tax-free, set against a new top rate of 45% above $160,000. The landlord interest deduction is gone again, and the bright-line test is stretched back out to ten years.

And the outrage missed the real story. Before any of those men got near it, the Greens had already shrunk the thing themselves. The wealth tax they once aimed at fortunes over $2 million now starts at $10 million. The revenue is a fraction of what they promised last time.

Henry Cooke, in his Post analysis, described the Greens wealth tax as “remarkably stripped back,” delivering less than half the revenue of the version the Greens ran at the 2025 Budget.

The Post’s Tom Pullar-Strecker also did the useful work of checking the Greens’ tax announcement against the rest of the world, and the parallels are everywhere. The bank levy copies one Australia brought in back in 2017, a levy Nicola Willis herself asked officials to look at. The inheritance tax is lifted more or less wholesale from Ireland, a model senior Labour figures reportedly wanted to adopt here. Wealth taxes of this kind exist in Spain, Norway, Switzerland. The $10,000 tax-free threshold is meaner than Britain’s or Australia’s. The two-tier company rate mirrors Australia. Even the 45% top rate sits roughly at the OECD average and bang in line with Australia. His verdict was that the package is “radical” in a New Zealand context rather than “wild” in an international one.

The wealth tax component is central, and is what has been watered-down the most. For three campaigns, the party drew its wealth line at $2 million – above which a tax would be paid. In 2020 it was 1% over a million and 2% over two. By 2023 it was a flat 2.5% above $2 million, plus a trust tax. Then the Greens’ 2025 Alternative Budget held that same $2 million line.

But this year the rate stayed put and the threshold leapt to $10 million, which would suddenly let off a lot of wealthy people from paying the tax. The changes in the Greens’ wealth tax component meant that what was once promised to bring in around $13 billion would now only raise about $3.7 billion. The whole tax package nets roughly $5 billion a year, against a remarkable $23.4 billion in last year’s Alternative Budget. The Greens are now campaigning on a “tax revolution” worth, in real terms, about a fifth of what they were demanding twelve months ago.

It’s been assumed that the Greens have heavily moderated their tax policy to suit the Labour Party. Elliot Crossan, writing from the socialist left, asked the question the Greens have not answered: if Chris Hipkins was always going to rule it out anyway, why water it down first? Crossan says: “watering down your demands before even getting to the table is a losing strategy.” He also points out that the major reduction in revenue from the revised policy means billions less to pay for everything else the Greens claim to want. What, he asks, gets quietly dropped to fund this caution?

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LABOUR PARTY CONFERENCE
Andrea Vance (Sunday Star Times): In search of Labour’s soul (paywalled)
Sam Sachdeva (Newsroom): Stormy start to Labour’s election push as party takes aim at a winter of discontent
Glenn McConnell (Stuff): Labour caught between ‘hope and reality’ as it tries to rally supporters
Thomas Coughlan (Herald): Labour candidates make it to Wellington conference by taking a leaf from Jami-Lee Ross (paywalled)
Nick James (Sunday Star Times): Labour focuses on the future and National on opening day of party congress (paywalled)
Giles Dexter (RNZ): Election a choice between two futures: Labour’s Edmonds

PARLIAMENT AND GOVERNMENT
Simon Wilson: The case for voting Green
Vernon Small (Sunday Star Times): Back pedalling to the centre: National’s pragmatic pivot three months from election day (paywalled)
Ruth Richardson (Sunday Star Times): National’s KiwiSaver plan double-charges workers (paywalled)
Phil Smith (RNZ): The House: Misleading Parliament - do MPs set a bad example?
Tom Pullar-Strecker (Sunday Star Times): If MPs feel need to support a bill they think is bad and will result in deaths, something’s wrong (paywalled)
Greg Presland (The Standard): With friends like NZ First …
Steven Cowan: The left is on the move, but not in New Zealand
Richard Prebble: Why We Cannot Talk About Climate Change

THE OPPORTUNITY PARTY
Heather du Plessis-Allan (Herald): Opportunity is the most interesting thing to happen since ACT’s rise six years ago (paywalled)
Liam Hehir: Opportunity Knocks
John McLean: Opportunity... But for what? Analysis of an ascendant political party

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ELECTION ‘26, PARTIES AND CAMPAIGN
Grant Duncan (The Conversation): As NZ’s Chris Hipkins pursues power, what can he learn from Keir Starmer’s downfall?
Giles Dexter (RNZ): Labour Party getting ‘fired up’ for election at annual conference
Nick James (Post): Labour to rally in Wellington this weekend if storm allows it (paywalled)
Thomas Coughlan (Herald): Is Christopher Luxon flying - or falling with style? (paywalled)
Duncan Garner (Listener): This political party is adding intrigue to Election ‘26 (paywalled)
Hanna McCallum (Newsroom): Opportunity knocks with return to old-fashioned political campaigning
Emily Simpson (1News): I’m smack-bang in the political centre, and I know how I’ll vote in November
Lyric Waiwiri-Smith (Spinoff): Is this a policy platform or a debating chamber?
Josie Pagani (Post): Spatchcocked politics in the UK offer us a useful guide (paywalled)
Federico Magrin (Post): NZ Loyal makes bid for political return (paywalled)
Brent Edwards (NBR): Election policies and coalition squabbling (paywalled)
Toby Manhire (Spinoff): The truth about the Dancing Cossacks ad

KIWISAVER AND NATIONAL’S POLICY SHIFT
Bryce Edwards (Democracy Project): Who really wins from compulsory KiwiSaver?
Peter Dunne (Newsroom): National ends 50-year superannuation war – but a new retirement equity battle begins
Henry Cooke (Post): If National’s big push to the centre doesn’t work, what then? (paywalled)
Max Rashbrooke (Post): National’s compulsory turn leaves the left with a bigger question (paywalled)
Nick Leggett (Post): We need a bigger plan the next election (paywalled)

PARLIAMENT AND GOVERNMENT
Charlie Mitchell (Post): $11,000 bill for luxury London hotel amongst millions in total travel spend by ministers (paywalled)
Glenn McConnell (Stuff): Ministers say Pāti Māori MP is ‘telling porkies’ about visiting jailed rangatahi
Nikki Macdonald (Post): The life and times of Mr Fixit, Sir Brian Roche (paywalled)
Nick James (Post): Costly rebrand sinks Motu Move name change (paywalled)
Harriet Laughton (Post): SAS crisis: Defence Minister says repair job under way following Post revelations (paywalled)
RNZ: MPs don rugby boots and netball bibs for charity
Jack Riddell (Herald): Should the Govt buy a closing McCain factory? The Greens say it’s worth trying (paywalled)
Mike Houlahan (ODT): Sorry, not sorry, or distasteful? Redress brings rancour (paywalled)
ODT: Robustly criticising feedback (paywalled)

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When something this big attracts that little resistance, the agreement itself is worth a second look. Not because the policy is necessarily wrong; it might be one of the better things this Government does. But a change that would eventually move a combined 12% of most employees’ pay into KiwiSaver or equivalent retirement schemes, by law, in perpetuity, deserves more than a warm round of applause. It deserves scrutiny. More than it is getting.

The party that killed compulsion learns to love it

Consider the messenger. This is the party of the Dancing Cossacks, the 1975 advertising campaign that helped bury Labour’s compulsory super scheme and define National’s instincts for half a century. National opposed Winston Peters’ compulsory savings referendum in 1997. It disliked KiwiSaver when Michael Cullen built it in 2006, then spent its years in office chipping away at it, halving the government contribution, scrapping the $1,000 kickstart, lowering minimum contribution settings. The commentator David Chaplin reckons National “probably did more long-term damage to KiwiSaver” than anyone.

And now the same party wants to make it compulsory, auto-enrol every newborn with a $1,500 “Baby Boost,” and push contributions to 6% each from workers and employers by 2032.

You could call that hypocrisy. Plenty have. I think the more interesting reading is the one Luke Malpass offered in the Post, where he reached for the parallel of “Nixon goes to China”. A compulsory savings scheme, he argued, “probably required the main party on the conservative side of politics to be on board.” There is something to that. Labour built KiwiSaver, and later flirted with compulsion in opposition, but never implemented it in government. If the Greens had proposed forcing people to hand over a chunk of every pay packet, Act would have called it economic coercion. Coming from National, the same idea gets dressed up as responsibility, resilience and common sense.

Clever politics, certainly. And maybe good policy too. We don’t save enough as a country, our capital markets are thin, and there are genuinely good things buried in the package, like the contributions for over-65s and for parents on paid leave. Credit where it is due.

A circuit-breaker dressed as a conversion

Why now? National did not wake up one morning converted to the wisdom of compulsion. It is sitting in the low-to-mid twenties in the polls and, on Richard Harman’s reckoning in Politik, would lose around eleven seats if an election were held today. The KiwiSaver announcement, he wrote, “has to be seen as an attempt at a circuit breaker.”

Chris Trotter, writing in LawNews, heard something sharper still: “the unmistakable note of panic.” He compared it to David Shearer unveiling KiwiBuild to a Labour conference in 2013, another flagship policy launched by a leader trapped in a political cul-de-sac and hoping for rescue.

None of this means the policy is bad. A government can do the right thing for self-interested reasons. But it does puncture the story National is telling about itself, which is one of long-term stewardship and serious leadership thinking in generations rather than electoral cycles. The truth is more ordinary. A party worried about where the polls are heading has reached for a popular policy that was already sitting in a rival’s manifesto.

KiwiSaver is now a proxy debate about NZ Super

National insists that KiwiSaver and Superannuation are “two separate conversations.” Politically, they are nothing of the sort. Nicola Willis has been unusually candid about the fiscal weight of NZ Super, and about her doubts that the country can keep funding a universal pension at 65 while also requiring people to save privately. Asked whether you could really do both, she suggested the answer “probably needs to be a more subtle combination of the two.” Note the word: “combination”.

The investment manager Rupert Carlyon, of Kōura Wealth, said the quiet bit plainly. Compulsion, he argued, “surely means the end of universal NZ Super. You don’t need them both.” Newsroom’s Tim Murphy framed the whole package as National giving with one hand while clearing its throat to take away with the other. Even David Farrar, cheering the policy on his blog, let the logic slip out: a country where everyone has private savings is a country where public superannuation can be set “at a more affordable level at some future stage.”

What voters are not being invited to dwell on is what comes after. Compulsory KiwiSaver makes it politically easier, somewhere down the track, to raise the age of eligibility for Super or to means-test it. You soften people up by telling them they are all building private wealth, and then the universal pension starts to look like a luxury we can trim. The shift is from a collective promise, the same pension for everyone at 65, to an individual arrangement where the balance in your account is your own affair. Carlyon again, bluntly: these changes are “a very clear statement that retirement is now our own personal problem.”

Whether you think that shift is sensible or alarming probably depends on your politics. What should worry everyone is that it is being engineered quietly, through a popular savings policy, rather than argued for honestly. Tim Hunter put it sharply in the NBR: without an endgame on Super, “forcing a couple of million people to save more than they want to is the ultimate nanny state intervention.” The policy only makes full sense as “stage one” of something bigger. The politicians selling it should say so.

The paywall now starts at halfway through all Democracy Project newsletters. Please take out a paid sub if you want to support this service and access the full content, including the following sections: “Compulsory saving, compulsory fees”, “A pay cut for the people least able to absorb it”, “From pension scheme to whole-of-life account”, and “The questions the applause is drowning out”.

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CONSERVATION LAND BACKDOWN, MINING
Fox Meyer (Newsroom): ‘God as my witness’ – Jones says public land will still be up for development
Heather du Plessis-Allan (Newstalk ZB): Did the Government botch their conservation announcement?
Ryan Bridge (Newstalk ZB): Emotion has overcome facts on conservation
Richard Harman: Not quite a panic, but close (paywalled)
Fox Meyer (Newsroom): ‘That’s on me’: Minister does u-turn on conservation land swap and sale provisions
RNZ: Controversial clause in Conservation Amendment Bill that allows sale of conservation land to be removed
RNZ: Shane Jones faces person dressed as Grim Reaper outside environment conference
Glenn McConnell (Stuff): Conservation bill backdown: Tama Potaka promises to drop law change for disposal of DOC land
Julia Gabel (Herald): Minister Tama Potaka to remove controversial disposal and exchange clauses from Conservation Act
Te Ao News: Greens vow to scrap conservation reforms as Potaka rejects ‘up for grabs’ claims
RNZ: Fast-track application for Otago gold mine paused
Mike White (Post): Santana pauses application for gold mine (paywalled)
Linda Hall (Herald): Conservation law change puts Hawke’s Bay treasures at risk of losing safeguards, conservationists say

POLICE COMMISSIONER INVESTIGATION
Sam Sherwood (RNZ): Police Commissioner investigation: Who knew what, and when?
Sam Sherwood (RNZ): Police Commissioner Richard Chambers under investigation after complaints
Michael Morrah (Herald): Public Service Commission backs Police Commissioner Richard Chambers staying amid conduct probe
Stuff: Police Commissioner Richard Chambers under investigation after complaint of sexual nature
Michael Morrah (Herald): Sexual allegations against Police Commissioner Richard Chambers: Detectives fly to Australia to interview woman

OPPORTUNITY PARTY
Lochlan Lineham (Herald): Opportunity Party leader Qiulae Wong willing to discuss common ground with National
Chelsea Daniels (Herald): Could a new kingmaker be emerging as coalition support slips?
Ani O’Brien: The media isn’t reporting on TOP’s rise, they are creating it
Audrey Young (Herald): The Opportunity Party’s tax policy in spotlight amid poll surge (paywalled)

GREEN PARTY POLITICS
Sam Crawley: Is there room for a blue-green party? Environmental opinion in New Zealand
Natalia Albert: The 2026 Greens Tax Policy: the good and the bad
Tom Eley (Herald): Green Party co-leader Chloe Swarbrick on anger, politics and change

ELECTION
Chris Trotter (LawNews): Election 2026: why the prospects for preserving political stability just took a turn for the worse
Stewart Sowman-Lund (Post): Luxon warns against strategic voting at ‘posh’ launch of Tāmaki election bid (paywalled)
Mike Hosking (Newstalk ZB): The only winner of the political polls
1News: ‘We do not want to be on 29% on election day’: Bishop on new poll
Katie Bradford (Herald): Australia’s Budget watchdog shows how New Zealand could cost election promises
Paul Foster-Bell (ODT): How to safeguard Kiwi democracy? (paywalled)
Doug Laing (Herald): Another John Ormond in on the Act in Napier – fourth in long line of election candidates
Listener: After years on opposing sides, Chris Finlayson and Phil Goff cross party lines for less tribal politics (paywalled)
Hamish McNicol (NBR): Tax changes, four-year terms: what our business leaders want (paywalled)

GOVERNMENT AND PARLIAMENT
Jenna Lynch (Stuff): Winston Peters and Shane Jones don’t like our questions. But here is what hasn’t been answered
Joel MacManus (Spinoff): Chris Bishop moves fast. It’s his super power and Achilles heel
Tom Pullar-Strecker (Post): NZ First treads awkward line as health & safety bill it says will kill workers returns to Parliament (paywalled)
Thomas Manch (BusinessDesk): RMA replacement legislation delayed by four weeks as MPs grapple with detail (paywalled)
Henry Cooke (Post): Reform-addicted Government rushes to the centre (paywalled)

KIWISAVER
Mandy Te (Interest): National yet to work through detail of how KiwiSaver policies would apply to workers with side hustles
Tim Hunter (NBR): Compulsory KiwiSaver is just stage one (paywalled)
Brent Edwards (NBR): The arguments over whether KiwiSaver should be compulsory (paywalled)

GOVERNMENT AGENCIES
Emma Ricketts (Stuff): Siloed teams, limited communication: Former MBIE employee on the failed $33m IT project
Glenn McConnell (Stuff): Winston Peters wants MBIE officials locked up, but prison no longer a punishment for misleading MPs
Lillian Hanly (RNZ): Psychologist quits Oranga Tamariki bootcamp after two months
Phil Pennington (RNZ): No money for upgrades to vital police despatch system due to start next month

SOLAR AND HOUSEHOLD ENERGY
Lauren Crimp (RNZ): National promises homeowners low-cost loans to install solar power
Stuff: National proposes household energy renovations scheme paid for through rates
Nick James (Post): National promises renewable energy fund for households, repaid through rates (paywalled)
Jonathan Milne (Newsroom): Govt green bank locks down $78m public funds as second solar project hits hurdles
Susan Edmunds (RNZ): What would National’s solar scheme offer that we can’t currently get?
Brent Edwards (NBR): National backs rooftop solar as it heads into the election (paywalled)
No Right Turn: The bare minimum
Julie Anne Genter (Post): How to decrease our diesel dependency (paywalled)

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ELECTION, POLLS AND POLITICAL STRATEGY
Phil Pennington (RNZ): Electoral Commission adjusting to AI threat in lead-up to November
Amanda Gillies (RNZ): New Zealand’s game of political chess
Glenn McConnell (Stuff): What happens if the Opportunity Party gets into Parliament?
Herald: Editorial: What are we voting for? A shambolic few days of policy announcements (paywalled)
Hayden Donnell (Spinoff): The Greens need to commit more crimes
Harriet Laughton, Henry Cooke and Nick James (Post): ‘Haven’t given them any thought’: PM dismisses Opportunity as a vote for the left following poll (paywalled)
Jonathan Ayling (Herald): Greens’ tax policy best chance to produce first Kiwi trillionaire (paywalled)
Thomas Coughlan and Chris Knox (Herald): Poll of polls: Coalition’s likelihood of being re-elected continues to fall, Top on the cusp of Parliament (paywalled)
Michael Swanson: Bellwether Seats: The Electorates that Help Project Elections
Audrey Young (Herald): Simeon Brown’s rise: From health fix-it minister to National campaign chief (paywalled)
Jamie Ensor (Herald): National MPs back Christopher Luxon after poor poll, one says he ‘hasn’t put a foot wrong’
RNZ: Labour, National downplay tepid results in 1News Verian poll
Glenn McConnell (Stuff): Luxon says party closing in on 5% ‘want to make every New Zealander a beneficiary’
Greg Presland (The Standard): National panics with KiwiSaver announcement as polling crashes
Elliot Crossan: Why have the Greens watered down their tax policy?
Nick Rockel: Shout to the TOP

PARLIAMENT AND GOVERNMENT
Jenna Lynch (Stuff): Shane Jones refuses to confirm if hotel was three-minute walk from Toronto mining conference
Lloyd Burr (Stuff): The most bonkers govt Big Tech spending revelations
Tuwhenuaroa Natanahira (RNZ): PM puts on ‘usual Luxon charm’ for rural sector at primary industries summit
Giles Dexter (RNZ): If I only had time - Winston Peters saw hope for Moana Pasifika deal
Tuwhenuaroa Natanahira (RNZ): Paul Goldsmith aware of complaints about Human Rights Commission head for a ‘couple of weeks’
Craig McCulloch (RNZ): Government shifts more responsibility for refugees to community organisations
RNZ: Abuse in care redress legislation passes final reading in Parliament

CONSERVATION BILL AND PUBLIC LAND
Farah Hancock (RNZ): Explainer: Could the Conservation Amendment Bill really lead to billionaires buying up the national estate?
Fox Meyer (Newsroom): Luxon offers to change bill after conservation land sale backlash
Fox Meyer (Newsroom): Potaka says conservation maps ‘misrepresent’ plans to sell public land
Andrew Dickens (Newstalk ZB): Reality lost in conservation bill rhetoric
ODT: Editorial: Losing the PR battle (paywalled)
Te Ao News: Concerns grow over Conservation Bill and weakened land protections

HEALTH AND SAFETY LAW REFORM
Tom Pullar-Strecker (Post): Winston Peters says law change will result in deaths, but party won’t block it (paywalled)
Anna Sargent (RNZ): Pike River families rally against overhaul of workplace safety laws
Lauren Crimp (RNZ): Van Velden rebuffs NZ First’s 11th-hour ‘politicking’ on health and safety overhaul
Julia Gabel (Herald): Winston Peters says Government’s health and safety reforms will be ‘dead on arrival’
No Right Turn: National gets Winstoned

KIWISAVER AND SUPERANNUATION
Stuff: Here are 5 things Nicola Willis said about KiwiSaver
John MacDonald (Newstalk ZB): Pension procrastination isn’t an option. But this is
Tamsyn Parker (Herald): Compulsory KiwiSaver: Could mandatory saving close the wealth gap with Australia?
Brent Edwards (NBR): The arguments over whether KiwiSaver should be compulsory (paywalled)
Susan Edmunds (RNZ): How KiwiSaver could give kids tens of thousands of dollars
Susan Edmunds (RNZ): Exhaust other options first, withdrawing KiwiSavers told

MBIE, IMMIGRATION AND PUBLIC SECTOR ACCOUNTABILITY
Chelsea Daniels (Herald): MBIE faces probe after IT project canned amid cost blowout claims
Phil Smith (RNZ): Parliament and ministers kept in dark: two issues, two investigations
Phil Smith (RNZ): Conduct of MBIE officials referred to Parliament’s Privileges Committee
Lillian Hanly (RNZ): Public sector cuts: Where does the front-line end?
Adam Pearse (Herald): Parliament’s Privileges Committee to assess if MPs were deliberately misled over failed immigration project
John McLean: Immigration biometric project exposed

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