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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“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?

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 the law says, and why nobody is enforcing it”, “What they were protecting”, “What Britain just did this week”, “The question of consequences”, and “Why it matters more than you think”.

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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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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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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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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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Erica Stanford is furious. Publicly, explicitly, on the record, at her own officials. That is not a normal thing for a minister to do. Normally the game is managed disappointment: a careful press release, an assurance that lessons will be learned. Stanford blew that up. Standing before a parliamentary select committee on Tuesday, she described what she’d learned about Immigration New Zealand’s biometric technology project as “a trifecta of terrible things,” said the information she had been given was “diametrically opposed to the truth,” and told the Herald she no longer trusted the advice she received from officials. “Almost as bad as it gets.”

She was right to be furious, and it was healthy that she didn’t just seek to give the usual reassurance. Because that instinct to smooth things over, to treat this as an awkward but manageable embarrassment is itself part of the problem in New Zealand’s political system.

What actually happened

The bare facts first. Immigration New Zealand’s Biometric Capability Update (BCU) was launched in 2018 to modernise a creaking identity management platform. It ran for seven years, cycled through at least twelve project managers, three programme directors, and six project sponsors, accumulated more than 170 change requests, spent somewhere between $31 million and $40 million of taxpayers’ money, and delivered nothing. The Budget this year wrote off $31.2 million. The underlying system — still running on a biometric algorithm from 2012 — remains in place.

That, by itself, would be an embarrassing waste. Big government IT projects fail. They fail here as readily as in Australia or Britain. INCIS, the NZ Police’s computerisation disaster in the 1990s, consumed $100 million. Novopay, the schools payroll fiasco, blew out by nearly $24 million and had teachers underpaid or not paid at all. Costly failures are a recurring feature of the public sector IT landscape, not an aberration.

But the BCU scandal is not mainly a story about a failed IT project. What turns it into a democratic integrity crisis is the suite of behaviours layered around the failure: the misleading of ministers, the removal of staff who raised concerns, and the deliberate manipulation of financial structures to avoid Cabinet scrutiny. That’s the trifecta. Each element is serious on its own. Together they represent something qualitatively different: a breakdown in the constitutional chain of accountability that is supposed to run from public servants, to ministers, to Parliament, to us.

The cover-up, not the catastrophe

The independent review by consultant Greg James (commissioned by Stanford after she became suspicious) found that ministerial reporting was “inconsistent and, at times, overly optimistic or misleading.” One particular sequence captures the problem with clinical precision. In September 2023, an independent quality assurance review told MBIE the project had “poor delivery history” and that reviewers had “doubts as to whether the project will in fact deliver at all.” What MBIE subsequently told Stanford was that “the project approach was sound and robust, the build is achievable, and the risk management practice is effective.” When Stanford traced the discrepancy, MBIE blamed a junior staffer.

There is a name for that: a classic accountability shield. When something goes wrong, the junior staffer did it. The former chief executive Carolyn Tremain eventually sent an apology letter acknowledging the mismatch was “incorrect and misleading” — but maintained there was no deliberate intent. Whether it holds up is for the Public Service Commission to decide.

The second element of the trifecta is uglier. The James review found that staff were removed from the project when they raised concerns about its viability. A former insider, speaking anonymously to the Herald’s David Fisher, was blunter: “There was poor governance and poor controls. If you were a staff member and you questioned it then you’re gone.” And then: “If you stand up and you whistle-blow, you’ll never work again.”

The same source told Fisher there are other projects just like it currently underway.

The third element — the creative accounting — is perhaps the most deliberately evasive of the three. Under Cabinet rules, projects whose whole-of-life cost exceeds $35 million require Cabinet approval. When costs began approaching that threshold, officials first attempted to slip a budget increase into an unrelated Cabinet paper. Stanford refused. They then restructured the project so costs fell below the $35 million line. MBIE officials later admitted to Stanford that this was intentional. The rule designed to trigger oversight was engineered around.

The “aberration” problem

Public Service Commissioner Sir Brian Roche has called all this a “complete lack of integrity” and “an affront to the people who work every day on behalf of New Zealand.” He’s launched a formal investigation. He’s promised to leave no stone unturned.

But Roche also called it “an aberration.” That word deserves scrutiny.

Nicola Willis offered something similar, insisting the scandal was not “symptomatic of wider issues” in the public service. These are understandable things for people in their positions to say. Roche is trying to protect the reputation of the institution he runs. Willis needs public confidence in the same bureaucracy she is simultaneously asking to cut 8,700 jobs and implement AI transformation. Neither can afford for this to be treated as typical.

But is it actually an aberration? The Otago Daily Times editorial this week asked the key question: “How often does that behaviour occur across our agencies?” It was, the editorial noted, “not clear why it took so long for the Public Service Commission to get involved, or even if questions have been asked of the Audit Office.” The newspaper warned that “if all that happens as a result is a few heads rolling and everyone moving on, an opportunity will have been lost.”

RNZ’s Gill Bonnett, who had been asking questions about this project through Official Information Act requests since 2024, put it plainly: “It’s not just about wasted money — the integrity of the public service has been called into question over the way officials ducked and dived to avoid telling ministers how badly wrong the project was going.” This wasn’t a sudden revelation. The warning signs had been visible for years to anyone paying attention.

Former Labour immigration minister Andrew Little told RNZ the revelations were “consistent with the kind of relationship I had with immigration officials.” Stanford is a National minister. Little was in Labour. Three successive immigration ministers, across two different governments, appear to have been managed rather than informed. Whatever was happening inside MBIE, the problem was institutional rather than partisan.

There is also an uncomfortable irony worth naming. As Opposition immigration spokesperson, Stanford criticised Andrew Little for poor oversight of MBIE. She was right to. Now she is experiencing the same dysfunctional relationship herself — from the inside.

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: “We are very good at reviews”, “Broken institutions, not just broken IT”, and “Trust, democracy, and what happens next”.

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This is the second part of a series on the 2026 NBR Rich List. Part one, “The $129 billion political class”, looked at the Rich List as a map of power.

The NBR Rich List tells us who has accumulated wealth. The donation returns tell us which of those people use some of that wealth politically. Unfortunately, much of this activity passes with very little scrutiny.

Therefore, I’ve cross-referenced the 2026 Rich List against three decades of declared donation records built up by the Democracy Project, which produces a clear and uncomfortable picture. At least 37 individuals and families on this year’s list have a traceable history of political donating. My preliminary results show that together they account for close to $9 million in declared donations to parties and electorate candidates since 1996. And that money flows overwhelmingly in one direction.

Roughly four in every five dollars went to the parties of the right. The current governing bloc of National, Act and New Zealand First has absorbed about $7.2m of the traceable total, against roughly $1.75m for Labour, the Greens, and Te Pāti Māori combined.

National alone has received about $3.7m from these Rich List donors over the period, and Act about $3.1m. For a minor party that rarely cracks double figures in the polls, Act’s haul from the country’s richest is striking, and, for a party built on tax cuts and deregulation, unsurprising.

The big donors

The single largest source in the records is the Gibbs family. Alan Gibbs and Dame Jenny Gibbs between them have given more than $1.4m, almost all of it to Act, in a relationship that stretches back to the party’s founding and continues into the 2025 returns.

After the Gibbs family comes a list that will be familiar to anyone who has followed National and Act fundraising over the last decade: Graeme Hart, Trevor Farmer, Brendan Lindsay, the Mowbrays, the Velas, Mark Wyborn, Chris and Michaela Meehan. This is not a random sample of rich New Zealand. It is a recurring donor class.

Graeme Hart, long one of the country’s richest man, and his holding company Rank Group have put more than $875,000 into Act, National and New Zealand First in the last four years alone.

The investor Trevor Farmer has given around $665,000 across the same three parties. Sir Brendan Lindsay, who built and sold Sistema, has spread more than $550,000 across the coalition. The Mowbrays, the Vela racing and fishing family, the property developer Mark Wyborn, and the Winton founders Chris and Michaela Meehan all appear repeatedly.

The rest of this column is for paid subscribers. That support makes this research possible — including the database work behind the charts and the cross-checking of Rich List names against three decades of donation returns. A paid sub will get you access to the second half, including the following sections: “Backing the whole stable”, “The other side of the ledger”, “Rising fast”, “What the donors say”, “What stays hidden”, and “A question of transparency”.

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The most useful line in this year’s NBR Rich List released yesterday is not the stuff about “wealth creators”. It is the reminder that, from the beginning, the people on the list “carry enormous financial and often political clout”.

That is the point. The Rich List is not just a leaderboard of private success. It is a map of power.

This year’s list puts the combined wealth of the country’s 150 richest individuals, families and duos at just over $129 billion, up from $102.1b last year. The number of billionaires has jumped from 18 to 26. The top ten alone are worth about $64b.

That does not mean these people secretly run the country. New Zealand is not a cartoon plutocracy. But it does mean that a very small group has the resources to fund politics, shape public arguments, hire lobbyists, influence regulation, underwrite think tanks, and wait out governments.

The new Establishment

The old New Zealand Establishment was easier to recognise. It was made up of the large landowners, the merchant families, the law firms, the banks, the private schools, the newspaper proprietors, the big farmers, the clubs, and a small circle of men who seemed to sit on every important board.

Some of that world is still there. The Rich List still contains old family names, property empires, energy dynasties, agribusiness fortunes and land-rich families that have been part of New Zealand’s elite for decades.

But the 2026 Rich List also shows how the Establishment has changed. The new ruling class is no longer only made up of the old provincial and property dynasties. It now includes software founders like Paul Copplestone, a rocket-builder in Peter Beck, screen and data-centre money, carbon farmers, fast-track developers, and a good deal of expatriate capital.

What the List really measures is the resources to influence politics: to fund election campaigns, lobby ministers, win public subsidies, buy up land, and present a narrow set of private interests as the national interest.

The NBR itself has always understood this, even if it prefers the more flattering language of “wealth creators”. In its 40-year reflection, it notes that the first Rich List described the wealthy as people whose paths to riches were varied but who carried “enormous financial and often political clout”. Forty years later, that is still the real story.

From $5.3b to $129b

In 1986, the Rich List profiled 55 individuals and 12 families worth $5.3b. This year it profiles 76 individuals, 55 families and 19 duos worth $129b. As NBR editor Hamish McNicol puts it, the number of profiles has “nearly tripled, while the collective wealth has increased 23-fold.”

This is the story of who won the last 40 years.

The first list appeared near the start of New Zealand’s neoliberal revolution. Since then, New Zealand has transformed its economy: privatisation, deregulation, the inflation of asset and especially property values, the weakening of organised labour, and a tax system steadily reshaped in favour of capital.

Many of those changes have produced genuine innovation and wealth. But they have also produced something else: a society in which wealth has accumulated at the top much faster than wages, public services, or ordinary security.

Predictably, the Greens seized on the list as evidence that the richest 150 now own about as much as the bottom half of the country, while homelessness and food insecurity remain severe. Chlöe Swarbrick called it an economy being “hoovered up, not trickling down”.

Christopher Luxon’s response yesterday was equally revealing. He said wealth creators should be celebrated and warned that a wealth tax would put a “wrecking ball” through the economy. Chris Hipkins acknowledged the list showed an “imbalance in the economy” but again ruled out Labour supporting a wealth tax.

That is the 2026 tax debate in miniature. National celebrates wealth and rejects wealth taxes. The Greens want to turn the Rich List into a case for structural tax reform. Labour’s position is the most revealing: it accepts the imbalance, then runs away from the tax instrument most obviously designed to correct it.

The tech aristocracy

The most obvious headline in this year’s Rich List is technology. Eleven of the 19 newcomers come from technology and services. The sector has more than doubled in estimated value, from $14.64b to $31.93b. The newcomer list includes people behind Halter, Supabase, Wayve, Nuro, Partly, AS Colour, Substack and other globally focused companies.

This part of the story should not be dismissed. New Zealand needs more of this kind of wealth and less of the kind produced by land scarcity, monopoly and asset inflation. New Zealand cannot live forever on land speculation, dairy intensification, tourism, and selling houses to each other.

Peter Beck is the spectacular case. His estimated wealth has rocketed from about $650m to around $11b, putting him third on the Rich List. Rocket Lab has become a genuine global technology company, has completed dozens of launches, and is now tied to the Nasdaq and the global space economy. Beck told NBR that New Zealand needs more success stories, which is hard to disagree with.

It would be foolish to dismiss this as merely the same old rich getting richer. Beck, Craig Piggott at Halter, Paul Copplestone at Supabase, Levi Fawcett at Partly, Alex Kendall at Wayve, Dave Ferguson at Nuro and others represent something more dynamic than old rentier wealth.

But the tech story should not end with applause. New wealth may now be made in the cloud, in space, or in AI-assisted software, but it still lands in politics.

Tech wealth depends on things the public pays for and provides: education, immigration settings, intellectual property law, capital markets, R&D support, data regulation, and the rules that govern defence and space. Rocket Lab, in particular, sits at the intersection of private enterprise, national prestige, space regulation, and strategic security.

Tech billionaires arrive with better branding than property developers. They still need rules. And New Zealand has not yet built the transparency machinery to deal with them.

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: “The old economy never left”, “The Mowbray moment”, “Fast track for capital”, “Progressive billionaires are still billionaires”, and “Follow the power”.

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In the last two weeks there have been many more stories about the lucrative pay and perks of Members of Parliament. Mostly, it’s stories about MPs’ housing allowances and superannuation entitlements. But will these revelations result in any reform?

Without reform, we can expect the issues will continue to fester. It’s not unconnected, that throughout the world there has been a rising anger with MPs and the political class. Voters are increasingly intolerant of their representatives “rorting” the taxpayer. The perks and high pay are helping fuel all sorts of populism and revolt everywhere.

Today in the Herald on Sunday, Heather du Plessis-Allan sums up the MP entitlements as “outrageous”, but argues that it isn’t actually in the interests of politicians to continue to receive them. She asks: “Someone in Parliament should have the courage to sort out these MP perks. It’s in the interests of all of them to end the largesse. It makes them all look bad.”

Here’s her conclusion: “they should reflect on what is happening in politics around the world. The popularity of Donald Trump, One Nation, Reform is in part a revolt against the ruling class. A class of people who do little for voters but protect themselves and their mates. Nothing says ‘ruling class’ more than perks that would never fly in the real world.”

The gravy plane

Yesterday, The Post’s Charlie Mitchell reported that taxpayers have spent around $6 million over the past decade subsidising travel for retired politicians and their spouses, including overseas business-class flights claimed years, sometimes decades, after the recipients left public office.

The scheme works like this. Any MP who entered Parliament before 1999 can claim lifetime rebates on travel: up to 12 domestic return flights a year, plus one international return airfare capped at the value of Air New Zealand’s cheapest business-class return between Auckland and London. Serve three terms and the taxpayer covers 60% of the cost; serve five and it rises to 90%. For those who use it fully, Mitchell reports, the subsidy is typically worth $10,000 to $20,000 a year.

Who benefits? Disproportionately, the people who need it least. The largest identified claimants are former National cabinet minister Philip Burdon and his wife Rosalind, who have claimed more than $200,000 since 2014. Burdon remains a director of Meadow Mushrooms, the company he co-founded, and the NBR estimated his family’s wealth at $95 million in 2019.

Former Speaker Sir Lockwood Smith and his wife have claimed about $175,000; former Labour minister Chris Carter and his husband more than $165,000; former Act leader Richard Prebble and his partner at least $150,000. Sixteen couples have each claimed over $100,000 in a decade — together accounting for more than a third of everything the scheme pays out.

There is a particular historical irony in the list of prolific users. Among them are the architects of the 1980s and 1990s market reforms: Roger Douglas, Michael Bassett, Ken Shirley. The politicians who taught a generation that subsidies distort behaviour and that the state should not feather private nests have proven reliable claimants of a non-market subsidy that runs for life. The recipients span Labour and National alike.

Stranger still, the scheme outlives its beneficiaries. Spouses keep claiming after the MP dies. Noeline Colman, widow of former Labour MP Fraser Colman, has claimed at least $80,000 in travel rebates since 2014; her husband left Parliament in 1987 and died in 2008. Lady Sandra Arthur claimed through the service of a husband who died in 1985.

The cost is increasing for these perks. Last month’s Budget — the one that raised state-house rents, lifted the threshold low-income homeowners must reach before getting housing help, and cut roughly $200 million from hardship grants — quietly increased the funding for former MPs’ travel to $1.6 million for the coming year.

“Part of the package”

The defence, when Mitchell put the numbers to Burdon, was candid. Burdon conceded the entitlement was “generous”, but said it had formed part of the remuneration package of his era. He warned that refusing to claim it could involve “a certain amount of moral arrogance” towards colleagues who did. Any change, he added, should be left to the independent body that sets parliamentary pay.

This is the deferred-compensation argument, which is the claim that MPs of an earlier era had accepted lower pay in exchange for lifetime travel for themselves and their spouses.

In a normal workplace, deferred pay is written into a contract and capped at a known figure. This entitlement is neither. Its value is open-ended and indexed to business-class airfares, so it balloons unpredictably. It was never disclosed as remuneration to the voters supposedly party to the bargain. And it extends to spouses and survivors who were never employed by anyone. The arrangement has no settled value and no end date, and it reaches people who were never employed by Parliament at all. Calling it deferred pay dignifies it.

There was once a democratic case for paying politicians properly. In Thomas Coughlan’s opinion column on perks, he outlines that the old Chartist demand for payment of MPs was meant to stop Parliament being reserved for gentlemen of independent means. New Zealand’s version of that principle remains sound: MPs should be paid enough that ordinary people can stand for office without private wealth.

But that democratic principle has curdled into something else. What began as compensation for an unusual job has become a set of legacy privileges whose original justification has long since expired. The old travel scheme appears to date back at least to the 1970s; by the early 1980s even ministers reportedly struggled to say exactly when it began. In 2014 it was supposedly closed to future MPs, but protected for those already inside the system. That is the familiar pattern: reform at the margins, grandfathering for insiders, and another decade of public money.

It should be pointed out that Burdon’s worry about “moral arrogance” is not shared across the old guard of former MPs. Peter Dunne has called for reasonable standards to be applied to MP perks; Laila Harré has said former MPs do not deserve free air travel; and Harré and Tau Henare have both called for an end to travel perks for ex-MPs and their partners. When a centrist, a figure of the left, and a former New Zealand First and National MP all agree the perk is indefensible, the claim that declining it would insult one’s colleagues looks thin.

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: “Limousines on standby”, “The superannuation property machine”, “The black hole in the books”, “The cycle that never closes”, and “What should change”.

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Labour picked Auckland’s Waitematā Station to launch its new public transport policy on Wednesday, and the venue nearly upstaged the message. Chris Hipkins’ promise of cheaper fares was repeatedly interrupted by the deafening arrival of the very trains he was promoting — at one point forcing him to stop mid-answer. “I’ll wait for the train to pass by,” he offered. The Spinoff’s Hayden Donnell recorded the aftermath: Hipkins headed off to film campaign content on board a train, only to find the next one was 17 minutes away.

And Newsroom’s Tim Murphy spotted the day’s neatest irony: by the afternoon, Labour was asking its supporters to donate $20, precisely the figure of the fare cap it had just unveiled. As Donnell put it, “that’s the thing about Auckland’s transport system. Even when it’s working well, it can be a little dicey at times.”

Labour’s policy itself is simple, which is the point. Under a Labour government, weekly public transport fares would be capped at $20 in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, and $10 everywhere else, from 1 July 2027. Once a user reaches the cap, any further travel that week costs nothing. Labour says it will cost $65 million a year from the National Land Transport Fund and save the average user about $25 a week. “This is real cost-of-living relief,” Hipkins said. “It means cheaper commutes, more money left at the end of the week, and a public transport system that works for everyone.”

It is a likeable little policy. But it opens a window onto a much bigger problem: a government transport funding system that is fiscally fictional, run by both major parties on numbers they refuse to show the public, while the one party with a genuinely different transport vision said nothing all week. I’ll explain all this below.

The end of Labour’s policy drought

The first thing the announcement tells us is about Labour’s election strategy. This was the party’s first policy in six months, after a long period in which Hipkins insisted everyone wait for the Budget. Tim Murphy in Newsroom captured the mood: “The Labour Party’s long-stalled election policy train finally pulled away from the platform today, first stop an ambitiously costed $20 cap on weekly public transport fares in the three main cities.” When reporters asked if he was relieved to finally have something to announce, Hipkins replied “Oh, plenty more to come”, which doubled as a promise about the campaign ahead.

Lyric Waiwiri-Smith of the Spinoff put her finger on what’s most revealing about it: “its most notable feature is how meticulously moderate it is.” She locates the policy on the spectrum herself, as gentler than the Greens’ free-fares ambitions and more interventionist than a National Party reluctant to meddle. Then she lands her best line: this is “not nanny state Labour, but more distant aunt Labour: happy to watch the kids every now and then, but not too keen on doing much to raise them.” Her conclusion: “At least now, the train has arrived. Destination? Middle of the road.”

The electoral targeting is shrewd. Henry Cooke, in his Politically Correct newsletter at the Post today, points out that MMP makes it perfectly rational to aim policy at the three big cities, home to about half the population, and identifies the real beneficiaries: commuters in places like Petone and New Lynn, with frequent services and $50 weekly fares, who “would save $30 a week from such a measure, and feel that any of their weekend trips were ‘free’. This is far from the full population of these cities, but it is a belt of people who traditionally switch votes between elections.” This is strong distributive politics. Luke Malpass at the Post called it “a decidedly retail start,” noting that $65m is “not even a rounding error in the Government accounts.”

Hipkins even welcomed the prospect of National copying it: “That’d be a good outcome for New Zealand consumers.” When an opposition leader is relaxed about the government adopting his flagship policy, you are watching what political scientists call “valence politics” — a contest over who seems more competent and more sympathetic on the cost of living, with ideology left at the station.

The cap also confirms the shape of Labour’s whole campaign: the small target. Hipkins has spent the year giving National as little as possible to shoot at, and a $65m fare cap is policy built to the same specification — popular, modest, and hard to caricature.

Matthew Hooton, in his Herald column on the policy today, ties the caution directly to the people at the top, describing a leadership wedded to “its small-target election strategy and its preference for holding office rather than exercising power.” It’s a barb that connects this week’s policy to this week’s defensive party list, and it raises the question that should worry Labour’s own supporters most: caution might win the election, but what exactly would it win it for?

The case for Labour’s cap

Labour’s new policy has genuine merit. Hayden Donnell makes the progressive case well: the cap “disproportionately helps poorer people who tend to live further away from city centres while still offering something to almost everyone,” and lets Labour deliver relief “while still wearing its financial hair shirt and professing fiscal rectitude.”

Kerre Woodham, no Labour cheerleader, read out a text from a low-income listener with a new baby who takes three buses each way to work: “at $20 it feels like a godsend.” Wellington mayor Andrew Little backs it, the Free Fares coalition of more than 100 community organisations welcomed it, and overseas equivalents are common — New South Wales runs a weekly cap of around NZ$50.

Cheaper buses obviously help the people who catch them. The real questions are whether Labour’s numbers are real, whether the fund it’s drawing on actually exists in any meaningful sense, and what the week tells us about the health of our political competition. Unfortunately, on all three counts the news is bad.

Show us the workings

Within a day, Labour’s $65m costing had been challenged from three separate directions — what David Farrar gleefully called “a triple fisking.” Auckland macroeconomics professor Robert MacCulloch, quoted on Kiwiblog, did the arithmetic on Labour’s own claims: average savings of $25 a week across the 135,000 census-recorded public transport commuters comes to $175m a year before induced demand. “Declaring that ‘hundreds of thousands of people’ benefit and the saving is ‘on average $25 a week’ does not add up to $65 million. It adds to at least three times that figure.”

The Taxpayers’ Union worked from public patronage data and arrived at a range of $141.7m to $182.5m for Auckland, Wellington and Canterbury before the rest of the country is even counted. And National’s campaign chair Simeon Brown noted that Labour’s three headline claims ($65m cost, $1,200 average annual saving, 1.36 million beneficiaries) “cannot all be true”.

Heather du Plessis-Allan put it more bluntly on Newstalk ZB: “They’re either fibbing about the cost, or they’re fibbing about the benefit. I think it’s a bit of both.”

Labour’s defence is that the $65m is a “net cost,” built on modelling Auckland Transport did in 2023 on a $20 cap (modelling AT itself never implemented), showing a 6% patronage lift, which Labour then extrapolated across the entire country. That is a single city’s three-year-old study stretched across the whole country.

Tim Murphy noted the calculations “appear based on an extra five million boardings.” The two sides cannot even agree what fraction of the fund the policy represents: Chris Bishop says $65m is more than 1% of a fund collecting “$4 to $5 billion per year”; Labour points to forecast 2026/27 revenue of $7.8b. When the alternative government and the actual government dispute the size of the denominator, voters have a problem.

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Lobbying reform is the issue every party seems to endorse in principle and none delivers. Suddenly it is being demanded from all directions at once: New Zealand’s official transparency watchdog has rediscovered its voice, an anti-monopoly campaigner is firing letters at the Auditor-General, working lobbyists are calling for rules over their own trade, and a minor party has put a register in its election pitch.

The cause is no mystery. Last month New Zealanders learned that in mid-2024 executives from Fonterra and Z Energy supplied the Prime Minister’s office with briefing notes proposing a change to climate law, including draft statutory wording. The material was hand-delivered to Christopher Luxon’s then chief policy adviser, Matt Burgess, and a copy was sent to his personal email account. None of it was disclosed in response to Official Information Act requests. It surfaced only through court-ordered discovery in the Smith v Fonterra climate case. The Government has since moved to change the law along the lines the companies proposed, a retrospective amendment that will extinguish the case before it can be heard.

I said in a recent interview that this scandal might prove a “landmark” in how New Zealanders think about their democracy. The evidence is now accumulating weekly. A lobbying reform debate that has spluttered along for more than a decade has caught fire, and in election year the politicians will find it much harder to smother.

From wonk issue to election issue

What’s different this time is the sheer number of voices. Transparency International New Zealand has issued its most assertive statements in years. Tex Edwards’ Monopoly Watch is running a full-blown campaign for a Lobbying Transparency Act. The Opportunity Party wants a compulsory register and ministerial stand-down periods. Health advocates, who have spent years documenting the influence of the alcohol, tobacco and food industries, are pressing the same case. Even working lobbyists are joining in: Holly Bennett used a Spinoff column to condemn colleagues who hand over “untraceable” hard-copy briefings.

New Zealand has been here before, and each time the moment has passed. Holly Walker’s 2012 Lobbying Disclosure Bill passed its first reading only to die at select committee. Chris Hipkins promised action after the Kris Faafoi affair in 2024, and what eventuated was a voluntary code of conduct consulted into such weakness that Transparency International itself called the final draft “meaningless”. Each attempt was, in effect, lobbied out of existence by the very interests it would have constrained.

The result is that New Zealand remains an international outlier. As Danyl McLauchlan notes in the Listener this week, the OECD in 2024 ranked this country fourth-worst of its 38 members for regulating lobbying. There is no register of lobbyists, no requirement to disclose clients or funding, no cooling-off period for ministers moving into the industry, and no enforceable ethical standards. As McLauchlan notes, the conventional Wellington view is that the country is too small for such guardrails (a premise he rejects).

The commentariat finds its voice

McLauchlan’s Listener column this week (A study in corporate coalition collusion; paywalled) is the most penetrating piece of commentary the scandal has produced. He describes the affair as a “mundane conspiracy”, behaviour that is “simultaneously shocking yet exactly how everyone already assumed climate and environmental legislation is drafted under the coalition government”. He puts the danger plainly: “we are drifting towards a two-tier system in which the corporate sector can operate outside legal constraints, while everyone else has to follow the rules like a sucker.”

He detects “a sense that the country is being run on behalf of insiders and donors, that the law itself is up for negotiation for those who have access”, and he closes with a line that should worry every defender of the status quo: “the ever-growing numbers of online conspiracy theorists are directionally correct: there really are hidden cabals manipulating our politics from behind the scenes.”

Even the sceptics concede the basics. Pattrick Smellie of BusinessDesk, a one-time political press secretary with little appetite for regulatory enthusiasm, writes that the affair “stinks, and it makes everyone trying to do above-board lobbying look terrible”.

Transparency International joins the fight

The most significant institutional development is the awakening of Transparency International New Zealand (TINZ). Last week TINZ has named lobbying regulation, political donations and the abuse of parliamentary urgency as its three election-year priorities.

Chair Anne Tolley, a former National Cabinet minister, says New Zealand is well behind its peers: “We have seen the results over several parliamentary terms: where industries and other interest groups with deep pockets, friends in high places and easy access to power are unevenly influencing government policy. All without public visibility.”

Executive director Julie Haggie went further on the specifics of the scandal: “It appears that a corporate interest, using non-scrutinised means, is able to then get legislation passed [under urgency] which is also not being scrutinised by the public.” TINZ wants a public register of lobbyists with regular disclosure, stand-down periods for those moving between Parliament and industry, real-time reporting of political donations, caps on donations, beneficial ownership disclosure for corporate donors, and a “positive test” before urgency can be invoked. Its research shows the current Government has passed 57% of its legislation under urgency, against 29% for the last Labour government.

None of this is the work of protesters or radicals. TINZ sits squarely inside the Wellington integrity establishment, which is exactly why its intervention lands: when a body this mainstream demands a crackdown, the centre of gravity has moved.

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Greg O’Connor found out, one way or another, that there was no longer a place for him in Labour’s future. The outgoing MP for Ōhāriu had wanted to stay in Parliament. More than that, he had made no secret of his ambition to become Speaker if Labour returned to power. But his electorate was abolished in the boundary review, through no fault of his own. He then lost the contest for the replacement Wellington North seat to Ayesha Verrall. That left the party list as his only option. And then, over the weekend before Labour’s announced the details of their 2026 election list, he found he was not on it, or at least not high enough on it to continue.

A papal conclave with casualties

In departing politics, O’Connor has responded with a good line: “The Labour Party list process makes the choosing of a Pope look transparent”, explaining, “there’s so many moving parts to it.” He declined to say whether his decision not to stand followed a poor list placing: “What goes on between myself and the party — I’m not going to be commenting on that.”

It was a classic political exit: loyal enough not to start a war, honest enough to make the point.

O’Connor’s departure is a useful way into thinking about Labour’s 2026 list. Not because the whole story is about him, of course. But because his absence tells us what a party list really is. A party list isn’t a tidy administrative document — it’s a map of power, favour and identity inside Labour. It tells us who a party thinks it needs, who it is prepared to lose, and what sort of government it imagines it might become.

For Labour, the list matters more than it does for National. National tends to win more electorate seats when it is doing well. Labour, especially under MMP, often relies much more heavily on the list to construct its caucus.

Even when Labour does win a decent number of electorates, the list still decides not only who enters Parliament but who has status, who is being protected, and who is being quietly told to win an electorate or leave. Henry Cooke put it well in The Post: the list “will do much to shape the party’s next three years and more, whether or not it wins the election.”

Renewal without rupture

The governing logic of this 2026 list can be put quite simply: Labour wants to look new, but above all it wants to look safe.

That’s not a bad strategy. Any opposition party trying to return after a heavy defeat faces the same problem. Bring back too much of the old team and voters conclude you have learned nothing. Sweep too many people away and you look like a risky start-up rather than a government-in-waiting.

Newsroom’s Sam Sachdeva captured this neatly, saying Labour had “had a bob each way”, with several first-time candidates pushed high up a list that was otherwise “somewhat lacking in sparkle”.

That verdict is fair. This is a restoration list, not a revolution list. It says: we have refreshed ourselves, but we have not gone mad. We have new people, but not a new leftwing insurgency. We are different enough to ask for another look, but familiar enough to be trusted with the keys again.

The most important symbol of that managed overhaul is Barbara Edmonds. The first two list places are automatically reserved for Chris Hipkins and Carmel Sepuloni, so number three is the first genuinely political ranking. Edmonds has gone from 18th in 2023 to third in 2026.

This is the most persuasive part of Labour’s reset. Edmonds brings tax expertise, a personal story that reaches beyond Wellington, and a tone that suggests seriousness rather than slogans. She is not Grant Robertson 2.0, which is part of the point. Labour is trying to show that it has moved on from the Ardern-Robertson era without repudiating it.

Has Labour solved its talent problem?

Back in February, Listener columnist Danyl McLauchlan wrote a sharp piece about Labour’s “elite human capital” problem — the observation that the party’s biggest liability in the the last Labour government was its own caucus. “In six years they lost seven ministers, most of them under ridiculous circumstances,” McLauchlan wrote. “Much of the drift that characterised Jacinda Ardern’s government can be attributed to this lack of talent... This does not feel like a problem solved.”

The new list answers that criticism, but only partly. Labour does now have a wider pool of people who look as though they could do serious work. There are lawyers, unionists, public servants, community figures, business people, activists and technocrats. Ayesha Verrall remains strong in health. Edmonds is a real asset in finance. Vanushi Walters has been lifted dramatically, from being out of Parliament after the 2023 election to number eight. Cushla Tangaere-Manuel is now in the top ten. Reuben Davidson has climbed sharply.

Fresh faces, familiar networks

The new candidates are a good example. Labour has placed six first-timers in winnable positions: police superintendent Rakesh Naidoo at 13; dairy union leader Chris Flatt at 20; Waitangi Tribunal member Kingi Kiriona at 22; School Strike 4 Climate founder Sophie Handford at 26; activist lawyer and author Max Harris at 29; and KPMG Asia-Pacific chief executive Warrick Cleine at 30.

On paper, that is an interesting mix. Naidoo gives Labour policing and community-network credibility. Flatt brings old-school union experience with a rural and agricultural flavour. Kiriona brings Māori institutional experience. Handford gives the list youth and climate appeal. Harris brings intellectual energy from the activist left. Cleine gives Labour something it does not usually have much of: visible high-level business experience. Interestingly, he’s also a donor: he gave $8,000 in 2025 and a similar amount in 2024, on top of roughly $36,000 across 2020 and 2023, plus further funding to support Damien O’Connor’s West Coast campaign.

But the “fresh voices” framing should not be swallowed whole. Some of these candidates are fresh only in the parliamentary sense. Flatt was Labour’s general secretary from 2009 to 2012. Harris is a celebrated figure in the Labour-Green intellectual world. Kiriona comes from institutions that have long dealt closely with Labour governments. These are impressive people, and several may become strong MPs. But this is not an outsider revolt. It is Labour expanding its inner circle.

The placement of Craig Renney tells another story. The Council of Trade Unions’ chief economist is at 51, with a realistic route to Parliament only through a difficult electorate contest (winning Wellington Bays off the Greens’ Julie Anne Genter). If Labour wanted to advertise a bold economic-left turn, it had an obvious vehicle here but chose not to use him that way. Similarly, Handford and Harris are fresh leftwing activists, but not given very high list positions.

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The Commerce Commission released its third “Annual Grocery Report” this week. The headline finding is a single number: the duopoly’s share of the retail grocery market is 82%. That is precisely where the 2022 market study found it, and precisely where it has sat for five years. So, nothing has really changed to what is a “broken market”.

The Commission’s own head of grocery, Alice Hume, called the state of the sector “disappointing”. Both Foodstuffs entities, the Commission found, “continue to sit at the top end of international profitability benchmarks”. Food prices rose again, by 4.6% in the year to December. The Commission’s verdict on its own regulatory regime was that the market shows “little observable change in core competition metrics”.

This is the third report in a row to say roughly the same thing, to roughly the same shrug. The interesting question is no longer what is broken; we have known that since Shane Jones first raised it in 2014, and in forensic detail since 2021. The interesting question is why, with the cost of living the defining issue of an election year, almost nobody in Parliament will fix it.

A reality check before the campaign

Consider what the years of effort have actually produced. There has been a full market study, a new Act, a Grocery Commissioner, a wholesale access regime, a ban on land covenants, and a worldwide hunt for a new entrant that approached 21 possible companies. The market is as concentrated today as it was the day all that work began.

Grocery Commissioner Pierre van Heerden says the reforms “need more time to bed in”. It is the kind of reassurance that is only ever offered when nothing is about to happen.

Unfortunately the politicians have now been talking about doing something to fix the supermarket sector for over a decade, but the supermarkets don’t really have anything to fear.

Where is the left?

On paper, this is the left’s issue, because historically they have existed as a check corporate power. The supermarket ripoff is the most overt expression of the cost-of-living crisis there is, and all supermarket customers surely suspect they are being fleeced. This is a ready-made campaign for any party claiming to stand for ordinary people against the big end of town.

But the political left doesn’t seem to be willing to touch this issue. Labour’s entire contribution to this week’s report was its spokesperson Arena Williams describing it as “frustrating reading”. That is a reaction, not a policy. There is no Labour plan to break up the duopoly, and no sign one is coming.

And Labour has no answer to the obvious questions. What is its position on structural separation? Does it back the abolition of the Grocery Commissioner, or lobbying reform — which McLauchlan’s investigation shows is inseparable from the grocery question? On none of it has the party said a word.

The Greens, also, who might be expected to own an issue blending inequality and corporate concentration, have said next to nothing.

Into that vacuum have stepped the populists. New Zealand First is campaigning on a breakup from the right. The Opportunity Party, polling at 6% according to the Roy Morgan poll this week, is harvesting the same frustration from the left.

As Heather du Plessis-Allan put it yesterday, both are now the “blow it up” parties for voters who find Labour never brave enough and the Greens too weird. The most redistributive issue of the decade, and the traditional parties of redistribution are nowhere to be found.

The party that cannot lead it

Why can’t Labour pick this up? The answer is structural rather than merely lazy.

Labour cannot credibly lead a campaign against the supermarket lobby because Labour is also captured by its relations with the actual supermarket lobbyists.

The revolving door here is well documented. In a Listener investigation last week, Danyl McLauchlan set it out, describing Woolworths’ head of government relations, Andrew Kirton, as “Labour Party royalty”.

Kirton’s career trajectory, as described by McLauchlan, is worth quoting in full: “He was a communications adviser to Helen Clark, later became general secretary of the party, then served as campaign manager for the 2017 election that brought the Ardern government to power. When Chris Hipkins took over as prime minister in 2023, he installed Kirton as his chief of staff – one of the most powerful unelected political positions in the country. Kirton’s wife Camilla Belich is Labour’s justice spokesperson. Just before running the PM’s office, Kirton was a lobbyist for Anacta, the Australian government relations firm engaged by Woolworths.”

McLauchlan points out that the person who held that Woolworths role before Kirton, Ellen Read, was Jacinda Ardern’s deputy chief press secretary. During the market study, Woolworths retained Capital Government Relations, whose owner Neale Jones had been chief of staff to both Andrew Little and Ardern, and which employed Mike Jaspers, a former Ardern adviser, to survey MPs on the company’s behalf. In January 2022, just before the study’s final report, Kirton arranged a dinner between finance minister Grant Robertson and Countdown’s managing director.

A party that has placed this many of its own people on the duopoly’s payroll is in no position to declare war on it. This is not a smoking gun of present corruption; these are people who worked for Labour and now work for Woolworths. But the friendships and the future job prospects all run one way. That is why the obvious champion of the checkout shopper is sitting this one out.

And McLauchlan points out that it’s not just Labour people involved: “Former National cabinet minister Steven Joyce sits on the board of directors for Foodstuffs North Island.”

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In a Singapore hotel ballroom this week, New Zealand’s defence debate was handed a new insult: “freeloader”. It came from US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, after New Zealand journalist Anna Fifield asked whether this country’s plan to lift military spending from 1% to 2% of GDP made us a “free rider.” Hegseth did not bother with diplomacy: “2 percent is not enough, and so 2 percent is freeloading.”

He went further. “You better have the same capabilities that we do,” he warned, “because if we don’t, our alliance is meaningless.” Earlier, in his set-piece address, Hegseth had told the region that spending 3.5% of GDP on defence should be treated as a “new global norm,” and that the US would no longer tolerate allies treating defence as “an afterthought.”

The Defence Minister Chris Penk, sitting in the front row, pushed back politely, insisting New Zealand was no freeloader and that “the trajectory mattered.” But the framing was already set. For days the question being asked across New Zealand media has been: how does the country prove it is not a freeloader? That is precisely the wrong question, and the more interesting one is who gets to decide what New Zealand’s security is worth, and on whose terms.

The insult that set the agenda

The revealing thing is how quickly Hegseth’s number became our problem. Hegseth’s 3.5% figure is not a strategic assessment of any threat to New Zealand. As Fifield herself reported, no country in the Asia-Pacific currently spends that much, according to data compiled by the International Institute for Strategic Studies. It is an aspiration, a number plucked to signal seriousness, and one that conveniently expands the market for American military hardware.

Even those in favour of spending more were unconvinced by Hegseth. Professor David Capie, director of Victoria University’s Centre for Strategic Studies, told The Post that Hegseth’s speech was “predictably transactional,” and that the freeloading comment “amounted to a storm in a tea cup.” “It’s no secret Washington wants all its partners to spend more on defence,” Capie said, “but he didn’t have New Zealand in his sights. The messaging from the bilateral meeting afterwards was all very warm.”

The Otago Daily Times, in a measured editorial today, conceded the charge had a sting of truth: “New Zealand’s defence has always, and will continue to be, dependent on others”, but concluded that pushing toward 3.5% would be “a whole other question entirely” in a country facing no obvious enemy and with “little appetite to be drawn into conflict.” New Zealand is not Poland. It is not Taiwan. It is not Ukraine.

None of this is to say New Zealand needs nothing. But Hegseth’s number measures loyalty, not need. Defence spending here is no longer just about what the country requires to look after itself. It is increasingly about what New Zealand must pay to remain respectable in the eyes of Washington, Canberra and London.

The language of defence has shifted. We are no longer simply discussing patrol boats, maritime surveillance, disaster relief, peacekeeping, fisheries protection or the ability to get people out of danger in the Pacific. We are talking about “interoperability”, “lethality”, “deterrence”, “integrated forces”, “advanced technologies”, “strike capabilities”, drones, missiles, space systems, AI and military-industrial partnerships.

Who is the real “hegemon”?

The sharpest rebuttal to Hegseth came from an unexpected source. Don Brash (former National Leader and former Reserve Bank Governor) is not a man usually accused of anti-American radicalism. Yet he took aim at the heart of Hegseth’s pitch. In his speech, Hegseth had declared the US “willing to work with all of you to ensure a Pacific free of any hegemon.”

Brash was incredulous: “How in hell’s name did he make such a statement with a straight face?... There is a hegemon in the Pacific right now, and it ain’t China!” He set out the asymmetry plainly: China, to the best of his knowledge, has one military base outside its own borders (in Djibouti) while “the US has military forces in South Korea, Japan, Guam, Palau, the Philippines, and Australia — and of course in hundreds of other bases around the world.”

Brash’s conclusion was not that New Zealand should spend nothing. “Should New Zealand increase its defence spending? That probably makes sense,” he allowed, citing the policing of a vast maritime zone against drug-runners and illegal fishing. But, he wrote, “spending 3.5% of GDP on defence would be nuts in current circumstances — and even more inexcusable if doing so implied we wanted to be in a military alliance with the hegemon of the Pacific.” That matters. It is much harder to dismiss this as leftwing anti-Americanism when the person saying it is Don Brash.

No enemy at the gate

So who, exactly, are we arming against? China is the implied answer, but it is rarely stated plainly. That is a problem. If the Government wants a generational defence build-up, it should be honest about the scenario it is preparing for.

Even the hawks struggle to name an invader. The former National defence minister Wayne Mapp, Minister of Defence from 2008 to 2011, argued that New Zealand’s geography “should negate the need” to spend at the level Hegseth demands.

“There’s no actual invasions like Ukraine or anything like that in our region,” Mapp told Newstalk ZB. “The pressures are different.” He went on: “New Zealand is also the most secure country in the entire planet … We’re further away from any other country. You would expect us to take at least some advantage of that fact.” Mapp does say he accepts that capability has not kept pace with the country’s growth, and that “we do need to step up” — but his benchmark is Australia, the only formal ally, not a number set in Washington.

There is also a more prosaic problem: New Zealand can buy equipment faster than it can rebuild a Defence Force. Capie warns that the binding limit is people, not platforms: last year’s Defence Capability Plan envisaged growing the Defence Force by 2,500 personnel, which he calls “a huge ask.” “We spend a lot of time talking about the need for new planes or ships,” he said, “but they are not much use unless you have the skilled personnel to operate them.” That warning is backed up by the recent frigate leaking oil into Akaroa Harbour, the tanker HMNZS Aotearoa sidelined for 139 days by contaminated fuel, and the HMNZS Manawanui driven onto a reef off Samoa. A spend-up that cannot crew or maintain what it already owns is its own kind of waste.

Follow the money

The freeloader debate is a democracy story. New Zealand is in the middle of the largest military build-up in a generation: a $12 billion Defence Capability Plan, and a further $1.6 billion in the latest Budget for drones, ship maintenance and naval upgrades, on a stated path to 2% of GDP. Penk calls that figure “a floor, not a ceiling.” That should have rung louder alarm bells than it did. Yet the public debate about whether any of this is necessary has been thin to the point of invisibility.

That vacuum is not accidental. As the writer Samuel Hume documented in the Australian journal Arena, New Zealand’s Defence Industry Strategy, which Hume shows closely resembles Australia’s, is explicitly designed to plug local firms into the supply chains of “multi-national Defence suppliers.”

The industry has not been waiting politely outside the door. Iron Duke Partners, the lobbying firm run by Phil O’Reilly, has promoted the defence budget as “a big opportunity…” while the New Zealand Defence Industry Association has secured “workshops” with officials before the capability plan was even released

And then there is the old-fashioned schmoozing. As I covered last year in the column, Democracy Briefing: Gifts, Graft, and a $12bn defence spend-up, an Auditor-General’s inquiry found that between 2016 and 2025, Defence Force personnel accepted more than 2,500 gifts and hospitality offerings from commercial suppliers — worth close to $419,000 — including international sports tickets, days on America’s Cup yachts, concert passes and smartwatches. Nearly 80% were justified as “building business relationships.” The Auditor-General, John Ryan, warned that “the practices we have seen … risk the public and Parliament losing confidence in the decisions made to contract with those suppliers.”

Then there is the revolving door. Air Marshal Kevin Short moved directly from Chief of Defence Force to Managing Director of Lockheed Martin New Zealand — one of the suppliers angling for the contracts now on offer. With billions on the table, the firms doing the lavishing are the firms doing the bidding. None of this proves that a contract was bought. That is not the point. The point is that the people selling the hardware have had years to build relationships with the people buying it. And now the bill is enormous.

The rest of this column is for paid subscribers, whose support keeps the Democracy Project going. It looks at Aukus by stealth, Pacific opposition to militarisation, the defence industry’s interests, and the choices now facing New Zealand

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This morning’s King’s Birthday Honours list can be read in two ways.

First, in the usual way. A long list of New Zealanders being recognised for work in health, culture, sport, education, philanthropy, the community. Some of the names are plainly deserved, others overdue. And some are a reminder that the honours system can still do what it is meant to do.

But there is another way to read it too: less as celebration, more as a map of power and wealth. Once again the honours list overlaps with the political donor class. The names being decorated by the state sit uncomfortably close to the names showing up in party donation returns, and that same world of wealth, access and political proximity is edging into what should be the country’s highest civic recognition.

About five months ago, I wrote a column called “Democracy Briefing: Honours for Sale?”, which was my first attempt to lay out this problem in a systematic way. I looked at the growing pattern of political donors receiving royal honours. With today’s honours list out, the argument is the same, but the evidence has grown.

The Barfoot real estate thread

In 2014, then-opposition MP Chris Hipkins stood up in Parliament and read from a list. He named Tony Astle, Chris Parkin, Sir Graeme Douglas, Sir William Gallagher, Lady Diana Isaac — National donors who had collected honours under the Key government. Then he got to Garth Barfoot: “we know that Garth Barfoot gave him $5,000 for his campaign and he got made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit in exchange for that.”

Twelve years later, Garth Barfoot — senior director of Barfoot & Thompson, the same man Hipkins named — donated $50,000 to the National Party on 20 February 2026. And this morning, the managing director of that same firm, Peter John Thompson, received a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for “services to philanthropy and rugby.” It is the same family network, and now the same political overlap is showing up again.

Thompson is plainly a genuine philanthropist. The company and Thompson personally have raised more than $6 million for the Starship Foundation. He has been involved in Auckland rugby for decades. None of that is the point. The point is something else.

Electoral Commission records show Thompson donated $46,388.49 to the National Party in his own name in 2025, plus a further joint entry of $10,000 with another donor. Then, on 29 April 2026 — five weeks before this morning’s announcement — he donated another $22,012.50 to National. The Electoral Commission published the return on 6 May. Today he is on the honours list.

I am not suggesting Christopher Luxon was literally swapping medals for donations. That is not what the evidence shows, and honours nominations take months to process. But that is precisely where the standard defence of the system falls flat. Whether there was a literal transaction barely matters. What matters is how it looks when a substantial, very recent donor to the governing party turns up on the honours list at exactly the moment the country is already asking whether money buys access and influence in this government.

Appearances matter in a democracy. Public trust depends on whether people believe decisions are made on merit, not proximity to power.

My own earlier profile of the Barfoot & Thompson network noted that the Thompson family was “not publicly known for political donations.” That is no longer true. In the space of roughly a year, Peter Thompson became one of National’s more substantial disclosed individual donors. And he is honoured in the very next list.

Barfoot & Thompson is not a neutral bystander in any of this. The firm sells something like four in every ten Auckland homes. It sits at the centre of an industry that, since 2021, has funnelled more than $2.5 million in political donations to the governing parties — 97% of it flowing to National, Act and NZ First. The industry has the most to gain from this Government’s resource management rollback, fast-track consenting regime and flat refusal to consider a capital gains tax. When the managing director of the biggest real-estate brand in the country receives a royal honour from a government his sector funds, then this is worth at least a little scrutiny.

The Dynes story concludes

Scott O’Donnell’s case isn’t just about a donation, which is part of what makes it worse.

O’Donnell has just been made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for “services to business.” He is the executive director of the H.W. Richardson Group — one of New Zealand’s largest privately owned transport conglomerates, with a business empire estimated at around $2 billion. His citation notes the $180 million Invercargill Central redevelopment, green hydrogen projects, a freight career. These are genuine achievements.

But O’Donnell’s name was already burned into the political integrity debate before this morning. He was one of the four directors of Dynes Transport Tapanui, which donated $20,000 to New Zealand First in July 2024. A Dynes joint venture subsequently received an $8 million Crown Regional Holdings loan for a Mosgiel freight hub, overseen by NZ First minister Shane Jones.

Winston Peters then appointed O’Donnell to the KiwiRail board in July 2025, despite KiwiRail chair Suzanne Tindal having raised concerns beforehand, and despite Treasury observing that “Scott has financial and beneficial interests in HWR which would significantly conflict with KiwiRail.”

What followed was months of conflict-management difficulties. O’Donnell initially disclosed only four companies with potential conflicts; the chair found 11 when she checked herself. By December 2025, Tindal told a select committee scrutiny hearing that O’Donnell’s conflicts were affecting the board’s capability and efficiency. Then two months ago, O’Donnell resigned after fewer than seven months into his three-year appointment, citing a new business venture in Australia.

Three months later, he turns up on the honours list.

I wrote about the KiwiRail appointment in a Democracy Briefing column at the time, labelling it a farce. At the time, I called it a “perfect storm of influence”: donation, government loan, board appointment, controversy, resignation. Today’s ONZM is the fourth and final chapter.

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: “The corporate man and the racing knight”, “The same names at every gate”, “The legality dodge”, and “A fix that stays unfixed”.

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This week the Government asked thousands of low-income homeowners, including families with children, to find on average another $42 a week before the state would help with their housing costs. In the same week, we learned that the minister responsible claims $1,000 a week from the taxpayer for a Wellington apartment she jointly owns and on which she lists no mortgage debt.

The timing tells you something about how power now works in New Zealand. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that New Zealand now has two quite different standards of public support. MPs get a housing payment that is generous, automatic, and barely tested. Everyone else gets forms, thresholds, stand-downs, and lectures about targeting.

The scandal here is not that anyone broke the law. Nobody did. The scandal is what the law allows, and who wrote it.

The $1,000-a-week question

Social Development Minister Louise Upston spent last week explaining why low-income homeowners should get less. Her bill lifts the threshold at which homeowners can claim the Accommodation Supplement from 30% to 40% of income, meaning thousands of households must absorb more of their housing costs before any help arrives. In the House, she said the change was about targeting support to “those who need it most,” and that taxpayer money should go to renters, “not people who are using taxpayer support to increase their own asset.”

It was a tidy line. It would have been tidier still had it not described her own situation almost exactly.

Upston earns around $320,600 a year. On top of that, she has been claiming $1,000 a week ($52,000 a year) in parliamentary accommodation allowance for an apartment in Wellington that she jointly owns and on which the pecuniary interests register records no mortgage.

Asked what her actual accommodation costs were, she declined to say. Asked whether she herself would meet the 40% threshold she is imposing on other New Zealanders, she declined to say that too. “I’m comfortable with the rules,” she told RNZ. She should be – the rules are very comfortable.

It’s a pay rise rather than a housing allowance

The optics are bad enough. But the more important question is how this allowance changed from reimbursement into entitlement.

Once, MPs who lived outside Wellington claimed back their actual and reasonable accommodation costs, against receipts. It was a reimbursement: you spent the money, you proved it, you got it back. Then, in 2009, John Key’s government switched to bulk funding. Instead of reimbursing costs, the system now hands over a flat sum: up to $36,400 a year for an ordinary MP, $52,000 for a minister. This allowance is paid regardless of what the MP actually spends, and with no receipt required.

That single change converted a cost-recovery scheme into something else entirely. An allowance you never have to account for is not a reimbursement. It is a pay rise. And because it is paid as cash against no proven expense, it can be banked straight into a property the MP already owns, turning a housing subsidy into a tool of private wealth accumulation.

This is why the mortgage detail matters. Upston is not alone in claiming the allowance while owning her Wellington property outright; several MPs do the same. The issue is not criminality. It is design. The system was changed so MPs no longer have to answer the most basic question: what did this actually cost you?

Even Chris Hipkins, who tolerated the change for years, now disowns it: claiming an allowance “when you’re not spending that money on accommodation,” he says, is “very, very hard to justify.” The Taxpayers’ Union, from the other end of the spectrum, has argued these untested perks amount to a hidden salary increase. When the Taxpayers’ Union and the Labour leader agree, the defenders are running short of company.

Paid not to live in Wellington

If you want the absurdity of the system in a single example, consider NZ First’s Andy Foster. He’s owned a house in Wellington for 26 years, during which he’s served ten terms on the Wellington City Council. He was, for a time, the Mayor of Wellington. And he has been claiming the accommodation allowance reserved for MPs based outside Wellington, because in 2025 he bought a second home in the Wairarapa, where he now intends to stand for election, and has reclassified that as his “family home.”

So the taxpayer is now subsidising a former Mayor of Wellington to maintain a residence in the very city he governed, on the basis that he doesn’t really live there anymore, while he campaigns for a seat somewhere else. As the blogger No Right Turn put it, “we’re not paying Foster to live in Wellington. Instead, we’re paying him to not live there, so he can campaign for election elsewhere.” The blog argues that this is arguably an unlawful use of parliamentary funds for a political purpose.

The whole pay and perk architecture

The accommodation allowance is only one part of a much bigger package. Andrea Vance set this out well today in the Sunday Star-Times, describing what she called a “cradle-to-grave lifestyle insulation package”. Her account of all the allowances is worth considering, because each MP perk on its own sounds reasonable yet the whole adds up to something remarkable.

Vance’s inventory is damning. She points to the $181,200 backbench salary from July, the tax-free expense allowance, subsidised family travel, access to chauffeur-driven cars for senior ministers’ families, post-election salary continuance, and the unusually generous superannuation arrangements. Her sharpest line is on the super scheme: the taxpayer match of $2.50 for every $1, she says, “would give a private sector CFO conniptions.” On her calculation, a two-term backbencher can leave with a retirement nest egg of roughly $300,000.

Newstalk ZB’s Heather du Plessis-Allan also looked at these add-on allowances this week, and concluded: “you can add somewhere between $120,000 and $140,000 at least in perks to their base pay.”

None of this is illegal. All of it is, in the technical sense, “within the rules.” But the cumulative effect is a political class almost completely sealed off from the economic weather the rest of the country lives in. As Vance says today, “while the language of government is increasingly about discipline and telling the public to tighten their belts, the lived reality inside the political system is absolute insulation from the economic frost they are making everyone else survive.”

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: “Rules for thee”, “The independence dodge”, “But everyone does it”, “The distance that’s killing trust”, and “What should change”.

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The Budget has naturally overshadowed it, but otherwise the big political story of the week has been the climate change lobbying scandal: hidden corporate influence that appears to have persuaded the Beehive to introduce a retrospective law change designed to stop private climate lawsuits against the likes of Z Energy and Fonterra.

It feels like a landmark in the public’s understanding of how corporates shape government decisions. Earlier lobbying scandals were too abstract to hold attention. This one has touched a nerve with anyone who wonders why successive governments do so little about climate change.

How powerful interests lobbied in the dark, and got what they wanted, has produced real anger. Audrey Young, writing about it yesterday, needed only two words. “It stinks.”

The man in the middle

The story changed when the staffer was named: Matt Burgess.

He was identified on Wednesday night as the Prime Minister’s senior policy adviser who received the hard-copy briefing notes from Fonterra and Z Energy — material that was not later disclosed through the OIA process. Andrea Vance named him at The Post. RNZ confirmed the role. Approached for comment, Burgess said only: “I have nothing to add.”

His job was Luxon’s chief policy adviser, and he came into it after working as a senior economist at the business think tank and lobby group, the New Zealand Initiative. So the Burgess story has become one of the clearest recent examples of the revolving door.

He was not a neutral public servant but a political appointee in the Prime Minister’s inner circle, and his beat covered resource management, energy and the Emissions Trading Scheme. His background at the NZ Initiative is not incidental colour. It is the point. In 2022 he wrote Pretence of Necessity, a report arguing that New Zealand did not need extra climate policies layered on top of the ETS. More recently, Initiative figures have also argued that Parliament, not the courts, is the proper place to settle climate liability. Those are distinct arguments, but politically they point in the same direction: keep climate accountability within the statutory framework and away from common-law litigation.

On its own, Burgess’ NZ Initiative background does not prove improper conduct. People move between think tanks and politics all the time. But in this case the overlap is unusually direct: the policy area, the corporate interests, the ETS argument, the hostility to court-led climate accountability, and the subsequent law change all point in the same direction.

When Fonterra and Z Energy delivered their briefing notes in mid-2024, the material went to Luxon’s chief policy adviser. That matters. It means the documents were not merely dropped somewhere in the outer machinery of government. They reached a senior political adviser whose policy background was unusually relevant to the very question being pushed by the companies. The proposals were framed in the companies’ interests and, on the reporting so far, appear strikingly close to the eventual direction of government policy.

The New Zealand Initiative

The Initiative grew out of the merger between the old Business Roundtable and the New Zealand Institute. It is not a lobby shop in the usual sense. Its influence is less direct and, for that reason, more interesting. It publishes reports, convenes business leaders, hosts politicians, briefs members, and develops a pool of people who can move easily between the world of corporate-funded policy work and the world of ministerial decision-making.

That is not sinister in itself. It is what serious think tanks do. But it becomes politically important when the people trained in that world end up handling the very policy questions their former institution has spent years trying to shape.

Its own prospectus sells the access plainly enough: private briefings from the research team, reports before publication, members’ meetings and lunches with senior politicians and opinion leaders, and an annual retreat with leading politicians and guests. What it is too modest to say is that it also helps create the personnel pool from which future ministerial offices draw.

The Initiative insists it is independent and non-partisan. Oliver Hartwich, its executive director, has complained that “conspiracy theories” about its links to the global Atlas Network are the most tiresome part of his job, and notes that former Initiative researchers turn up in Labour and Act offices, not only National ones.

That defence is less reassuring than Hartwich seems to think.

The question is not whether the Initiative secretly runs the Government. That is too crude. The more interesting question is how a business-backed worldview gets normalised inside the policy system: not through bribery or brown envelopes, but through careers, papers, private briefings, board seats, and a steady flow of people between think tanks and ministerial offices.

Eric Crampton, the Initiative’s chief economist, once joked that Luxon’s office had “stolen” Burgess from them. It was probably meant as collegial banter. But it also captures something real about Wellington: people do not have to be formally seconded from think tanks into ministers’ offices for their assumptions to travel with them.

Was Fonterra funding the think tank?

One question follows naturally: was the Initiative funded by the same companies whose briefing notes Burgess received? The honest answer is: we cannot fully tell, because the Initiative does not publish a complete current membership list.

The Initiative is funded by membership fees from the country’s largest corporations. Its roster has included all five major retail banks, energy companies such as Genesis Energy, supermarket chains, Google and British American Tobacco, among dozens of others. Genesis Energy is one of the defendants in Smith v Fonterra, and its chair, Barbara Chapman, is the Initiative’s deputy chair. So one of the companies Mike Smith was suing sits inside the think tank, and one of its directors helps run it.

Fonterra’s tie is older and looser. Its chief executive sat on the board in the early years, and Nicola Willis was a Fonterra executive during that period. Whether Fonterra or Z Energy are current paying members is not something the Initiative’s disclosures let you establish, because the full membership list is not public. I will not overstate it. There is no clean line running from a Fonterra cheque to a Burgess report to a government law.

But the absence of a neat paper trail does not make the question irrelevant. The Initiative is funded by large corporate members, including companies in sectors with a strong interest in climate, energy, regulation and litigation risk. That does not prove a direct line from any particular company to any particular policy. But it does show why the Initiative’s role matters: it is part of the network through which business-friendly climate arguments are developed, polished and carried into government.

Its climate position for a decade has served those industries’ interests, and it trained and employed the man who went on to receive their lobbying inside the Prime Minister’s office.

This is why the story should not be reduced to a conspiracy claim. The more plausible problem is also the more ordinary one: the same people, the same institutions and the same assumptions keep circulating through the same small set of rooms.

Most people imagine lobbying as an outsider trying to bend a minister’s ear. This case suggests something subtler. By the time Fonterra and Z Energy arrived with their papers, the argument they were making may already have been familiar, respectable and welcome inside the office. In that situation, a briefing note does not have to change anyone’s mind. It only has to give officials and ministers a ready-made argument for doing what they were already inclined to do.

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: “The wider pipeline”, “The timing problem”, “Luxon’s “nothing to see here” problem”, “Is this a cover-up?”, “The retrospective law”, “The small-country excuse”, and “What now?”.

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