New Zealand is eleven weeks out from an election and the mood of the electorate is unmistakably sour. Many New Zealanders tell pollsters the economy is rigged to advantage the rich and powerful, that society is broken, and that the country is headed in the wrong direction. And yet the two main parties of the left are offering something conspicuously careful.

In an age of public discontent, the left is running the least discontented campaign in the country. Why?

Tonight I spoke in Wellington on a panel organised by the New Zealand Fabian Society on the topic of “leftwing populism”. What follows is essentially my speaking notes. Or you can watch the video of the meeting here: “Left Populism At Home and Abroad: Possibilities and Problems”

----

In an age of discontent, where is the left?

In Ipsos New Zealand’s 2024 populism survey, 65% agreed that “the economy is rigged to advantage the rich and powerful”. Another 63% agreed that “the political and economic elite don’t care about hard-working people”, 58% said “New Zealand society is broken”, and 66% agreed that the country “needs a strong leader to take the country back from the rich and powerful”.

Those are extraordinary numbers for a country that still likes to think of itself as egalitarian, moderate and relatively contented.

Yet the political left in that same country is cautious, managerial, respectable — and strangely uncomfortable talking in those terms. That is the puzzle. New Zealand increasingly has the public demand for left populism. What it lacks is the political supply.

Anti-establishment anger doesn’t automatically become progressive. Somebody has to explain that anger, identify its causes and organise it politically. If the left doesn’t do that, someone else will.

What is left populism?

Political scientist Cas Mudde’s influential definition treats populism as a “thin-centred ideology” that divides society between “the pure people” and “the corrupt elite”, and holds that politics should express the general will of the people.

That is a useful starting point because “populism” has become one of those words that is usually an accusation rather than a description. We use it to mean irresponsible, simplistic, demagogic, authoritarian, nationalism, or sometimes just policies that respectable people don’t like.

But populism itself is about the political division between the people and an elite.

Many of the radical-right movements we now call populist combine that anti-elite politics with nationalism and authoritarianism. They tell people they’re losing control not only because of elites at the top but because of outsiders below: immigrants, minorities, welfare recipients, the culturally alien.

Leftwing populism, in contrast, directs the anger elsewhere: towards concentrated economic and political power. Its targets are monopoly corporations, landlords, the very wealthy, corporate lobbyists, political insiders and institutions captured by vested interests. In that version of populism, the migrant down the road isn’t the problem. The focus is on those who possess disproportionate economic and political power. The political question is therefore not simply whether anger exists, but who gets blamed for the conditions producing it.

New Zealand’s populist mood

The Ipsos results give us a striking combination of attitudes. As noted above, 65% think our economy is rigged for the rich and powerful and 66% want a strong leader to take the country back from them. But only 23% agreed with the proposition that New Zealand would be stronger if immigration stopped. Just 29% agreed that immigrants take jobs away from “real” New Zealanders.

So New Zealand’s populist mood has been much more strongly anti-elite than anti-immigrant. This shows that populism doesn’t have to be rightwing. There is no iron law saying public discontent has to become Trumpism, Faragism or some local equivalent.

Go back to 2016. A UMR poll that I reported at the time put Bernie Sanders on 77% support among New Zealanders, compared with just 8% for Donald Trump. At the very least, it suggested that an appetite for political insurgency in New Zealand didn’t have to take a rightwing form.

More recent evidence suggests something else. There aren’t merely two ideological New Zealands any more. There are increasingly two experiences of New Zealand democracy. If you’re financially comfortable, the system still mostly works. If you’re struggling, it increasingly looks rigged.

The Helen Clark Foundation’s recent research on social cohesion illustrates this divide starkly. Prosperous New Zealanders are much more likely to trust government, believe elections are fair and feel that institutions work for people like them. Struggling New Zealanders are dramatically less likely to agree.

For example, 56% of prosperous respondents trusted government to do the right thing, compared with only 22% of struggling respondents. And while 62% of prosperous respondents regarded elections as fair, only 35% of struggling respondents did.

At least some of the current populist mood therefore grows out of people’s actual experience of the economy and democracy. It isn’t simply being manufactured by clever politicians or algorithms.

So, New Zealand doesn’t lack a constituency for progressive populism. It lacks political organisations prepared to mobilise it.

Why isn’t the left there?

The first explanation is the decline of class organisation. The traditional left wasn’t simply an electoral brand that periodically offered voters more generous policies. It was embedded in organised labour. It was built through unions, workplaces, local party branches, working-class communities, cooperatives, clubs and a whole ecosystem of institutions in which people understood themselves as members of a social class with common interests.

That world has been hollowed out. Labour gradually ceased to be an organisation embedded in organised labour and became much more professionalised, parliamentary and managerial.

This wasn’t uniquely New Zealand. From the 1970s and 1980s onwards, parties of the left across the Western world became increasingly middle-class political vehicles. The left itself changed class location. Its activists and MPs became increasingly drawn from university graduates, professionals, public servants, NGOs, academia and metropolitan cultural institutions.

Many of those people are themselves insecure or poorly paid. But the change in who makes up the left nonetheless changed its language, priorities and instincts.

The legacy of 1984

In New Zealand there was an especially important twist. The left lost the great economic argument of the 1980s. Except that here, the political left didn’t merely lose the arguments – it actually administered them in the neoliberal revolution carried out by the fourth Labour Government.

That left an enormous ideological scar. The party historically created by organised labour became one of the principal architects of the economic order that weakened organised labour.

Having lost much of the economic terrain, the broader left increasingly concentrated on social liberalism, identity, culture, environmentalism and foreign policy. Meanwhile economic redistribution and class politics receded. You can see the result in how the term “leftwing” is now understood. When I ask university students what being leftwing means, the answers tend to be things like anti-racism, diversity, gender equality, LGBTQ rights, environmentalism and political correctness. They very rarely say working class, poverty, unions, ownership or collective economic struggle.

A slightly provocative way of putting it is this: The right won the economic argument of the 1980s and kept the winnings. The left won the social argument and mistook it for the whole of politics. So although the left in this country became extremely fluent in the language of recognition, representation, procedure and expertise, it became much less fluent in the language of wages, ownership, rents, monopoly and economic conflict.

The answer for the left isn’t to decide that racism, gender, sexuality suddenly don’t matter. It is to reconnect those struggles to a wider politics of material redistribution and class power.

Did MMP absorb the revolt?

There is another explanation for why New Zealand hasn’t experienced the same populist upheavals as Britain, Europe or the United States. We may have had our anti-establishment convulsion early. Between 1984 and 1993, New Zealand tore up its post-war economic settlement, especially in economic reform. Then the public took revenge on the political establishment by tearing up the electoral system. In one sense, MMP was our Brexit.

The analogy only goes so far, of course. But both were rebellions against political establishments that large sections of the electorate thought had stopped listening.

MMP absorbed a huge amount of anti-establishment energy. It opened Parliament to smaller parties, gave discontented voters somewhere to go, and ultimately left Labour and National in much healthier condition than their counterparts in Britain or the United States.

For thirty years, that pressure valve worked remarkably well. I’m not convinced it’s working any more.

Labour’s problem

That takes us to the parties actually on offer in 2026.

Labour now talks more fluently about market concentration, excessive profits and economic unfairness. Chris Hipkins is increasingly comfortable with economic language that would have seemed unusually ideological for Labour a few years ago.

But Labour has two problems. The first is credibility. It had six years in government and, for three of those, an outright parliamentary majority. Yet he supermarket duopoly survived. Housing remained dysfunctional. The banks remained extraordinarily powerful.

The problem of what I call “Broken New Zealand” only got worse under Jacinda Ardern and Chris Hipkins. Yes Labour diagnosed plenty of problems, commissioned inquiries into them, but generally just administered broken markets rather than fixing them.

The second problem is strategic. Campaign strategists and commentators have described Labour’s approach this year as a “small-target” strategy: minimise political risk and controversy while allowing voters to continue judging the Government.

That may be tactically rational. But it is almost the precise opposite of populism. Populism says there is a conflict and asks voters to choose sides. Labour’s strategy says: don’t worry, we’ll manage things somewhat better. Yet in a moment that may require something closer to the radicalism of 1935, management won’t cut it.

The Greens’ opportunity

The Greens have almost the opposite problem. They already possess some of a left-populist policy programme: wealth taxation, windfall taxes, stronger action against monopolies, public ownership, housing intervention and redistribution. And Chlöe Swarbrick herself has put the argument bluntly: “Anything other than material redistribution is tokenism.” But the Greens haven’t consistently organised their politics around that proposition.

Compare what has happened elsewhere. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani campaigned relentlessly on an affordability agenda (rents, buses, childcare and groceries) while identifying landlords, corporations and concentrated wealth as political adversaries.

Zack Polanski has pursued something similar since becoming leader of the Green Party of England and Wales last year, combining climate politics with the cost of living and giving the party a much more insurgent, anti-wealth-concentration identity. Since his election as leader, the party has moved from around 10% support into the mid-to-high teens in a number of polls, while membership has more than tripled.

That doesn’t prove eco-populism caused the surge, nor are either Mamdani or Polanski templates New Zealand should simply import. But the comparison shows what can happen when material politics becomes the organising story rather than one policy area among many. If climate politics, inequality, housing and economic insecurity are all parts of the same story about who has power and who pays, the Greens should say so.

What would left populism actually look like?

So what might a New Zealand left populism actually look like? First, attack the broken markets that are ripping off ordinary New Zealanders. These are the structures where economic power allows wealth to be extracted without producing corresponding value: supermarket concentration, the banking oligopoly, electricity pricing, housing rent extraction and firms protected from real competition. Make those structures visible.

Second, democratise the political system. If you tell people an elite has too much power, you need actual remedies:

1. Regulate lobbying

2. Reform political finance

3. Close the revolving door between government and vested interests

4. Increase transparency around political access and influence

Otherwise anti-elitism is just theatre.

Third, a leftwing populism would focus on the following tangible issues:

1. Cheaper electricity.

2. Affordable homes.

3. Cheap or free healthcare.

4. Higher wages.

5. Broken monopolies.

6. Taxing unearned wealth.

These are things people can recognise as improvements in their own lives. Not forty policies and a beautifully balanced fiscal document. A small number of propositions relentlessly explained.

And fourth, chase the non-voters rather than simply obsessing over swing voters. One of the largest political constituencies in this country is the people who don’t participate at all. They are disproportionately younger, poorer and Māori. These are precisely some of the groups recording the strongest levels of political alienation and anti-establishment sentiment. A genuinely insurgent left would ask how to bring some of those people into politics, rather than simply fighting National over the same relatively small pool of swing voters.

The challenge for the left

There are obvious dangers in all of this, because populism simplifies. Not every social problem is caused by a villain. It can also become anti-pluralist. “The people” aren’t homogeneous, and political opponents don’t become illegitimate simply because they disagree with the majority.

And populism can become a substitute for organisation. A charismatic politician, an anti-elite message and a successful election campaign don’t rebuild unions, community organisations or working-class political power. That may be the deepest problem of all.

So I’m not arguing that the New Zealand left needs to become more demagogic. It needs to become more political. It needs to recover conflict over economic power, rebuild a working class constituency, and give anti-establishment New Zealanders a progressive explanation for why the country increasingly doesn’t seem to work for them.

The anger already exists. Yet if the politicians of the left just say the system is fundamentally sound and merely needs somewhat more competent management, while a party like NZ First says the system is rigged and promises to tear it up, we shouldn’t be surprised when the more populist right wins.

So, the opportunity for the left is to offer a different insurgency. And it’s to say that, yes, parts of this system really are rigged but the answer isn’t to turn against migrants, minorities or other people with little power. Instead a leftwing populism would challenge those who actually possess disproportionate power.

Whether the New Zealand left is prepared to take that possibility seriously before somebody else captures this mood is the question.

Dr Bryce Edwards
Director of the Democracy Project

Leave a comment

New Zealand has a recurring problem with broken markets. Electricity, banking, supermarkets, insurance, building materials and housing are all dominated by a small number of large players. Governments investigate them, the Commerce Commission writes reports, ministers express concern, and remarkably little changes.

Part of the explanation doesn’t take much detective work. These are also the sectors with the strongest lobbying operations in Wellington. While the Commerce Commission was running its grocery market study, the PR firm SenateSHJ was working from inside the Commission, on Commission email addresses and Commission computers, at a time when it also held clients in the grocery sector. It was paid more than $300,000 across two years. Whether any of that shaped the outcome is unknowable, which is rather the point. Nobody outside had a way of finding out at the time.

New Zealand places almost no rules around that activity. There is no compulsory register of lobbyists, and no requirement to disclose who is paying whom to influence ministers. A minister or senior Beehive staffer can leave office and start work for an industry they were dealing with the week before, with no stand-down at all. Political donations are regulated, however imperfectly; nothing comparable applies to the business of getting in front of a minister in the first place.

So if we want to understand why governments can identify obvious market failures and still struggle to act against powerful incumbents, lobbying deserves much more attention than it gets.

On Sunday, the Opportunity Party put forward the most substantial attempt so far this election to do something about it. Its “Clean Up Politics” package would regulate lobbying, cap political donations and establish an independent anti-corruption body with significant investigative powers.

The announcement was quickly overwhelmed by accusations of hypocrisy over Opportunity’s own donors. Some of those questions are legitimate, and I will come to them. But they should not obscure the larger development. I can’t remember another party with a plausible shot at post-election leverage putting forward an integrity package this ambitious.

The OECD gives New Zealand a zero on lobbying

The OECD’s new Anti-Corruption and Integrity Outlook 2026 has recently assessed the safeguards member countries have against corruption and undue influence. On lobbying, its assessment of New Zealand runs to a single sentence: “New Zealand does not have a regulatory framework or implementing measures for managing risks around lobbying.”

Behind that sentence is a finding of essentially nothing: no legal definition of lobbying, no register, and no regulator with anything to enforce. On the scorecard, New Zealand gets “zero” for both the rules and their implementation.

It isn’t that New Zealand is incapable of regulating political activity. The OECD gives us respectable marks on political finance, access to official information and integrity strategy, which makes lobbying an odd hole in an otherwise reasonable set of arrangements. Canada, France, Estonia, the United Kingdom, Germany, Ireland, Australia and the United States all have some formal machinery for monitoring lobbying, and we have none of it. We regulate political money but not political access.

Danyl McLauchlan reaches much the same conclusion in his Listener feature this week, giving New Zealand’s lobbying guardrails a “zero” as well, having got there by a completely different route.

Opportunity’s lobbying law

The register is the part of Opportunity’s package that would do most of the work. Paid lobbyists would have to name their clients and file quarterly returns setting out which ministers and officials they had approached and what they were pushing for. Ministers, senior political staff and public sector chief executives would face a one-year stand-down before moving into lobbying work. A statutory code of conduct would allow sanctions for lobbyists who conceal clients or conflicts of interest, with penalties running from public censure to fines and deregistration.

The provision I’d single out is the ban on contingency fees for policy changes, which has had almost no attention. Paying a lobbyist only if they successfully secure a government decision is about as close to a price list for political influence as you can get without printing one.

Opportunity would also require lobbying communications with ministers to go through official systems, making them more likely to fall within reach of the Official Information Act. If somebody is being paid to influence government, the rest of us should have a reasonable chance of finding out who they work for and what they want.

The timid parts

Some of the package could be stronger. The revolving door is the clearest case. Opportunity proposes a one-year stand-down before ministers, senior staff and officials can move into lobbying, which sounds like progress only if you measure it against the nothing we have now. Australia imposes 18 months on former ministers and Britain two years. Canada, at the far end, goes to five. Facing Up To Our Future, the Helen Clark Foundation’s new book, settles on three.

More awkwardly for Opportunity, the party itself campaigned in 2023 under Raf Manji for an 18-month stand-down. Its new policy has gone backwards, and it would be useful to hear Qiulae Wong explain why.

Quarterly disclosure is also too slow. Three months is a long time in politics, and a lobbying campaign around a live bill, a major procurement decision or a regulatory change could be over before the public knew it had begun. Monthly disclosure would be better, and in particularly sensitive cases disclosure within days should be on the table.

Immediately after its criticism of New Zealand’s lobbying regime, the OECD points out that we lack a public beneficial-ownership register showing who ultimately owns and controls companies. Helen Clark essentially makes the same point in McLauchlan’s Listener feature: “Where does the money really come from, and who benefits from government decisions?”

A lobbying register is of limited use if the company hiring the lobbyist can still conceal who ultimately owns it, and the same problem arises with political donations. Opportunity has left beneficial ownership alone, which is a strange gap in a package otherwise built around following the money.

Read more

There’s a lot to be learnt about political power in New Zealand from Kiri Allan’s new book and her media appearances. However, not all of it is what the former politician would like us to see.

The most revealing scene in Kiri Allan’s new memoir, Go Hard or Go Home, isn’t the car crash. It happens in a hospital, where Allan, then a Cabinet minister, was receiving treatment for cervical cancer. As she recounts in the book, and as Danyl McLauchlan reports in his excellent Listener profile earlier this month, an outgoing chief executive of one of her own departments made a special visit and spent at least half an hour discussing the government board positions he hoped to occupy after leaving his post.

“Imagine being plugged up to chemotherapy,” Allan writes, “and a very senior public servant making a special trip to the hospital to lobby you for board positions.” Her conclusion: “It says something about where power and patronage actually sit in Wellington… and who feels entitled to it.”

If it happened as Allan describes it, it is pretty shabby. It is also a remarkable glimpse into the less formal workings of Wellington: the networks and expectations that run alongside the official machinery of government. And then she declines to name him. The book tells readers something is rotten in the way appointments and influence work here, and then declines to say where.

The revolving door from minister to consultant

The government appointments story also looks more interesting alongside Allan’s own life after Parliament. She now runs a consultancy firm which has clients she lists as “including iwi entities, Māori collectives, central and local government and private business”. Her website describes the firm as a “professional hustler for clients and entities who do good things for great people”.

Much of that work is in climate adaptation, emergency management, natural hazards and related areas. These are not random subjects: Allan was herself Minister for Emergency Management and Conservation.

Allan’s post-political work is presented as consultancy rather than lobbying. Yet the activities she has publicly described include strategy, helping organisations understand legislative and regulatory processes, using networks and assisting clients to get projects across the line with decision-makers. Doesn’t this sound like “lobbying”?

None of this suggests wrongdoing. The point is that New Zealand has no lobbying register and no stand-down period for departing ministers, so there’s no way for anyone to tell.

That question became especially relevant this week when Allan wrote an opinion piece for the New Zealand Herald on Thursday about the National Iwi Chairs Forum hui in Queenstown. The piece was a mixture of reportage and opinion, titled “Party leaders met NZ’s most influential iwi figures: Te Pāti Māori tanked and Luxon didn’t show”.

The Herald told readers that Allan was a former Labour minister who “now runs the KLA consultancy firm”. What it did not disclose was Allan’s advisory relationship with the National Iwi Chairs Forum itself. The Forum lists Allan as lead adviser to its Disaster Recovery ILG, and Allan has publicly described facilitating climate-adaptation work associated with the Forum. But if you write a political column about an organisation’s meeting, shouldn’t readers know that you also work in an advisory capacity with that organisation? It simply gives readers useful information.

The Herald piece also required an awkward clarification after Te Pāti Māori president John Tamihere posted on Facebook that the piece told “outright lies”, especially because he wasn’t at the conference. Allan had reported that Tamihere was there, and the following: “In my view, Te Pāti Māori tanked. You could feel the room – packed with people waiting for a clear vision for te ao Māori – pull back. Instead they got, what sounded to me like, a defensive account of the party’s internal troubles from president John Tamihere, including a claim that no one but him had built an organisation serving Māori the way Waipareira Trust had.”

The above section was later amended to refer to co-leaders Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and Rawiri Waititi instead. But there’s still no acknowledgment that Allan was reporting on an organisation she works for. This should be a basic requirement when an ex-minister, political insider and consultant wants to be a media commentator.

Going hard on the public service

Allan’s biggest intervention during the promotional tour has been her attack on the public service — one that potentially aligns with the interests of the sectors she now advises.

Allan writes in her book that she came to agree with the Act Party that the state service “was overpaid, bloated and slow”. This was first reported on by McLauchlan in his Listener piece. He writes that Allan “came to loathe the Wellington bureaucracy: the officials who left her unbriefed, the ‘yes, Minister’ that meant nothing” — and the highly paid senior people who, in her view, dodged the hard issues.

Then on Friday on RNZ she doubled down on all this in an interview with Guyon Espiner: “What I found with senior bureaucrats is that they’re often more political than politicians. They know they’re going to out-survive politicians. And they just sometimes need to bide their time, say ‘Yes minister, absolutely minister.’”

PSA national secretary Fleur Fitzsimons was furious with the former Labour minister. In a Facebook post she accused Allan of taking a “cheap shot” at the public servants who had worked for her, calling the comments “unjustified, gross and unbecoming”. Fitzsimons says: “She knows that the people and agencies she is criticising can’t answer back.”

She also argued the remarks feed “a far-right narrative that leads to privatisation of important public services”. Of course, Allan was pushing an agenda of devolution of roles and funding to communities, iwi and private entities – sectors that overlap with the client base she describes on her own website – with stories about her time as Minister for Conservation.

Allan’s narrative is that she became aware that the centre gatekeeps resources that should flow to communities: getting millions of dollars of Jobs for Nature money out to community groups was a “ridiculous process” that took a couple of years, and settling cultural rights over whale bones took four. She told Espiner: “I do think we need to have a good think about how tax dollars get put back into communities, having our communities steward those resources ... is something I’m a big advocate for.”

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: “The limits of Allan’s candour”, “Allan stands by her treatment of staff”, “Selling the policy her soul rejected”, and “Reckoning, not redemption”.

Read more

There is something strange about this election campaign. National has just put itself through another leadership crisis, Christopher Luxon looks weaker than ever, and Labour still doesn’t look like a party storming towards victory.

Luxon survived his second confidence vote in four months on Wednesday. Chris Penk lost his ministerial portfolios for launching the challenge that caused it. National MPs spent much of the week talking about themselves. All of this sits on top of the Government’s real problems: unemployment is high, living costs are still painful, public services are stretched, and a lot of voters think the country is heading in the wrong direction.

You would expect the Opposition to be cleaning up. Instead, the 1News-Verian poll released that same evening had Labour on 30%, down two points, with National just behind on 29. Luxon was still ahead of Hipkins as preferred prime minister, 17% to 15.

Labour reached 37% in the Verian poll taken in mid-April, its highest since Hipkins’ first poll as leader in January 2023. By June it had dropped five points to 32. It has kept sliding since.

Forget for a moment whether Labour is a point ahead or two points behind in any particular poll. The more interesting question is why it is not ten points ahead. For months the coverage has concentrated on what is wrong with National and Luxon. It is time to turn some of that scrutiny on the party that wants to replace them.

The small-target strategy

Labour has been running a deliberately boring “small target” strategy (say little, offend no one, let the incumbent implode). There was a very good reason for such a cautious approach. After the 2023 election the party was in a terrible position. It had fallen from 50% in 2020 to 26.9% three years later. Auckland had turned against it. Labour was associated with Covid, inflation, projects that didn’t work, Three Waters, co-governance battles and ministerial scandals.

Hipkins’ first job in Opposition wasn’t to excite anyone. It was to make Labour safe again. He has largely done that. There was no civil war after the defeat. He stayed in control, moved Barbara Edmonds into a central economic role, refreshed the candidate list and slowly rebuilt support. Labour no longer looks like the party voters were desperate to throw out in 2023. That is not nothing. It doesn’t follow that voters are desperate to put it back in.

Almost every recent analysis of Labour reaches for the same description: a small-target or “Ming vase” strategy, borrowed from Australian Labor in 2022 and UK Labour in 2024. Writing in The Spinoff this week, Joel MacManus asked whether it has begun to backfire. He quotes the lobbyist Georgina Stylianou, who describes Labour’s announcements as “tangible little droplets – they’re all good retail policies but they don’t have an overarching pitch”.

So, Hipkins has done the first part of the job: Labour is electable again. But it is much less clear that it is compelling.

An extraordinarily weak Government

Labour’s position becomes harder to understand when you look beyond the headline party numbers. The latest Ipsos Issues Monitor, reported by Stuff’s Emma Ricketts, found Labour was the most trusted party on all five of the issues voters ranked most important: cost of living, healthcare, the economy, housing and unemployment. National no longer leads on any of them. That is quite an advantage for an Opposition to hold.

Labour is ahead on so many issues, Sam Sachdeva wrote in Newsroom, “yet still seems unlikely to form government in most current polling”, which suggests “the party is failing to fully capitalise on its potential advantage”.

The Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll at the start of the month was worse again, putting Labour at 27.8%, essentially back at its 2023 result. Hipkins dismissed it as a rogue poll, and he may be right, since other polls have Labour higher.

But there is enough here to say Labour has lost momentum. Its support has softened from the mid-30s it was reaching earlier in the year, and the energy in this campaign is going to other parties.

The Herald’s Jamie Ensor made the point after the Curia result. All the attention on Luxon’s mistakes should be producing a much bigger dividend for Labour by now. His conclusion is hard to argue with: “When others are coming for your vote, waiting for Luxon’s next faux pas just isn’t enough.”

National is doing almost everything an Opposition could reasonably ask of it. But you still have to put the ball in the net.

Former Labour adviser Vernon Small asked the question that ought to be uncomfortable inside Labour headquarters: “If Labour and the Opposition can’t open a significant lead in these times, when can they?”

The Opportunity problem

This is why the rise of the Opportunity Party should concern Labour. Opportunity reached 6.1% in the Curia poll and 8% with Verian this week, which on those numbers would give it nine seats.

We shouldn’t assume all of that has come out of Labour. Opportunity’s constituency looks more complicated than that. What matters is why people are going there. The party has one big, clearly stated idea: a land value tax funding a universal basic income. You can think that bold or barmy. Labour would reject most of the programme and plenty of people will find it frightening, but nobody is confused about what it is trying to do.

Danyl McLauchlan argued in the Listener in June that National’s KiwiSaver changes and the Greens’ tax package both have serious flaws, but that both parties are at least trying to fix something real. Labour has offered nothing on that scale. His conclusion was that the minor parties have been “more courageous with their policy proposals this year”. McLauchlan’s description of the larger contest is savage but difficult to forget: “The impression is of two leaders who have no plan except that each should be prime minister instead of the other.”

There is a second story in the Curia numbers. The combined National and Labour vote fell below 60% for the first time since that poll began five and a half years ago. On preferred prime minister, Toby Manhire wrote in The Spinoff, “neither Chris is inspiring hearts and minds”.

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: “Has Hipkins got another gear?”, “Where is the economic fight?”, “Who would Labour actually govern with?”, “Winning by default”, and “What this all means”.

Read more

A day after Christopher Luxon survived the latest attempt to remove him as Prime Minister, we are finally getting a clearer idea of what happened. It is still murky. There are competing accounts of what occurred inside National’s three-hour caucus meeting, and almost everyone involved now has an incentive to minimise their role. But enough pieces have emerged from the accounts of Liam Hehir, Ani O’Brien, Jo Moir, Thomas Coughlan, Richard Harman, Jenna Lynch and others to reconstruct the basic story, even if some crucial details remain disputed.

According to Hehir and O’Brien, Chris Penk had been canvassing support for a possible Erica Stanford–Chris Penk leadership ticket, with Stanford as leader and Penk as deputy. Chris Bishop, meanwhile, remained one of the other main names being discussed as a replacement for Luxon. Before anything had been properly settled, someone spoke to the Herald. The story went public on Monday night, Luxon immediately called MPs back to Wellington, and what had been an attempt to quietly establish whether the numbers existed became an emergency leadership crisis.

At least for a while on Tuesday afternoon, the numbers appeared to be moving against Luxon. By that evening they were moving back. Stanford and Bishop appear to have been competing rather than combining their forces. Some MPs who had expressed dissatisfaction with Luxon were evidently not prepared to vote him out. And when caucus finally met on Wednesday, Luxon changed the terms of the contest by putting his own leadership to a confidence vote before any alternative candidate emerged.

There may have been a broad appetite for change. There was plainly no majority for any particular alternative.

The Stanford-Penk option

The clearest new account came from Liam Hehir on RNZ’s Morning Report today. Hehir is a National Party member and a close friend of Penk, but says he had deliberately not pumped Penk for information because he would “rather be a bad pundit than a bad friend”. So Hehir was explicitly not presenting this as an account extracted from Penk himself.

His understanding is that Penk was not originally trying to make himself Prime Minister. Instead, he was fronting a possible change involving Stanford as leader and himself as deputy. Hehir thought there was a fairly obvious political logic to the combination: Stanford as one of National’s more liberal ministers, Penk as a well-liked conservative, giving the caucus a ticket that crossed some of its internal divisions.

The intention, according to Hehir, was to do the numbers properly to initiate a clean coup. Penk would canvass support, “get the names on paper”, and then, if the numbers were there, go to Luxon and tell him it was time to step aside.

Ani O’Brien, another commentator with strong National contacts, reported much the same thing last night: “This evening I have learnt that what Chris Penk was actually canvassing was support for an Erica Stanford–Chris Penk leadership ticket. To be clear that is: Stanford for leader and Penk as her deputy.”

O’Brien is careful on one important point: she has not established how much Stanford herself knew about or approved the exercise. That distinction matters. Hehir and O’Brien have both reported that Penk was canvassing a Stanford-Penk option. It does not follow that Stanford personally sent him out to organise it.

On O’Brien’s account, the exercise had not progressed much beyond initial discussions when it lost control of its timetable. She describes the next moment in three words: “Then somebody talked.”

Someone who knew what was happening spoke to the media. Hehir says people who had been canvassed, or had heard about the canvassing, went to the Herald. Thomas Coughlan’s story then broke and everything changed.

Suddenly journalists were ringing MPs asking whether they supported Luxon. Stanford and Bishop were being asked whether they wanted his job. What had been a relatively private exercise in testing whether an alternative leadership was viable became an immediate public crisis.

As O’Brien puts it: “The story was out, journalists were ringing MPs, MPs were being asked to declare allegiances, and Luxon had every incentive to force the issue immediately rather than allow his opponents time to organise properly. The coup, if you want to call it that, had been triggered far too early.”

We still don’t know who leaked to the Herald or why. It may even have been somebody sympathetic to Luxon. What is clear is that the leak helped him. Without it, Penk and others might have had another day or two to settle the numbers and work out which leadership option could command a majority. Instead Luxon had his MPs flying to Wellington.

The numbers fall apart

Even then, Luxon was apparently in real danger. Herald political editor Thomas Coughlan reports that before the 6pm television news on Tuesday, the numbers were “firming up for a change”. Some of Luxon’s usual supporters were noticeably quiet, and the atmosphere around Parliament was that a leadership change might genuinely be happening.

Heather du Plessis-Allan says Stanford and Bishop (“or at least both people who thought they were contenders”) were reasonably confident on Tuesday afternoon that they had the numbers. By about 8pm, however, she was being told the coup was falling apart and MPs who had moved away from Luxon were “defecting back”.

Richard Harman’s Politik newsletter helps explain how that could happen so quickly. His reporting suggests that much of the operation was remarkably loose. Rather than securing written commitments, the plotters appear to have relied heavily on verbal assurances. Some backbench MPs told Harman they had not been approached at all.

The obvious question is: how do you get close to rolling a Prime Minister without being absolutely certain you have the votes?

An MP telling a colleague privately that Luxon is doing a poor job, or that Stanford might be better, is one thing. Actually voting to remove a sitting Prime Minister shortly before an election is quite another. Harman says some MPs may even have indicated support to more than one camp.

His historical lesson is straightforward. Serious National Party coups have traditionally involved hard counts and commitments that could not evaporate at the last minute. Harman writes: “The plotters might reflect that rolling a Prime Minister is a more serious affair than casual conversations on mobile phones”. His advice is even simpler: “get it in writing.” The plotters, as Brent Edwards put it at the NBR, “had not bothered to do a proper head count.”

There was another problem. Even if enough MPs could be persuaded that Luxon should go, there was still no agreement over who should replace him.

Lynch reports one account from inside National in which Stanford and Bishop were “locked in a battle over who should get the top job”. Du Plessis-Allan says something similar, although more bluntly: “the coup fell apart because of egos”. Her information is that the two needed to coalesce around one candidate, but “neither Chris Bishop nor Erica Stanford was prepared to go second on the ticket”.

Matthew Hooton takes this argument much further. In an interview with The Post’s Andrea Vance, he named Stanford, Bishop, Nicola Willis, Simeon Brown and Mark Mitchell as “the real villains of today”. Hooton’s charge is that all five knew a leadership change was necessary but none was willing to put their own ambitions aside. The attitude, in his telling, was: “if it can’t be me then we’ll stick with Luxon”.

The Post editorial today makes essentially the same accusation, concluding that National’s five touted leaders “are not leaders, but, like Mr Luxon himself, mere careerists”.

Hooton may be laying it on a bit thick. There were perfectly rational reasons for MPs to hesitate before removing a sitting Prime Minister this close to an election. But the basic problem stands. Without agreement on Stanford, Bishop or somebody else, there was no viable coup.

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: “Luxon moved faster”, “So what did Penk actually do?”, and, “National’s worst possible result”.

Read more

In a few minutes time National MPs will gather at Parliament for an extraordinary caucus meeting that could end Christopher Luxon’s time as Prime Minister. Luxon may still survive. MPs who complain privately about a leader do not necessarily vote against them when they finally get into the caucus room, especially when the leader is also the sitting Prime Minister.

But things look significantly worse for Luxon than they did yesterday. The bigger change is that his opponents may finally have worked out what comes next. Until now, plenty of National MPs seem to have wanted Luxon gone, but they haven’t been able to agree on a replacement. This morning Erica Stanford increasingly looks like the person around whom enough of them might coalesce.

The tide has turned

NZ Herald political editor Thomas Coughlan is normally fairly careful about predicting leadership contests, but his assessment last night was unusually strong. Asking whether Luxon could survive this second round of caucus discontent, Coughlan wrote: “That looks incredibly unlikely.”

He reports that Luxon may effectively have been forced to call this morning’s meeting because he knew the party whips were getting close to presenting him with evidence that he was losing the support of caucus anyway. “If that’s the case,” Coughlan writes, “the question may not be whether Luxon’s leadership can be saved – it may actually be how long has it been over for?”

That fits with what Richard Harman is hearing at Politik. His newsletter this morning says: “It seems that numbers yesterday firmed against him.” Harman reports that one minister told an MP from another governing party that Luxon’s opponents believed they had enough votes to defeat him.

Stuff political editor Jenna Lynch is even more pessimistic about Luxon’s position. She argues that those trying to remove him have already “mortally wounded an already bruised and limping prime minister”. Having to call another emergency caucus meeting to settle questions about his leadership, just four months after the last confidence vote, is, she says, “beyond damaging”.

Lynch’s conclusion is blunt: “There is only one path forward from here. And that is a caucus consensus on leadership, which probably means the leader cannot be Christopher Luxon.”

National MPs could still get into the room this morning, look around at the alternatives and decide once again that Luxon is the least bad option. That essentially happened in April, when Luxon surprised his detractors by calling a confidence vote before they were properly organised. He won, came out afterwards, declared the issue closed and refused to take questions. But it plainly wasn’t closed.

Newsroom’s Marc Daalder writes that “for MPs to once again come to the brink of change before backing away would strain credulity”. Even another narrow survival would leave Luxon badly damaged, because voters would know his own MPs had seriously contemplated removing him twice in four months.

And then there is John Key. Reported to be hitting the phones for Luxon, Key told the Herald the reports were “untrue”, and refused to say anything further. Coughlan’s conclusion is the quote of the day: “If Luxon has lost Key, one of his biggest backers, and something of a living saint to the modern National Party, then the game is truly up.” Last night the world’s largest prediction market was indicating an 80 percent-plus probability that Luxon is rolled (trading on it is illegal in New Zealand).

The circumstances are therefore quite different this morning. Luxon’s opponents have had more time to organise, and there now appears to be much more serious discussion about an alternative leadership.

Why Stanford?

The problem for Luxon’s opponents has always been that unhappiness with the leader isn’t enough. They need somebody else who can get a majority.

The April confidence vote, widely believed inside National to have been around 27–22, suggested that Luxon already had a large number of colleagues prepared to vote against him even without an actual challenger. But there was no agreed replacement. Bishop had supporters. So did Stanford. Willis, Mitchell and others were also talked about. As long as no alternative could attract enough support, Luxon had a reasonable chance of staying where he was.

Andrea Vance reports in The Post that senior MPs have been discussing a possible arrangement involving Stanford as leader and Prime Minister, Mark Mitchell as deputy, and Chris Bishop taking over finance. Vance is careful to stress that none of this is settled and no challenger has formally declared. She reports that Stanford initially lacked sufficient backing but that her position strengthened substantially yesterday.

Later in the evening, a senior minister texted The Post describing the proposed Stanford–Mitchell–Bishop ticket as “nonsense”, while declining to explain which part of the report was wrong. The Post says it stands by its reporting.

Heather du Plessis-Allan, who has good sources within National, is also hearing that MPs have moved. Yesterday she said: “I have counted by myself three loyal Luxon MPs who have left him. Two of them have joined Erica Stanford’s camp. One of them has joined Chris Bishop’s camp.”

“I don’t think this is looking good for him at all,” she said.

The Herald is also reporting this morning, citing an outside source linked to National, that Defence Minister Chris Penk has been engaging MPs on Stanford’s behalf to test whether she has the numbers. Penk has publicly expressed confidence in Luxon and has not confirmed that account, so it should not yet be treated as established fact. But if it is correct, it matters.

Stanford is on the more socially liberal side of National and cannot win the leadership simply with support from that part of caucus. She needs conservatives to be comfortable with her too, and Penk could be important in making that happen.

There are electoral reasons why MPs might decide Stanford is now worth the gamble. Harman points out that National is struggling particularly with women and in Auckland. Stanford is the MP for East Coast Bays and, he writes, “would be likely to attract more female and Auckland votes than Bishop. That may make her the favourite.”

Her ministerial record also helps. Education is one of the areas in which the Government has been able to point to a reasonably coherent programme of change, and Harman notes that Stanford consistently performs strongly in the Herald’s Mood of the Boardroom assessments of Cabinet ministers.

Stanford also looks more like a genuine change from Luxon than the other obvious contenders. Willis is tightly associated with the Government’s economic performance. Bishop has been linked to leadership manoeuvring for so long that any move by him would immediately look like the culmination of a coup. Stanford, by comparison, has managed to keep herself relatively separate from the destabilisation.

Stanford ruled herself out at the weekend; her people were counting numbers by Monday. She has refused to express confidence in Luxon when directly asked. At Wellington Airport yesterday she simply did not answer. And The Post reports that Murray McCully, the former East Coast Bays MP she worked for for four years and is reported to have called her political mentor, has been seen in Wellington and is believed to be advising her. The apprentice of National’s most storied backroom operator appears to have learned the first lesson: never be seen holding the knife. Stanford has said nothing all week.

The paywall now starts partway through all Democracy Project newsletters. Please take out a paid subscription if you want to support this service and access the full content, including the following sections: “What would a Stanford team look like?”, “The Stanford gamble”, and “What happens this morning”.

Read more

Coup stories about replacing Prime Minister Christopher Luxon are circling again, initiated it seems by his enemies within the National Party. A showdown is reported to be occurring tonight.

The story was broken last night by the New Zealand Herald’s political editor, Thomas Coughlan, who reported that “discontented National Party MPs hit the phones on Monday” after Luxon’s talkback radio captain’s call for a referendum on MMP caught many of his own MPs unaware last Thursday. One unnamed MP confirmed fielding “several” calls about a leadership change and delivered the quote that will define Luxon’s week: “There’s going to be change in the top job. It’s just a question of who is going to be it.”

That MP named senior ministers Chris Bishop and Erica Stanford as the front-runners. Three caucus sources told the Herald both are potential contenders despite their public pledges of loyalty. Stanford has ruled herself out. Bishop, fronting media in Auckland this morning, notably declined to deny there is an appetite within the party for change.

RNZ’s political editor Jo Moir has reported this morning that National’s caucus is indeed meeting online tonight (Parliament is in recess this week), with Luxon’s leadership hanging over the agenda. Bishop appeared to dampen down the rumours of a coup this morning, telling media: “It’s not an emergency caucus meeting – it is a regular caucus meeting in the recess week, so that we can get together and talk about, you know, what we talk about in caucus.”

Yet the news reports have also received unusual reinforcement from figures associated with National and the political right. On X, commentator Ani O’Brien says: “I am clearly hearing the same thing as him” and “I know the reporting to be accurate in this case.” Taxpayers’ Union co-founder Jordan Williams posted an image of a coffee cup being tipped over — a visual joke about a leadership “spill”. Liam Hehir, who opposes replacing Luxon, says he highly doubts Coughlan is simply making the story up. It’s clear that the coup talk has now spread well beyond the press gallery.

However, the Post reports this afternoon that “National MPs have largely gone to ground amid renewed speculation about the leadership of the party.” They report no obvious signs of discontent: “The Post has contacted more than two thirds of the caucus attempting to ascertain how widespread the reported discontent is. Just five National MPs have offered any comment – Shane Reti, Melissa Lee, Carlos Cheung, Miles Anderson, and Ryan Hamilton all told The Post they backed Luxon entirely and were not sure where the speculation had come from.”

Is Chris Penk the stalking horse?

Richard Harman at Politik reports that National caucus members have been pushing for a special meeting on the leadership, with MPs bringing forward a caucus meeting that was previously scheduled for tomorrow. Multiple sources told him the leadership “had been discussed in phone calls all through Monday”.

Harman adds one explosive but unconfirmed claim today. He reports that Monday’s calls appeared to have been initiated by Defence Minister Chris Penk. One source told him the plan was for Penk to act as a “stalking horse” for a wider contest involving Bishop, Stanford, Nicola Willis, and possibly Simeon Brown.

The stalking horse is an old device, most famously used against Margaret Thatcher in 1989: someone organises the challenge, flushes out the numbers and absorbs the damage so the real contenders can keep their hands clean. Stanford, remember, ruled herself out only at the weekend. Bishop and Stanford both pledged support for Luxon earlier this year. If a stalking horse is indeed in the field, those pledges are already being treated as disposable.

Three votes in it: The 27–22 problem

When Luxon called a confidence vote on himself on 21 April, he won it, read a short statement, took no questions, and declared the matter closed. Nicola Willis said afterwards that only the scrutineers knew the tally. The refusal to say more was the whole manoeuvre.

While nobody knew the margin, “I have the support of my caucus” could not be tested. More to the point, no MP contemplating a move could tell whether they were one of a handful of malcontents or one of half the room. Everybody was counting blind.

That protection has gone. It appears a score sheet from the vote may be circulating. Coughlan says that the Herald has been told by MPs that they believed the margin was 27 to 22. The Post reports that the widespread view within the caucus is that April was very close, around 27-22, which as the paper puts it is just three votes in it – only three MPs switching sides would reverse it to 24–25.

Harman was given a slightly different version, 28 to 21, requiring four votes to shift. He points out that the only people who genuinely know are the two tellers, party president Sylvia Wood and Chief Whip Stuart Smith, but adds that “a score sheet can be kept, and it would seem that is what may be doing the rounds.”

If a score sheet is circulating, whoever released it plainly wants National MPs to know how close the April vote may have been. The number is useful because it makes a change look achievable. Harman asks the question that matters, which is why the numbers have suddenly started appearing four months after the event. Nobody leaks a stale vote count for the fun of it, and every wavering National MP now knows how short the walk is.

There is an observation in the Post’s reporting that has been almost entirely overlooked. Within the caucus, a margin that narrow with no declared challenger in the field is itself read as a sign of Luxon’s weakness. If the 27–22 account is correct, 22 of Luxon’s colleagues voted against him even though there was no declared replacement.

There has been no shortage of opportunities for MPs to change their minds since April. Luxon has made a succession of unforced errors, culminating in an MMP referendum announced on talkback radio that his own ministers could not agree was party policy. The party’s attempt to re-establish its fiscal credentials has also been poorly received.

The April ballot was meant to demonstrate that the leadership question had been settled. If the reported numbers are accurate, it showed instead how little support Luxon had to spare.

Bishop or Stanford?

If Luxon goes, two names recur. Bishop is the safer caucus choice: quick on his feet, combative and experienced in political management. But he could be seen as replacing one middle-aged man with another.

Stanford offers the larger public reset. She is less closely identified with the Government’s economic record and probably the candidate Labour would have more reason to fear. She connects more easily with the public and appears less manufactured. But she is much less tested.

The Post also reports today, based on talking to sources within National, “One suggested that the long-unanswered question of whether Chris Bishop or Erica Stanford would take over had been put to bed through some kind of deal, but this remains unconfirmed.”

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: “The two-women option”, “The revolt on the right”, “The case against the coup”, and “What happens tonight”.

Read more

On the face of it, yesterday was Christopher Luxon’s best day in months. The Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll had National up 0.5 points to 31%, Labour down 3.7 to 27.8%, its lowest result in that poll for more than 18 months and barely a point above its catastrophic 26.9% election defeat. The coalition bloc would win 61 seats to the opposition’s 59. And in the preferred prime minister stakes, Luxon rose 4.1 points to 23.2%, clear of Chris Hipkins on 19.8%.

RNZ’s Jo Moir reckoned the poll would have come as a considerable relief to National. After months of poor polling and repeated leadership speculation, the party can at least point to evidence that it remains competitive and that Labour has considerable problems of its own.

The poll was not all good news, however – the Post reports this afternoon that a leaked copy of the full Taxpayers’ Union–Curia poll “had Luxon with a net favourability score of -19%, behind Hipkins on -7% and Peters on -16%.” Furthermore, it showed “falling confidence in the country’s direction, indicating 36% of voters now think it is heading in the right direction and 54% the wrong direction.”

The timing of the poll also matters. Its fieldwork was completed before Thursday’s extraordinary MMP referendum episode and therefore before the worst part of Luxon’s week. More importantly, it arrived just as some of the country’s most influential political commentators were reaching much darker conclusions about the Prime Minister.

Coughlan’s brutal verdict

The most consequential assessment comes today from New Zealand Herald political editor Thomas Coughlan, whose opening proposition about the election is extraordinary: “the central question of New Zealand politics is not who will win it, but whether Christopher Luxon will even contest it”.

This is significant coming from the political editor of the country’s biggest newspaper. Coughlan’s judgement is that the past week has shown “just how poor a performer he can be”. His wider conclusion is even harsher: “there is no floor to Luxon’s political ineptitude.”

Coughlan’s assessment of Luxon’s week: “This has been a shocker of a week — one of the worst of any Prime Minister in recent memory, and made worse by the fact that most of the errors were self-inflicted.” On the now-infamous Rotorua transcript, which the Prime Minister’s own office released in the belief it would exonerate him: “The 500 words of patronising cybernetic drivel condemned him.” And on the mood inside Parliament: “However depressing and chaotic things look on television or read in the newspaper, they’re worse in real life. The atmosphere at Parliament is febrile, the mood is terrible.”

The last line of Coughlan’s column is particularly damaging. It plays on Luxon’s own favourite word, the one he used three times in Rotorua when he told struggling business owners to be “adult, adult, adult”: Coughlan concludes his column today with: “The ‘adult, adult, adult’ thing to do might be to go, go, go.”

Hooton says Luxon is the problem

Coughlan is far from alone. Matthew Hooton’s analysis in The Post yesterday is even more brutal.

He describes Luxon as “obviously out-of-touch, out-of-his-depth and profoundly unpopular”. Reporting on the mood in National, Hooton makes the remarkable claim that “almost no one believes Luxon will be prime minister by Waitangi Day”, even if the party manages to scrape together another coalition government after the election.

Picking on one of Luxon’s controversies this week, Hooton focuses on revelations that Luxon had taken Defence Force flights after attending a National Party fundraiser. His defence, as recorded by Hooton: “Look, I’m prime minister. I’ve got a busy job. I’ve got a big schedule. Where I can’t use a commercial flight, I’ll use military assets.” No previous prime minister, Hooton points out, has found it necessary “to so liberally use the defence forces to get around” — and this from a man who in opposition promised to fly commercial. One the same day, unemployment hit an 11-year high.

Hooton’s argument is not that National lacks possible replacements. Quite the opposite. He names Nicola Willis, Chris Bishop, Erica Stanford, Mark Mitchell and Simeon Brown as politicians who could do a better job. The problem is that National MPs cannot agree on which one they want.

Hooton says some National MPs know Luxon is leading them towards “catastrophe” but have concluded it may now be too late to change. Hooton notes in passing that if Brown wanted the job he would “have to do it by beating the record held by Ardern and Sir Edward Stafford to become the youngest person ever to take the top job”.

That is Hooton’s speculation rather than evidence that Brown is organising any challenge. But the fact that such scenarios are now being seriously canvassed by commentators close to the political right tells you how far the discussion has shifted.

The David Brent problem

The David Brent comparison has been around for a while. Hooton was making it as far back as 2024, comparing Luxon with Ricky Gervais’ painfully self-confident manager from TV’s The Office. Rotorua made the comparison difficult not to think about again, and the Herald’s Ryan Bridge ran a Herald NOW segment this week titled “Christopher Luxon strikes again ... as David Brent.”

Bridge called the Rotorua speech to businesspeople a “David Brent-Tony Robbins mashup”. Luxon was standing before business owners, many of whom have had a grim couple of years, delivering motivational advice with enormous confidence. The problem was not simply the jargon. It was the apparent failure to recognise how the message would land. After all, Luxon told business owners facing their sharpest confidence collapse in a decade to “go out there and smack it and go create the road”, to “retool”, and to stop behaving like children toward the government parent.

The business background that was once supposed to be Luxon’s great political advantage is now increasingly being used against him. When he entered politics, National presented the former Air New Zealand chief executive as a serious manager who understood performance, targets, delivery and leadership. Now those same credentials can easily be turned around. Critics hear the corporate language and wonder whether Luxon understands the very different business of politics.

That is where the David Brent comparison starts to become more than a cheap joke about mannerisms. Brent’s problem was never just that he used embarrassing management jargon. It was that he generally believed he was performing brilliantly while everyone else in the room was having a very different experience.

Duncan Garner takes this criticism in a somewhat different direction in The Listener today. His argument is about the gulf between the Prime Minister’s increasingly optimistic talk about the economy and what many people are experiencing. “You say one thing, Mr Luxon, but we feel another,” Garner writes.

At a Christchurch business conference this week Garner asked hundreds of small business owners whether they felt better off after the past three years: “No one put their hand up. Not one person.” His advice: “If you can’t see past this and sharpen up, then put the cause and the party first and stand aside for someone who can.”

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: “O’Sullivan’s question of power”, “The right is turning on Luxon”, and “Can National afford to keep Luxon?”.

Read more

This week Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has been receiving criticism for his extensive use of Air Force transport to get around the country. Stuff journalists Jenna Lynch, Emma Ricketts and Glenn McConnell have published a run of stories about the Prime Minister’s use of military aircraft for domestic travel, pointing out that the trips do not involve emergencies or disasters. Using Defence Force documents obtained under the Official Information Act, they have counted 41 such flights over this term of government so far.

Luxon is not the first to use the Air Force to fly around. Previous governments have also hitched such rides around the country. But the recent stories highlight that there is a need to create better rules and transparency around the use of such public assets. For although some have characterised the mini-scandal as trivial, the use of military craft for politics relates to some important issues about the potential use of state resources for electoral gain. After all, the Air Force belongs to the state, not to the party temporarily running it.

The real scandal here is bigger than Luxon, and it will outlast him. New Zealand has no clear rules about when a prime minister may use a military aircraft, and no routine way for the public to find out how those aircraft are being used.

Not everyone thinks this matters. Luxon says the planes have to fly and the pilots need the hours, so carrying him made no difference to the bill. Former prime minister John Key says successive prime ministers have all used military assets. Heather du Plessis-Allan says the whole thing is “nitpicking”. We’ve got to stop nitpicking legitimate uses of things like Defence Force flights, for God’s sake,” she said. Labour, for its part, says the Prime Minister is treating the Air Force as his “personal taxi service”.

Luxon’s defenders are right about one thing. Prime ministers sometimes need to travel in ways that would look excessive for anyone else. Their schedules move without warning, and commercial timetables were not designed around them. It would be silly to insist that a prime minister spend half a day in the back of a Crown car to prove he is careful with money.

Which is precisely why the rules matter. If military transport is genuinely necessary at times, and if it hands a prime minister a scheduling advantage no opponent can match, then somebody other than the beneficiary has to be able to say when it was justified. At present nobody is. The only answers the public gets come from the politicians who benefit from them.

The meeting that was a fundraiser

Of those 41 flights, one stands out, and the details of it were published on Wednesday. Luxon spent Thursday 23 July in Feilding and Whanganui. He had government engagements through the day, then dinner at the Whanganui Golf Club, then a Defence Force King Air to Auckland.

Defending the flight on Mike Hosking’s Newstalk ZB programme, he described the end of that day in notably loose terms: “The other day, I am in Whanganui, I finish a meeting at 10:30pm at night. I get on a little six-seated King Air plane from the Air Force.”

Calling the fundraiser “a meeting” was too cute. It obscured the one fact that made the flight contentious. The Herald’s Thomas Coughlan later found a special liquor-licence application from the golf club venue describing the event as a “fundraising dinner for the National Party with the Prime Minister in attendance”, running from 5pm until 11.45pm. Luxon’s office would not confirm that this was the meeting he had in mind, though it did confirm he attended a National Party event that evening.

His office says he had originally intended to stay overnight and fly back on Air Chathams the next morning, and that his plans changed because he had to represent the Government at the funeral of Bill Birch, the former National finance minister. That pushed a Simpson Grierson engagement in Auckland to 7.30am. Luxon says he uses commercial flights where he can, and that on this occasion none was available.

But it’s hard to imagine National accepting the same explanation from a Labour prime minister who had stayed late at a Labour fundraiser. National would be asking whether the party had benefited and whether it should be paying part of the cost. And it would be entitled to ask that.

Chris Hipkins says the Prime Minister could have left the dinner and taken an earlier commercial flight, and that in any case “he could have chosen not to attend a National Party fundraiser if attending Bill Birch’s funeral was that important to him”. On the principle, he is unequivocal: “Once you start doing campaigning and fundraising events for your political party, that’s a bright line, and Air Force resources should not be used for that under any circumstances.”

That is perhaps too rigid. Prime ministers do not stop being party leaders, and no workable rule can require that political and official business never occur on the same day. The better question is whether the party event helped create the need for the military flight.

On the face of it, it did. The aircraft allowed Luxon to stay at a National Party fundraiser late into the evening and still make Auckland by morning. Without it, National might have had to shorten the dinner or pay for a charter.

Even Luxon’s most prominent defender concedes the principle. Using a Defence Force flight to get to a party fundraiser, du Plessis-Allan says, “would be a big no-no”, because “you can’t use Defence Force aircraft to get yourself re-elected, can you?”

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 flight records say”, “Who decides?”, “National and Labour swap arguments”, “When the state becomes a party resource”, “The problem is wider than one aircraft”, and “Rules before the next flight”.

Read more

A Newstalk ZB listener sent in a text message on this morning asking the Prime Minister to “stop this farce of 5% parties controlling the outcome of Government”. Kerre Woodham read it out. Christopher Luxon started where he usually starts, pointing to European countries with far more tangled coalitions than ours. Then he went somewhere else entirely. Asked whether he would hold a referendum on MMP if he was still Prime Minister next year, he said: “Yeah, I think I would.”

That was all it took. There was no press release, no policy document and no sign that the referendum commitment itself had been settled or communicated across National’s caucus. On a mid-morning talkback show, the Prime Minister appeared to commit himself, and by implication a future National government, to reopening New Zealand’s constitutional settlement.

No one should object to a country revisiting how it elects its Parliament. The objection is to doing it like this.

What he actually said

Luxon’s reasoning on holding a referendum, such as it was, ran like this: “I think I would because I actually think, you know, that it is quite right to check in constitutionally and say, ‘Is this the system, New Zealand, you still want?’ You know, ‘You voted for this in the 90s, we’ve had a check-in in the [20]10s, 20 years down the road or whatever it has been, is it still where you want to be?’“

He then explained why he wanted more National ministers around the Cabinet table. “When you have to form coalition governments, you don’t have the same values, you don’t have the same policies, you’re not talking to the same people,” he said. And then the line that has defined the week: “The question is, I keep saying, I don’t need some yahoo or numpty from some other party around that table.”

Asked directly whether he meant his current coalition partners, Luxon said no. But when Woodham asked whether he would rather have Mark Mitchell at the Cabinet table than New Zealand First candidate Michael Laws, the Prime Minister replied: “You said it.”

Luxon offered no argument that MMP produces unrepresentative parliaments, or bad legislation, or unaccountable MPs. He did not say what system he would prefer instead. His complaint was that proportional representation obliges him to share power with people he does not rate. He was not complaining about the electoral system. He was complaining about having to negotiate.

There are legitimate complaints about MMP. The 5% threshold discards votes, the electorate-seat rule has treated similarly supported parties differently, the party list system give party organisations considerable power, and pivotal parties can secure influence beyond their numerical strength. Those are arguments for defined reforms and a properly designed review. Luxon identified none of them.

Adam Pearse of the Herald read it as a symptom rather than a policy. Tying major constitutional reform to the prospect of “yahoos and numpties” around the Cabinet table, he wrote, “suggests a leader under pressure to answer for the dysfunction and lack of delivery that has hobbled his coalition.”

Was it National Party policy?

The Herald, RNZ and Stuff all asked National’s MPs the same question this afternoon. Their answers never settled whether Luxon had announced official party policy.

Nicola Willis, when asked whether an MMP referendum was National Party policy, said: “The Prime Minister is the leader of the National Party.” She added that she had been aware “these were views that he held and that we’ve discussed in our caucus”.

Simeon Brown is National’s campaign chair, so he might be expected to know the party’s policies. Asked about it, he said: “He was on radio giving a view, and that’s great.” Asked repeatedly and directly whether it was National Party policy, Jamie Ensor reports, he didn’t answer. Asked whether it had been through caucus, he walked off.

Mark Mitchell said flatly that National was “not campaigning on that”, while also saying it was something to revisit next term if the party was returned. He then admitted: “I haven’t seen the Prime Minister’s comments.”

Willis’ defence is worth pausing on, because it inverts the concept of transparency: “I think it’s good to have a prime minister who gives you open honest answers,” she said. But candour about a passing thought is not transparency. Transparency would mean publishing the policy, its reasoning and the alternative on offer. What Willis is defending is the absence of any visible policy process, dressed up as authenticity.

It didn’t come out of nowhere

The convenient explanation doing the rounds is that Luxon simply blurted this out. Henry Cooke set out the process failure in The Post. Luxon’s announcements, he wrote, are “election-shaping pronouncements made without a press release or any collateral prepared alongside them”, and there is “little if any merit in making these election-changing pronouncements in such a haphazard and seemingly unplanned way.”

But one piece of evidence complicates the gaffe theory. In May last year, at National’s regional conference in Orewa, Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith told a crowd of party faithful that he “would love to get rid of” MMP. Jonathan Killick reported for The Post that Goldsmith said it wasn’t on the agenda “right now”, but that he believed the electoral system should be revisited every fifteen years. He added that he wouldn’t want to go back to First Past the Post.

That is the minister who would have to legislate a referendum telling party members that he would “love to get rid of” MMP, while rejecting a return to First Past the Post and leaving the preferred replacement unspecified. The remarks have received little attention in today’s coverage.

Put that alongside the four-year-term proposal and a possible move to a less proportional electoral system, and the concern becomes obvious: longer between elections, fewer parties constraining the executive, and no guaranteed strengthening of accountability in return. Each proposal is arguable on its own. Taken together, they point towards a freer hand for the government of the day.

Politicians initiating and framing changes to the rules that determine their own power face the oldest conflict of interest in democratic life. The same problem appears in ministerial declarations, lobbying access and political donations. Here it arises on the largest possible scale.

The timing matters. Recent polls have put National around 30%, sometimes below it. Minor parties are rising and Opportunity is knocking on Parliament’s door. Under a less proportional system, that arithmetic could look very different for National. It was under First Past the Post, after all, that National twice took office on fewer votes than Labour, in 1978 and 1981.

The response that will do Luxon most damage came from his own coalition partner. Winston Peters said “MMP broke the stranglehold of two parties running roughshod over our economy without social licence”, and then delivered the line Luxon will not shake: “Now that the two old parties are losing their grip on power, they want to change the electoral system to favour their falling fortunes.”

Shutting down and taking away true democratic representation, Peters wrote, “should be seen for what it is – a power grab and an ignorance for what it means to be a democracy.” He also said, of the fact that Luxon appeared not to have told his caucus: “It means there could be interesting repercussions if you know what I mean ... you can do the interpretation.”

Peters is self-interested, obviously. But he has a longer record on this question than most of Luxon’s critics: he was arguing for proportional representation in 1990, when he was still a National MP.

David Farrar, the longtime National pollster, was politer but no more supportive. “It is unclear if this is merely a desire by the Prime Minister, or official National Party policy. Either way, I think it is premature,” he wrote, arguing that thirty years is a more sensible interval than fifteen.

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: “How constitutional reform should happen”, “A constitutional problem, or a Luxon problem?”, “Who would run the campaign?”, and “A referendum with no majority”.

Read more

Christopher Luxon has now called the remarks made by his Foreign Minister “racist” and “offensive”. He says Winston Peters should apologise, but Peters has refused to do so. Luxon nevertheless retains confidence in him, will not remove him from the foreign affairs portfolio, will not say whether Peters has met the professional standards required by the Cabinet Manual, and will not reveal what happened when the two men finally discussed the matter. Instead, the Prime Minister has suggested that New Zealanders who are unhappy about Peters’ behaviour should respond by giving National their party vote on November 7. In effect, ministerial accountability has been deferred until the election.

The controversy is now about more than Peters telling Green MP Lawrence Xu-Nan to “go back to your own country”, where people supposedly “lie like a flatfish”. The racist nature of those comments has been well covered, and even Luxon accepts that description. Luxon can advise the Governor-General to remove Peters from ministerial office, but NZ First’s votes are essential to keeping Luxon’s Government in power. The Prime Minister’s authority is therefore worth much less than it looks on paper, and Peters understands this.

Why Luxon will not sack Peters

The Post’s editorial on the affair yesterday offered the strongest possible indictment of the PM, saying that “Christopher Luxon now holds his job in a de jure sense only”, and that “the charade is unveiled: it is Mr Peters who is the de facto prime minister and controls the government”.

The editorial goes too far. Peters does not run the entire Government, and National remains numerically dominant in Cabinet. But it is right about the weakness exposed by this affair. Peters appears to have acquired something close to an informal veto over the enforcement of ministerial standards against himself, because National believes dismissing him could bring down the Government.

Luxon plainly does not agree with Peters’ remarks. He has defended Xu-Nan as a full and equal New Zealander and condemned attempts to denigrate immigrants. “He may think he’s Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen and Pauline Hanson and Donald Trump,” the Prime Minister said, “but we have legal immigration in this country.” Yet none of this has produced any consequence. Peters has not withdrawn his words or accepted that he did anything wrong. After meeting Luxon, he emerged to tell reporters that their discussion was private and that he would not be apologising. Whatever the PM said to him, it does not appear to have altered Peters’ position.

This was the central concern of The Post editorial. Because ministers serve at the Prime Minister’s pleasure, it argued, retaining Peters necessarily communicates that Luxon regards the behaviour as compatible with ministerial office, whatever his personal objections might be. The editorial then turned to National’s caucus, saying MPs needed to remind Luxon of his role as “the ultimate standard-setter in government”. If the caucus failed to do that, it said, it “can only be assumed” to accept such behaviour from the country’s most senior political leaders. The conclusion is harsh. The underlying issue is harder to dismiss. If ministerial conduct can be publicly denounced as racist and unacceptable, yet attract no sanction because imposing one would be politically inconvenient, the ministerial standard involved has very little practical meaning.

A minister is always a minister

Luxon’s central defence has been that Peters made his comments as leader of New Zealand First during a general debate in Parliament, rather than in his role as Foreign Minister. This is the so-called “two hats” argument, and it is not very convincing. Section 2.56 of the Cabinet Manual says that, in their ministerial, political and personal roles and “at all times”, ministers must uphold the highest ethical and behavioural standards and are ultimately accountable to the Prime Minister. The wording does not provide an exemption for speeches delivered as a party leader or comments made during an election campaign.

Former Speaker and Trade Minister Lockwood Smith expressed the point more directly when he said that Peters remained New Zealand’s Foreign Minister at all times while he held the warrant. Foreign governments will see it that way whatever Luxon says. The Chinese Embassy did not lodge its “solemn representations” with the New Zealand First organisation, it dealt with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, which Peters leads. His ministerial office then issued a statement saying he stood by his comments, further undermining the claim that this was simply a private party-political intervention that had nothing to do with his position in the government.

The same difficulty was obvious in the international coverage. As Toby Manhire observed at The Spinoff, the overseas wire reports referred to Peters as New Zealand’s Foreign Minister or top diplomat. They did not pause to explain that, according to Luxon, he had temporarily become a different political personality when he entered the debating chamber. Helen Clark made the absurdity clear in comments to Joel MacManus at The Spinoff. What could the Prime Minister possibly tell other countries, “Don’t take any notice of the foreign minister, he doesn’t speak for the country”? Clark called that “a preposterous proposition”.

As Glenn McConnell noted at Stuff, Luxon’s first condemnation was issued specifically in his capacity as National Party leader rather than as Prime Minister. In other words, he initially used much the same distinction between his party and governmental roles that he later relied on to protect Peters. It allowed him to criticise a political competitor without immediately addressing what he intended to do about the conduct of one of his own senior ministers.

The realities of MMP

Nicola Willis has come closest to giving an honest explanation for National’s inaction. Asked how Peters could continue to sit around the Cabinet table when the Prime Minister and numerous National MPs regarded his comments as racist, she said: “These are the realities of MMP and coalition government, and our duty to New Zealanders is to provide the stable government needed to manage the country well during what are difficult times.” She added: “I don’t think anyone would thank us for breaking up the coalition.”

Ethnic Communities Minister Mark Mitchell also called Peters’ remarks racist and unacceptable, but explained that “Government stability is very, very important at the moment.” Maureen Pugh put the matter even more plainly: with only a few sitting weeks remaining, she thought the Government should simply see out the term.

Stability matters, and an early election caused by the collapse of a governing coalition would bring uncertainty at a difficult time. It is also not certain that sacking Peters would automatically end the Government. New Zealand First would still have to withdraw confidence and supply, and Peters has not publicly issued that threat. But National clearly believes that removing him would carry an unacceptable risk, and Peters benefits from that belief whether or not he has ever stated his intentions. The threat works because National assumes it is credible.

Nothing in MMP or the coalition agreements removes the Prime Minister’s power to recommend that a minister be dismissed. The problem is that using it could cost National office. The Government has decided that preserving the coalition is more important than applying a serious consequence to Peters, and it is a judgment that should be stated honestly rather than presented as an unavoidable constitutional feature of proportional representation.

Luxon also had options between dismissal and silence. He might have required a public apology or withdrawal, announced a formal reprimand, found that Peters had fallen below the standards expected of ministers, or obtained an undertaking that the conduct would not be repeated. He could also have said that, while National remained prepared to negotiate with New Zealand First after the election, Peters would not be reappointed as Foreign Minister. Political commentator Janet Wilson has suggested this would be a way for Luxon to draw a clearer line without immediately provoking a coalition collapse.

Instead, Luxon has kept the outcome of their conversation secret and left any apology entirely to Peters. Peters has suffered no identifiable penalty, while Luxon has been left to explain why behaviour he regards as racist is not serious enough to affect a ministerial warrant.

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: “Was Peters trying to get himself sacked?”, “Why the provocation works”, “It’s not my Cabinet”, and “What happens after the election?”.

Read more

Christopher Luxon’s apology to small-business owners has largely been treated as another of the Prime Minister’s communications failures. It was certainly that. But the episode also exposed a much bigger problem for National: the party that regards itself as the natural representative of business is increasingly losing the confidence of businesspeople.

At Friday’s Rotorua Business Chamber breakfast, chief executive Melanie Short presented Luxon with the results of a survey of 85 local businesses. As the Rotorua Daily Post’s Annabel Reid reported, optimism about the economic outlook for both New Zealand and Rotorua had fallen by 62 percentage points, while confidence in respondents’ own businesses had dropped by 43 points. Costs were rising while customer numbers fell. Many businesses were absorbing those costs rather than passing them on, because they did not believe customers could afford higher prices.

“The affordability of doing business, it’s getting harder and harder,” Short told the Prime Minister. “How long can we hang on?”

Luxon responded that this was “quite a negative view”. He told the audience that businesses needed to be “retooling and radically disrupting” themselves, and that “if you’re not retooling and radically disrupting your business, you ain’t doing the job”. He then described what he regarded as an unhealthy relationship between New Zealand businesses and the state.

“Come home to New Zealand, and there’s a parent-child mentality,” Luxon said. “I have literally sat in boardrooms across New Zealand, and the conversation goes: ‘I wonder what the Government’s going to do? I wonder what the Government’s going to think?’ Who cares what the Government thinks or does? Our job is to be adult, adult, adult.”

The response was extraordinary because Short had not asked Luxon for money or a bailout for any particular business. Asked afterwards what she made of the answer, she said: “We do do it ourselves.” What businesses want from government, she said, is confidence and direction: “It’s knowing the Government has a plan.”

Rotorua Business Chamber president Paul Ingram made much the same point when he spoke to RNZ after Luxon’s eventual apology: “I don’t think we’re looking for a handout. We’re looking for understanding.” Ingram said many owners had their mortgages and homes on the line, and he hoped there was “genuine reflection” behind the Prime Minister’s apology.

Luxon initially defended his remarks. Yesterday morning he said he was “disappointed” by the reporting and argued that his comments had been taken out of context. By the afternoon he had changed course: “I am sorry if my comments do not properly acknowledge the challenges that many small business owners are facing, and that I got that wrong.”

More than a communications mistake

Releasing the transcript did not help the Prime Minister. It confirmed that the news stories were accurate and showed that Luxon had turned a reasonable question into a lengthy management lecture.

At one point, he asked for a show of hands from those using artificial intelligence: “OK, so in this chamber, how many of you are actually using Claude or Claude Code?” He then asked how many training sessions the chamber had held and whether increasing AI literacy was its “number one focus right here, right now”.

Although AI will indeed help many businesses, Luxon’s pivoting to Claude did not answer Short’s question about whether the Government had a plan for the local and national economy. It reinforced the impression that Luxon was more comfortable reciting the lessons of a corporate leadership course than engaging with what small businesses were telling him.

The Post’s editorial yesterday put the problem bluntly, arguing that Luxon “has never adjusted to leadership of a nation of small and medium-sized businesses rather than corporate monoliths”. It said his analysis of New Zealand business culture sounded more like “the gibberish of corporate bureaucrats” than the language of the entrepreneur he presented himself as.

There were also questions about Luxon’s account of his own business experience. He told the Rotorua audience that during his years in Illinois, “the last person I wanted to ever talk to as a CEO was the Government”. As The Post and other outlets noted, Luxon was not a chief executive in Illinois. He held senior Unilever management roles there before later becoming chief executive of Unilever Canada and then Air New Zealand.

More importantly, Luxon used his American experience to imply that businesses there largely got on with their work without paying much attention to government. That is difficult to reconcile with the scale of corporate lobbying in the United States. As The Post pointed out, “That would be news to the enormous US lobbying industry in Washington DC and every state capital. Unilever has in-house lobbying capability, retains lobbying law firms.”

Before entering Parliament, Luxon also chaired Jacinda Ardern’s Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Council. At the time, Luxon said the council would “build closer relationships between business of all sizes and the Government” and provide expertise to inform policy decisions. This makes his suggestion that businesses should not concern themselves with what government thinks or does even harder to understand.

National’s declining credibility with business

National’s relationship with business has been deteriorating for some time, and Luxon’s corporate background has not protected him from that.

In the Herald’s 2024 Mood of the Boardroom survey, Luxon ranked sixth among ministers, with a score of 3.73 out of five. A year later he had fallen to 15th among 28 ministers, scoring 2.96. Finance Minister Nicola Willis also dropped sharply, finishing 13th with 3.09. In the interviews with business leaders, Luxon was criticised for not being a good listener.

The Mood of the Boardroom is a narrow survey of senior chief executives and directors. It is not a representative measure of public opinion, nor does it speak for the thousands of small-business owners who rarely appear in such exercises. But that is why the result was so embarrassing for National. This is the constituency most inclined to support its tax, spending and regulatory agenda, yet many of its members had already become deeply dissatisfied with the Government’s performance.

Writing from the libertarian right, Auckland business owner Damien Grant titled his response “Corporate New Zealand has written off this administration”. Grant reported that former Mercury chief executive Fraser Whineray said Luxon had entered politics with a “massive Rolodex” but “hasn’t used it at all”. Grant himself argued that Luxon and Willis either did not understand the scale of the problem or did not care. “The disappointment isn’t in their failure,” he wrote, “but in their unwillingness to try and succeed.”

Yesterday Steel Worx Group director Chris Barrett told Ryan Bridge’s Today that he had voted National throughout his life but would not do so at this election. His company had spent $37 million building factories, retooling and automating. Referring to Luxon’s advice, Barrett said: “I did everything he said that they should become adults and do. What I didn’t do was destroy the economy.”

Barrett blamed Labour for damaging the economy and National for failing to fix it. The downturn obviously has more complicated causes than that, including international shocks. What makes Barrett worth listening to is that he is exactly the sort of businessperson National expects to have on its side: a manufacturer who has invested in and adopted new technology.

The problem is no longer that Luxon is failing to explain National’s economic programme. A growing number of businesspeople are unconvinced by the programme itself.

Small business and corporate welfare

Luxon’s argument in Rotorua was that businesses should not look to the Government for grants or assistance. There is a perfectly respectable centre-right case for that position. Governments should be cautious about using taxpayers’ money to keep unproductive firms operating, and businesses should normally bear the consequences of their commercial decisions.

The difficulty is that this is not how the Coalition Government operates in practice. Only weeks before the Rotorua remarks, the Government announced that Golden Bay Cement, owned by Fletcher Building, would receive a grant of up to $60 million to maintain manufacturing at New Zealand’s only fully integrated cement plant.

The Government therefore hands out money to business regularly, and it did so in Rotorua that same week. Part of the reason Luxon was in the city at all was to cut the ribbon at Red Stag’s new volumetric modular timber plant at Waipā Mill. The Herald’s Annabel Reid reported that the project was built in collaboration with German and Austrian firms, “with support from the Ministry for Primary Industries’ Primary Sector Growth Fund”.

Former Act Party MP Deborah Coddington began her own critique by agreeing with Luxon that taxpayers should not routinely bail out failing businesses. She then listed some of the assistance that this and the previous government had provided, including millions for the Tūroa and Whakapapa ski fields, continuing costs associated with the closed Chateau Tongariro, $8 million for Michelin Guide promotion, and the much larger screen-production rebate system.

Some of these schemes may well be justifiable. The point is that governments intervene in markets continually, often at the request of businesses, deciding that some industries or employers are important enough to receive public support.

David Seymour came close to naming the problem, suggesting Luxon had “possibly got two groups of people mixed up”. Seymour said there were “some people who call themselves businesspeople and yet always have their hand out to the Government”, while there were many others “doing it bloody tough, for reasons not of their fault”.

That’s a fair distinction, but it’s also an acknowledgment that the Prime Minister delivered his lecture to the wrong people. The small Rotorua businesses were not the companies best placed to extract subsidies or special regulatory treatment from the state.

Luxon’s reliance on his time at Air New Zealand also invited scrutiny. Duncan Greive pressed this point in the Spinoff. He noted that the government plays a central role in the operations that underpin a national airline. What’s more, the airline was rescued in 2001, remains majority Crown-owned and received a $900 million Crown loan facility during Covid.

Greive acknowledged that Luxon had been a successful Air New Zealand chief executive, but argued that the airline’s unusually close relationship with the state made the Rotorua lecture difficult to accept. He concludes: “Christopher Luxon has worked for, but never led, an organisation which had to be truly self-reliant, without an implicit or explicit government backstop.”

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: “The missing economic strategy”, “The markets the Government will not disrupt”, and “National’s business problem”.

Read more

Most political obsessives struggle to understand how late ordinary people tune in to an election. For many New Zealanders, the campaign will only begin to feel real in its final fortnight, when the leaders’ debates are under way, political advertising becomes inescapable and candidates finally encounter voters who have paid little attention until then.

Yet the Government’s has changed the law on when the electoral role closes, meaning that this final fortnight will be too late for some to enroll to vote. Anyone who is not enrolled by midnight on Sunday 25 October will be unable to vote in the general election on Saturday 7 November. Those enrolled at an old address may still have their party vote counted, but could lose their electorate vote. Advance voting starts the morning after the roll closes and continues for almost two weeks.

The Government calls this change of date the end of “election-day enrolment”. That is misleading. Before Labour introduced enrolment on polling day in 2020, people could still enrol throughout the advance-voting period. The coalition has abolished that too. Electoral law expert Graeme Edgeler traces the right to enrol close to election day back to 1948, with broad access continuing through the voting period since 1990. National, Act and NZ First have not restored the old rules. They have imposed the tightest enrolment deadline New Zealand has had in decades.

The decision-making process used to reach this point has been poor. The Ministry of Justice had considered an earlier closing of the roll and declined to recommend it, warning that any changes affecting democratic rights “should be enduring and only occur following careful consideration and a consultative approach”. There has been little sign of either quality here. The law was passed under urgency in December, without Opposition agreement, and will apply to an election only 11 months later.

Labour is entitled to attack the change, but it should not pretend it had no part in the breakdown of consensus over electoral law. It introduced election-day enrolment without National’s support and now sounds rather more attached to bipartisanship than it did in government. I will return to that. It does not let the coalition off the hook. Labour made it easier to enrol; National, Act and NZ First have made it harder.

Thirteen days, not one

If the Government had simply abolished enrolment on election day, there would still have been an argument. It would at least have been a return to the system that operated before 2020. Closing the roll before advance voting begins is something else.

The figures being thrown around have sometimes added more heat than light. At the 2023 election, the Electoral Commission processed about 450,000 enrolments or changes to enrolment details during the voting period, including roughly 110,000 on election day. That does not mean 450,000 votes are certain to disappear this year, as some of Labour’s earlier rhetoric implied. Kieran McAnulty initially talked about as many as 400,000 ballots being voided before retreating from the claim.

The Commission’s estimates are still large enough to matter. It expects about 55,000 party votes could be disallowed because the voters are not properly enrolled. Another 73,000 people could lose their electorate vote because they remain registered at an old address. Their party vote may still count, but their ability to choose a local MP will not.

Henry Cooke asks readers to imagine the coalition finishing with 61 seats while 55,000 attempted party votes have been rejected. “Slowly, people on social media start to do the maths and find 55,000 votes is worth two seats,” he writes. Nobody would know where the missing votes would have gone, but that would not prevent the losing side claiming it knew. “The election was stolen, the meme will go.”

Cooke’s imagined protests may be at the dramatic end of the possibilities. His basic warning is harder to dismiss. The accepted votes would still have been counted properly, but a result that close could become very difficult to defend once tens of thousands of voters had been turned away under a law passed by the parties clinging to power.

Plenty of time for whom?

Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith says the change is about getting the result faster. “The final vote count used to take two weeks, last election it took three,” he said when the legislation passed. He described the new deadline as “a significant, but necessary change” and argued that voters have “plenty of time to get organised and enrolled”.

There is a real administrative problem here. The 2023 count was slow, the Electoral Commission was under severe pressure and Labour had been warned that introducing election-day enrolment would increase the workload. Special votes have to be checked carefully. Nobody should want speed to come at the cost of an accurate result.

The question is why voters should bear the cost of the Commission’s difficulty processing those votes. Parliament could have funded a larger operation and required more work to be done earlier. The Government has instead reduced the number of citizens the system needs to accommodate.

Nor has the Commission promised a substantially faster declaration this year. Chief Electoral Officer Karl Le Quesne says special votes will still need integrity checks, and the published timetable retains the same 20-day period used in 2023. Election day is 7 November. The official result is due on 27 November. Perhaps the process will become quicker in later elections, but the loss of enrolment rights starts now.

Goldsmith keeps his case largely administrative. His Act Party colleagues have been more candid about the voters they believe the system should accommodate. Todd Stephenson complained that it was “outrageous that someone completely disengaged and lazy can rock up to the voting booth, get registered there and then, and then vote to tax other people’s money away”. David Seymour said he was “a bit sick of dropkicks that can’t get themselves organised to follow the law”.

The revealing words in Stephenson’s statement are “tax other people’s money away”. He has already constructed a political profile of the late voter: disorganised, undeserving and likely to support redistribution. This is not simply irritation at a slow count.

Newstalk ZB’s Kerre Woodham put the wider exclusionary argument even more plainly: “If you can’t manage to enrol and it’s beyond you to check your details are correct, you know what? Stay home. We don’t want you voting.” Mike Hosking told his listeners that “the fact you can’t rock up on the day is only going to ‘disenfranchise’ you if you are a bit disorganised”. The logic is that some people should not be voting.

Who does the deadline catch?

The 2023 figures give a reasonable indication of who is most exposed. Mike Smith has set out the 2023 figures: a third of voters aged 18 and 19 enrolled or updated their details during the voting period. Among Māori voters of the same age, the figure was 48%. More publicity about the deadline may reduce those numbers this year, but it is difficult to look at them and pretend the impact will be evenly spread.

The deadline is unlikely to trouble someone who has owned the same house for 20 years and has voted in every election. It is more likely to catch a student who has moved since leaving home, a renter changing flats, or a family shifted between temporary accommodation. Some people will assume their enrolment is correct and discover otherwise only when they arrive to vote.

This is why the Attorney-General’s Bill of Rights assessment and the Human Rights Commission have warned about the disproportionate effect on younger and more mobile citizens. Māori, Pasifika and Asian voters are also more likely to be among the groups caught by enrolment problems. Housing insecurity and weak contact with government agencies now carry an additional electoral cost.

The term “voter suppression” will strike some New Zealanders as excessive. It evokes US battles over identification laws, polling-place closures and partisan purges of electoral rolls. Nothing as aggressive is happening here. But the essential claim is not difficult to understand: a government has knowingly made it harder for eligible people to vote, despite knowing which groups are most likely to miss out.

Political scientist Grant Duncan, who sets out the Government’s case more fairly than many of its critics, reaches that conclusion. Because the coalition knows special votes lean left and knows the 13-day deadline will fall unevenly, he writes, “it does look as though the government’s proposal amounts to intentional voter suppression”. His bluntest line is also the hardest to answer: “They know exactly which kinds of voters are most likely to miss out.”

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: “Did the coalition do it to favour itself?”, “How electoral law used to be made”, “Labour helped create the conditions”, “Keeping watch”, and “Count the votes in public”.

Read more

Something new today. I’m starting a regular roundup of the people who shuttle between public office and private influence: lobbyists, former political staffers, former ministers, and the expanding class of insiders who make a living out of having once been on the inside. Lobbyist Watch.

This month has produced plenty to work with. David Seymour’s former chief of staff has moved into supermarket lobbying. Two people with connections to the Free Speech Union have been appointed to regulate doctors. Elsewhere, the “revolving door” has been spinning in both directions.

Most of these movements are lawful. New Zealand has made sure of that by having very few rules.

Conventional political coverage follows ministers and MPs. “Lobbyist Watch” will pay more attention to the people who leave their offices, turn up in lobbying firms, appear on television panels, join public bodies and sometimes move back into government.

The latest staffer to turn big-business lobbyist

Andrew Ketels left the Beehive at the start of this year after a long run as David Seymour’s chief of staff. He had been alongside Seymour through Act’s recovery from near-extinction, the 2023 coalition negotiations and the first two years of government.

This month, as Kate MacNamara reported in the Herald today, Ketels joined corporate-affairs firm Sherson Willis as its head of government relations. The firm’s clients include Foodstuffs North Island. Between leaving Seymour’s office and joining Sherson Willis, he completed a short government relations contract for Woolworths.

The appointment comes as politicians are again considering what to do about the supermarket duopoly. Breaking up the companies is being discussed. So is separating their wholesale and retail operations, forcing access to supply networks and somehow making it possible for a third competitor to survive. Any serious intervention would have enormous financial consequences for Foodstuffs and Woolworths.

Ketels knows how Act and National think, which people matter, and which arguments are likely to get through the door. No confidential briefing needs to change hands for that knowledge to be valuable.

MacNamara called him the “latest political staffer to turn big-business lobbyist”. He is certainly not the first supermarket recruit.

Andrew Kirton, formerly Chris Hipkins’ chief of staff, is now Woolworths’ head of government relations. Before becoming Hipkins’ chief of staff, Kirton worked for Anacta, an Australian government-relations firm engaged by Woolworths. Ellen Read held the Woolworths role before him, having recently left her job as Jacinda Ardern’s deputy chief press secretary. Former National minister Steven Joyce sits on the Foodstuffs North Island board.

Labour, National, Act. The duopoly appears to be shopping across the political spectrum for influence.

Foodstuffs North Island retained Sherson Willis in 2021, after the Commerce Commission released the draft of its grocery market study. The relationship has survived a change of government and several changes of minister.

Danyl McLauchlan’s recent Listener investigation into the supermarket sector filled out the wider picture, reminding us of Guyon Espiner’s RNZ lobbying research. During the Commerce Commission study, Countdown retained the lobbying firm Capital Government Relations. SenateSHJ, a lobbying and public-relations firm with clients in the grocery sector, was also working inside the commission, using its computers and email addresses. SenateSHJ declared a conflict of interest, although the details released under the Official Information Act were redacted.

Foodstuffs and Woolworths still account for about 82% of national grocery sales. The exact effect of any particular lobbyist is almost impossible to establish. The supermarkets plainly believe the investment is worthwhile.

MacNamara also noted today that Ketels is engaged to Stuff political editor Jenna Lynch.

Who really matters

Danyl McLauchlan published another Listener article this month surveying the country’s most effective political operators. He deliberately looked beyond party leaders and senior ministers. The people who deliver political results, he wrote, “aren’t all in Parliament”.

One of his categories was “The Lobbyists”. His entry on Capital Government Relations borrowed an old Bill Hicks joke about voters arguing over whether they prefer the puppet on the left or the puppet on the right while ignoring the person controlling them both – lobbyists.

McLauchlan suggested that this is close to Capital’s business model. The firm was founded by Labour operative Neale Jones, who works alongside former National staffer Ben Thomas and former New Zealand First deputy leader Fletcher Tabuteau.

The joke lands because there is something recognisable in it. A firm able to work across Labour, National and New Zealand First is selling more than policy advice. It offers relationships, political intelligence and an ability to translate a client’s interests into language each party understands.

In his influence map McLauchlan also included environmental campaigners, Rewiring Aotearoa, the Helen Clark Foundation and the business-funded New Zealand Initiative. Quite rightly. Political advocacy is not solely a corporate occupation.

The imbalance lies in the resources available. A community organisation may get a select committee submission or a half-hour meeting with an MP. A supermarket company can employ people who have just left the offices where policy is made, retain an outside lobbying firm and keep its campaign going for years.

Anyone can email a minister. Not everyone can hire the minister’s former chief of staff.

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: “Back through the door”, “Commentator or lobbyist?”, “From lobby group to regulator”, “Keeping watch”, and “What this column will do”.

Read more

Christopher Luxon appears to have made one of the more important strategic announcements of the election campaign almost by accident. Asked at yesterday’s post-Cabinet press conference whether National could work with the Opportunity Party, the Prime Minister initially returned to his familiar lines about tax and spending. National would not “do business” with parties that wanted to “spend more, tax more, borrow more”, he said. When pressed on whether this amounted to formally ruling Opportunity out, Luxon eventually replied: “We wouldn’t be working with them.” He then noted that there was still “quite a long way to go to November 7”, ended the press conference and left. Luxon’s office subsequently told reporters that National was ruling out both a coalition and any confidence-and-supply agreement with Opportunity.

Labour campaign chair Kieran McAnulty quickly claimed Luxon had blurted out a new position without meaning to. “He did it by accident, and then he got flustered, and then he ran away,” McAnulty said. He also joked that Luxon “ran down the stairs like he was competing at the Commonwealth Games”, which suggested to him that the announcement had not been planned. The line was amusing, although the decision itself was probably not invented on the stairs. Luxon now says National’s caucus and board had been discussing Opportunity “for several months”. National had clearly been considering the issue, even if Luxon did not appear to have planned such a categorical announcement that afternoon.

The policies did not change – the polls did

National insists the rule-out is straightforward and principled. “This is a party that wants extreme policy on taxes,” Luxon told reporters the following day. “We’re a party of low taxes. It’s not a surprise we don’t want to work with them.” He also mocked Opportunity’s claim to occupy the political centre: “They’re as centrist as I am an All Black, frankly.” Previously, however, Luxon had normally responded to questions about Opportunity by saying he had not given the party much thought. He attacked its land-value tax and Citizen’s Income and suggested an Opportunity vote looked like a vote for Labour and the Greens, but stopped short of excluding it from any future arrangement.

What changed was not Opportunity’s tax programme. Versions of a land tax and universal income have sat at the heart of the party since Gareth Morgan founded it a decade ago. What changed was that enough voters began supporting it to make National nervous. Opportunity received 4.6% in the June 1News-Verian poll and 4.7% in the July RNZ-Reid Research poll.

It is still entirely possible that it will fall below the 5% threshold, but it is now close enough that neither National nor Labour can continue treating it as an interesting irrelevance. Using the RNZ-Reid Research numbers, Toby Manhire calculates that adding about 0.3 percentage points to Opportunity would carry it over the threshold and leave National, Act and NZ First without a majority.

The recent Talbot Mills polling also helps explain National’s concern. Former National voters were the largest single group among Opportunity supporters: 23% said they had voted National in 2023, compared with 18% who had voted Labour. Jamie Ensor, writing in the Herald, says National’s message is directed at traditional supporters who might be tempted to “shop around – you may not like what you end up buying”. As Ensor puts it: “With National sitting below where it polled at the 2023 election, the party will want to hold on to anyone considering wandering.”

That seems the most persuasive explanation for the rule-out. National fears that some of its own voters have decided Opportunity is a safe place to register dissatisfaction with Luxon and the present coalition. They may like Qiulae Wong’s less combative political style, want stronger environmental policy without voting Green, support reform of lobbying and political donations, or believe that weak competition in banking, electricity and supermarkets requires a more interventionist response. Some probably just want something new after years of voting for parties they no longer find convincing. National is telling these people they cannot support Opportunity while still expecting Luxon to remain Prime Minister.

National’s dream result

RNZ political editor Craig McCulloch has given the bluntest account of National’s strategy. “Christopher Luxon is clearly worried about Opportunity getting over that 5% line,” McCulloch said. “He is trying to stop the momentum, trying to box them in with the left and trying to dissuade any right-wing voters who might be considering Opportunity as an option.” McCulloch also described National’s ideal outcome. Former National voters would become frightened about helping Labour and return to National. Opportunity might gain replacement support from Labour and the Greens, but not quite enough to cross the threshold. “So that vote is wasted,” McCulloch said. “That would be his dream situation.”

McCulloch gets to the heart of the tactic. National wants Opportunity to lose enough centre-right support to remain below 5%, while continuing to take some votes from the left. In that scenario, those votes elect no MPs and are excluded when seats are divided among qualifying parties, slightly increasing the share available to those parties. National, Act and NZ First benefit. Luxon is therefore trying to change what an Opportunity vote means. Wong has presented it as an independent vote for a party capable of negotiating with either side. National wants voters to see it as a vote that could make Chris Hipkins Prime Minister.

Until now, Opportunity’s claim to be a two-way kingmaker has been central to its campaign. Wong says the party remains open to working with either major party. Its stated procedure is to negotiate first with whichever party receives the largest vote, and to approach the other side if those talks fail. The eventual result would presumably depend on what each side was prepared to offer, but the order of negotiations is not the same as simply supporting whichever party accepts the most Opportunity policies.

National’s announcement is intended to remove much of that ambiguity by declaring that, whatever Wong says, National will not enter an arrangement with her party. In practical terms, National is trying to close half of Opportunity’s political market before it reaches Parliament.

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: “A clear strategy, badly communicated”, “Principle until the numbers arrive”, and “Could the tactic backfire?”.

Read more

Chlöe Swarbrick had an unusual message for Green Party members at the weekend: stop talking only to people who already agree with you.

Launching the party’s election manifesto in South Auckland, Swarbrick said the Greens needed to speak to people they did not know and even those they did not like. No one would accept new information, she warned, if they felt under attack or believed they were losing.

This sounded like a rebuke to her own party. The Greens can appear culturally narrow, self-righteous and more comfortable condemning people than persuading them. Yet little of the wider anger about living costs, corporate power and failing public services appears to be flowing to the Greens. A recent Talbot Mills poll put the party on 9%, below the 11.6% it won in 2023.

The weekend’s answer was its new campaign slogan: “For All of Us”. The party revived its old “Buy Kiwi Made” politics, talked repeatedly about people’s “material needs”, and promised to put electricity prices, tax and water at the centre of its election campaign.

Most of the policies were familiar. What changed was the way the Greens presented themselves. They want to look less like a political subculture and more like a broad movement capable of speaking to people who are unhappy with the country but do not yet see themselves as Green voters.

At the very least, the AGM showed that the Greens recognise their political problem. Whether the party itself has changed is harder to know.

A Green Party for people it does not like

Swarbrick told RNZ that the party was fighting for the basic rights to food, healthcare, shelter, education and job opportunities not only for “the people that we know and like”, but also “for the people we don’t know and even those we don’t like”.

In her speech to members, she made the lesson more explicit. The Spinoff’s Hayden Donnell reported her saying: “No one is ever going to be able to empathise with your worldview if they feel that they are under attack. No one is ever going to be able to accept new information if they feel they are losing. If we want to win, we’ve got to win together.”

Donnell described this as “a plea for a broad-based Green Party that welcomes in new voters rather than browbeating them”. He’s right. The speech was partly a message to Green activists about how they conduct politics.

Stuff’s Isaac Davison also highlighted Swarbrick’s call to move away from “bloodsport politics”. Rebuilding the country and expanding the Green movement would require “building connection, and building trust”, she said: “We have to talk not just to each other, but to those we’ve never talked to before.”

In political terms, the slogan “For All of Us” is an attempt to move the Greens towards a more universalist politics, and away from identity politics. Progressive parties have increasingly organised themselves around the recognition and protection of particular groups. Although that can be valuable, it can also produce a politics that looks like a collection of separate and divisive claims rather than a common programme for society.

The universalist promise is simpler: everyone should be able to rely on decent housing, healthcare, education, energy and income security. That is potentially more powerful than asking voters to identify with the internal culture and language of the Green Party.

Making that turn is harder than announcing it. The Greens would have to listen seriously to people who disagree with them, including socially conservative voters and those whose livelihoods might be disrupted by Green policies. Persuasion would have to take priority over declaring which side of history everyone is on.

The new message also sits awkwardly alongside some of the party’s other rhetoric. A week before the AGM, Marama Davidson called the coalition Government “a pack of bastards”.

When The Hui presenter Julian Wilcox suggested that was harsh, Davidson replied: “It’s not harsh enough, Julian. The real-life damage that they have been doing to people, women, disabled people, Māori, the trampling over Te Tiriti, the absolute desecration of our tāiao, our living systems. There’s far stronger words. I’m being mild.”

Davidson also attacked Opportunity because it had not ruled out supporting National. She said the party remained open to keeping “Luxon and that bastard government in power”.

Davidson had valid grounds for anger. She pointed to the cancellation of pay equity claims, falling real incomes, high rents and environmental damage. But when she describes opponents in those terms it’s then hard to call for an end to bloodsport politics. It makes it easier for critics to conclude that “For All of Us” means everyone except those who vote for the wrong parties.

The “real New Zealand First”

Another revealing part of Swarbrick’s speech was her attempt to reclaim the language of nationalism from Winston Peters. She reached back to the Greens’ 2005 Buy Kiwi Made initiative and argued that New Zealand needed to support local jobs, production and infrastructure. “We’ve got to buy Kiwi-made. We have to build Kiwi-made,” she said. “That might just be what I mean when I say we are the real ‘New Zealand first’ party.”

Behind the joke was a serious strategy: a form of economic patriotism, or progressive economic nationalism. Rather than defining the national interest mainly through immigration, borders and cultural grievance, Swarbrick is defining it through ownership, production and economic security.

The manifesto promises to revive Buy Kiwi Made, direct more government procurement towards New Zealand firms, strengthen regional industry and use public ownership to reshape the electricity sector. NBR’s Brent Edwards reported Swarbrick saying that Kiwipower was intended not only to lower household bills, but to protect the country’s ability “to make and grow what New Zealanders needed”.

This places her in the same international milieu as British Green leader Zack Polanski. Swarbrick has pointed to Polanski and New York mayor Zohran Mamdani as politicians who succeeded by concentrating on “cost of living, affordability and improving lives for regular people through people power”.

Polanski calls his approach “eco-populism”: connecting environmental policy to bills, rent, wages and public ownership, while directing anger towards concentrated corporate power. Unlike the versions offered by New Zealand First or Donald Trump, this populism defines the divide as being between households and communities on one side, and banks, monopolies, and large asset owners on the other.

Stuff columnist Verity Johnson recently drew out what the left- and right-wing versions have in common. She argued that Swarbrick and Peters were “the same person in different pants”: both understood “ordinary, 70k a year anger” at housing costs, grocery prices and governments’ failure to confront entrenched corporate power.

Johnson’s comparison only goes so far. But Peters has been effective at identifying discontent, even when his solutions are unconvincing. The Greens’ opportunity is to acknowledge the same anger while directing it towards economic ownership and concentrated power.

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: “The return of material politics”, “Who gets New Zealand’s power?”, “Opportunity and the problem of the Green record”, “The test of credibility”, and “Has the party turned a corner?”.

Read more

The National Party has spent much of this term trying to understand why so many women dislike the Government. This week Stuart Nash gave it an answer it could work with.

Nash deserved the trouble he created. His private attack on National MP Katie Nimon was inaccurate, reckless and politically inept. But his downfall quickly became about more than the contents of one text. National turned it into a campaign for women voters and a rare chance for Christopher Luxon to impose himself on New Zealand First.

The striking question is not only why Nash went. It is why this offence proved fatal when Shane Jones has survived so many others.

The text and the facts

Nash sent his fatal text message to Chris Finlayson on 14 July, after the former National Attorney-General suggested on the “Cross Party Lines” podcast that Nash could not win Napier off Nimon. Finlayson read it out on air on Wednesday: “Comments like yours motivate me and drive me harder. Katie took nine months off on full pay, went back for a week, then took another month off. Laziest MP I have ever come across. Nice woman, but ill-suited to the rigours of being an electorate MP.”

The facts were wrong. Nimon, who had her first child in May last year, says she took ten weeks completely away from work, returned part-time to electorate duties, and remained away from Parliament in Wellington for six months. “Things don’t hurt as much when they’re not true,” she said afterwards. She suggested that she had “achieved more with National for Hawke’s Bay in three years with a baby than he has in nine years”.

Nash had put a false claim about a rival candidate in writing and sent it to someone with every reason to expose him. His first response made matters worse. Instead of directly apologising, he defended his record and complained that National had twice opposed Labour’s extension of paid parental leave.

National finds a women’s issue

National’s condemnation was instant and remarkably well coordinated. Luxon called the comments “sexist” and accused Nash of “channelling the manosphere”. Chris Bishop said they were “disgusting and he should know better. Stuart Nash needs to get into the 21st century”, before upgrading to “sexist dickhead” on Facebook and eventually “good riddance”.

Jenna Lynch at Stuff noted that “the sheer number of posts from National MPs digging into their camera rolls to find a photo with Katie Nimon to be part of the conversation was impressive, if a little much”. Simeon Brown posted a sarcastic apology for having taken parental leave himself. Erica Stanford declared that “Christopher Luxon is such a champion of women”.

None of this was spontaneous sympathy for Katie Nimon. Lynch wrote that National saw Nash’s transgression as “a rare political gift. They’ve not been fortunate enough to receive many this term.”

The anger may well have been genuine. Nimon is popular with her colleagues and National MPs plainly thought Nash had traduced her. The way the party mobilised that anger was also unmistakably political.

Heather du Plessis-Allan offered the sharpest interpretation: “It must be remembered that it is ultimately National that orchestrated Nash’s demise.” National, she wrote, “went ballistic”, rolling out its senior politicians one after another. Kerre Woodham wondered whether the barrage amounted to “a party-wide instruction to shriek your outrage across every media outlet because we’re polling badly with women and we want to show women that we love them really”.

And in case anyone doubted the machinery behind it, Matthew Hooton reported in the Sunday Star-Times today that “both National and NZ First strategists are briefing furiously to try to take the credit for Nash’s fall”.

The numbers explain National’s enthusiasm. Andrea Vance cites Post/Freshwater Strategy polling showing the Government comfortably ahead among men but collapsing into the low thirties among women aged 35 to 54. National alone is below 20% with that group, while Labour is in the mid-forties.

Writing for Newsroom, sociologist Carol Harrington argues that Nash’s comments “handed National an opportunity to pose on the side of women’s rights despite the party’s track record on equal pay and domestic violence”. Harrington sees this as hypocritical on National’s party: “The record of the past three years shows they stand up for women when it doesn’t cost them anything.” She points to the Equal Pay Amendment Act 2025 halting 33 pay-equity claims and argues that National stands up for women when doing so costs nothing.

Also, on Nash invoking his “strong, independent daughters” in his resignation statement, she added a parenthesis: “I can’t be a misogynist, I have daughters!”

Harrington’s emphasis on costless symbolism underplays the value of senior politicians defending Nimon and rejecting the suggestion that motherhood makes an MP lazy. That response mattered. Her larger challenge is harder to dismiss. Women do not vote only on whether politicians use offensive language. They vote on health services, pay, childcare, housing and the cost of living.

Luxon gets in first

Nash also presented Luxon with an unusual opportunity to look like the person in charge of the coalition. Peters and Jones have spent much of the term attacking National’s policies and leadership while continuing to serve as ministers. Luxon has had few useful ways to discipline them.

Nash appears to have tendered his resignation earlier on Wednesday evening, but Peters had not made that public. At 9.24pm, Luxon announced that Nash would never serve as a minister in a government he led. New Zealand First was not warned. Peters confirmed at 10.47pm that the resignation had been accepted.

Lynch describes Luxon’s move as an effective “pre-sacking”. Strictly speaking, Nash was already on his way out. But Luxon got in first publicly and presented himself as the politician drawing the line.

The move imposed a cost on a coalition rival without risking the coalition. The Herald’s Audrey Young saw a wider shift: “Luxon is starting to treat New Zealand First with the same disrespect he himself is being treated with.” He could not sack Shane Jones. But, to borrow Lynch’s phrase, he could publicly “pre-sack” Stuart Nash.

Why New Zealand First folded

New Zealand First has built much of its recent identity around refusing to bend to outrage. Peters routinely denounces the mainstream media, political correctness and “snivelling wokesters”. Du Plessis-Allan therefore found the speed of Nash’s removal strange. “It is weird that NZ First sacked Stuart Nash this week,” she wrote. “So, let’s call it for what it really is. It’s a sacking.”

The obvious response from an anti-woke party, du Plessis-Allan argues, would have been to tell the critics to get lost and defend Nash’s right to speak. Instead, he was reportedly given a resign-or-be-fired ultimatum at about 7pm on Wednesday.

Du Plessis-Allan’s explanation is brutally electoral: “The mathematics didn’t stack up for Nash. There are many times more women voters than Indian voters in NZ.” The comparison was with Jones’ “butter chicken tsunami” comments, which Peters had defended. Nash had offended a much larger and more electorally dangerous constituency. And with Michael Laws and Jones positioned as the party’s heirs-apparent, Nash was “at best surplus to requirements and at worst a threat that allowed itself to be eliminated”.

Jo Moir at RNZ gets closer to Peters’ internal logic. New Zealand First needed to “cauterise the wound that was Stuart Nash”. Peters, she wrote, has no patience for anyone in his party handing opponents an easy victory. Jones’ provocations are normally deliberate, on-message and aimed at an audience the party wants to excite. Nash’s mistakes were uncontrolled and created trouble without advancing any obvious strategy.

As well as all this, Moir points out that for a party that “talks ad nauseam about family values”, trashing a young mother was about as far off-message as it gets. The Post’s Henry Cooke said it felt like “punching down”: a former senior minister attacking a first-term MP and millennial mother. Thomas Coughlan reported that Nash’s fate was sealed after an internal push from women in New Zealand First, including board member Dot Jones.

Nash’s previous record counted against him too. His ministerial career had ended after a succession of judgment failures, culminating in the disclosure of confidential Cabinet information to donors. He then failed to apologise promptly for the Nimon message.

Most of all, Nash was expendable. He was a candidate rather than an MP or minister. Removing him did not threaten the Government, cost the party a parliamentary vote or force Peters into a confrontation with Luxon.

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: “Why Shane Jones survived”, “Who gets to speak for women?”, “When private politics becomes public”, and “National wins the week”.

Read more

Most voters will not have followed this week’s select committee report on the two bills replacing the Resource Management Act. That is understandable. The legislation is enormous and much of the argument is buried in planning terminology. But the central issue is straightforward: how much power should Parliament hand to ministers to decide how land, water and the environment are used?

Then today, The Post published a precis of an extraordinary 7000-word note that Simon Upton, the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, has sent to all MPs. Upton is not some professional protester. He is the former National Cabinet minister who took the RMA through Parliament in 1991. His verdict on its replacement is worth quoting at length.

Upton’s warning

Upton’s central charge is that Parliament is being asked to hand over its job. Where the RMA constrained regulation to managing the environmental effects of activities, he writes, the new bills “give complete discretion to Ministers to strike whatever environmental or developmental balance they prefer. In short, Parliament can have no certainty about the outcomes that are to be achieved by these Bills.”

The bills contain lists of “goals” rather than a binding purpose. Nothing ranks them, and nothing says how conflicts between them get resolved. Ministers decide. The purpose clauses, Upton says, “provide no backbone at all”, and the goals can be “rearranged by Ministers like a Rubik’s cube in almost unlimited permutations”.

He put it more plainly to The Post: “Whereas in the past, Parliament said, ‘OK, ministers, you can go off and make regulations, and councils, you can go off and make regulations, but here are the guardrails. This is what you can do’. Now there are no guardrails really in the act.”

His warning about lobbying is especially relevant: “almost unlimited ministerial discretion to fine tune the regulatory framework will inevitably incentivise vested interests to seek regulatory accommodations, increasing the likelihood that Ministers will be the target of special-interest lobbying.”

Ministerial power and lobbying

Several of the industries with the most at stake in resource management law are also significant funders of political parties. Joel MacManus made the connection in The Spinoff this week: “there are a few classes of people in New Zealand society for whom the RMA is of extreme importance: farmers, mining companies and property developers. For them, getting a resource consent can be the difference between making millions or going bust. That may be a clue as to why these three industries form the vast majority of corporate political donations in New Zealand.”

The property industry alone has donated more than $2.5 million to political parties since 2021, with roughly half going to National and about a third to Act. The fast-track regime has already generated controversy over the links between political donations, access to ministers and favourable regulatory decisions. Under the new planning system, organised interests will have even stronger incentives to seek changes to national rules, because those decisions could affect an entire industry rather than a single project.

Upton told Andrea Vance: “The more discretion you leave in the hands of the executive, the greater the opportunity for lobbying for special interests to say, ‘Look, minister, you’ve got the power to move this around. Do please do it for us’.”

A discretionary system is more easily used by organisations with the money, information and access required to influence it.

Henry VIII in the Beehive

Parliament’s own Regulations Review Committee has looked at the ministerial powers in these bills and reached for a term from Tudor England, the “Henry VIII clause”: provisions that let ministers effectively alter the operation of primary legislation without going back to Parliament.

Greg Severinsen of the Environmental Defence Society, one of the sharpest technical analysts of this reform, wrote in Newsroom this week that “a breathtaking amount of power and discretion has been vested in the minister, with minimal guardrails”. The select committee, he says, took bills that already favoured development and “doubled down on that ideology”.

The “environmental limits framework”, supposedly the great safeguard of the new system, has in Severinsen’s words been “completely gutted”. “Any activity whatsoever” is now allowed to breach a limit, so long as the minister thinks its public benefits outweigh the harm. Under the original bill this exception applied only to “significant infrastructure”; the committee widened it to “publicly beneficial activities”. Simpson Grierson’s Sarah Mitchell noted that under the broadened definition of infrastructure, “arguably, an Ikea or a very large Bunnings could be necessary to support the functioning of the economy”.

All reference to limits, says Severinsen, is “being scrubbed from the goals of the bills entirely”. His conclusion: the bills are “not only on shaky ground environmentally, but also constitutionally”. His example of what the new calculus means in practice is memorable: “dairying dollars may prove to be more important than swimmable rivers.”

Who pays for environmental protection?

Under “regulatory relief”, local councils that restrict what landowners can do with their land, by protecting a stand of native bush or a heritage building for instance, can be required to compensate the owner.

This “regulatory relief” element is one of the most consequential and least understood parts of the package. It draws on the American idea of “regulatory takings”, under which restrictions on the use of land can sometimes require compensation. New Zealand planning law has traditionally set a much higher threshold for relief.

Consultants MartinJenkins, in work commissioned by the Ministry for the Environment, estimated the potential liability at anywhere between $7 million and nearly $2 billion, with the cost ultimately falling on ratepayers. Severinsen points out that Auckland alone has more than 17,000 properties with significant ecological area protections covering 26,000 hectares, including the Waitakere Ranges, “the lungs of Auckland”.

Hundreds of submitters commented on these provisions. Nearly all opposed them. The committee kept them anyway, and Bishop has been open that the “tension” the regime creates for councils is the point.

Severinsen and councils fear that some protections will be weakened or abandoned because the financial and legal risks will be too great. Upton told MPs the Natural Environment Bill effectively reasserts a landowner’s right to destroy biodiversity which, if curtailed, would have to be compensated for by ratepayers.

Labour’s Rachel Brooking, who spent decades as a resource management lawyer before entering Parliament, expects her former colleagues to do nicely: “The resource management lawyers are going to be in for a whole lot of work for a long time.” She predicts a “cottage industry” of valuers arguing about compensation.

Greater Wellington chair Daran Ponter said the regime was designed so wealthy landowners could take councils to court. He expected his own council could end up “walking away from better and higher environmental standards” rather than risk having to compensate private owners.

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: “The rejection of localism”, “A law unlikely to last”, and “Where should power sit?”.

Read more

The Government has decided to give up to $60 million of public money to Golden Bay Cement, which is wholly owned by Fletcher Building. It is not a loan and taxpayers do not receive shares in return. It is a grant to one of New Zealand’s largest listed companies.

Ministers prefer other language. Finance Minister Nicola Willis calls the deal “the least worst option”. David Seymour describes it as a “necessary evil”. Fletcher Building says it is a “specific, one-time response to an exceptional set of circumstances”. But the ordinary description for transferring taxpayer money to a private company is “corporate welfare”.

Today’s editorial in The Post says Seymour’s “necessary evil” description was “half-right”. The context strongly suggests the newspaper accepts the “evil” part while disputing that the payment was “necessary”. It argues that the Government should have reconsidered the policies making the plant commercially vulnerable rather than reaching for the taxpayer cheque book.

The Post not only strongly attacks the $60m payment to Fletcher Building, but generally critiques the wider return of government subsidies to private business. The editorial invokes Adam Smith, quoting his warning that meetings between businesspeople can end “in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices”. The Post adds: “Add politicians and lobbyists, and the mischief is compounded.”

There is no evidence of corrupt dealing in the Golden Bay decision, or that Fletcher Building has acted improperly by pressing its case. Companies are entitled to argue for their commercial interests. The question is whether governments are becoming too ready to accept the arguments put to them by large and well-resourced businesses, particularly when the proposed solution involves a very large amount of public money.

There is a real case for saving the plant

It is important to acknowledge that there are some good reasons for keeping Golden Bay Cement open. RNZ’s Corin Dann argues that Willis probably had little practical choice. Golden Bay is New Zealand’s only fully integrated cement manufacturer and supplies about 60% of the cement used here.

Fletcher said rising costs, including carbon-emission costs, would likely have forced it to close the manufacturing operation and move to an import-only model from 2030. An independent assessment found that closing the plant and importing cement instead would make commercial sense without government support.

That would leave New Zealand entirely dependent on overseas cement at a time when the country is planning a large programme of house building, roads, hospitals, schools and water infrastructure. The risks of relying on international supply chains have also become much clearer. Wars, shipping disruptions and growing protectionism make dependence on imports less comfortable than it might have seemed a decade ago.

Anneke Smith makes this case in The Post. She says the optics of giving $60m to a large listed company in an election year are “quite simply ridiculous”, but there is also “a method to the madness”. Once the ability to manufacture cement here disappears, rebuilding it would be difficult and expensive.

Willis says losing the plant could create “significant economic disruption”. She warns that any serious interruption to cement supplies could bring construction and infrastructure development to a standstill. The closure of the Marsden Point oil refinery also hangs over the decision. Once an industrial capability has been dismantled, regret does not easily bring it back.

In return for the money, Fletcher has committed to keeping the plant at Portland, near Whangārei, operating until at least 2040 and to investing at least $150m over that period. That investment remains subject to Fletcher’s normal approval processes and a programme still to be agreed with the Government. There will also be open-book monitoring and clawback provisions, and the deal protects about 150 direct jobs as well as a larger number of jobs linked to the operation.

So Willis probably did face a genuine problem. Allowing the country’s last cement plant to close would have been a major decision, and one a future government might deeply regret. But that does not automatically make a $60m grant to Fletcher Building a satisfactory answer.

The Government has chosen the quickest answer

Kate MacNamara puts the nature of the deal plainly in the Herald: “It’s taxpayer money. It’s not a loan. It’s free money.”

She explains that the underlying problem is the Emissions Trading Scheme. Golden Bay Cement pays carbon-related costs that many overseas producers do not. Imported cement can therefore undercut the local product, even when it may have been manufactured with higher emissions overseas. Production moves offshore, New Zealand loses jobs and industrial capability, and global emissions may not fall. This is the problem usually described as “emissions leakage”.

The Government says it considered changing the rules but decided that doing so could undermine the ETS and potentially create much greater costs. It opted instead for a targeted agreement with Fletcher Building. That leaves the climate scheme untouched and keeps the plant operating.

But the problem was hardly unexpected. MacNamara points out that Grant Robertson and David Parker were considering a carbon border adjustment mechanism as far back as 2021, with cement used as an obvious case study. Such a system could impose a carbon-related charge on imports so that domestic companies were not competing against overseas producers facing much weaker environmental rules.

That work went nowhere. A structural problem that has been known about for years is now being addressed through a commercial agreement with one company. Fletcher itself says the issue is a “structural imbalance” in which New Zealand manufacturers face costs that importers largely avoid. It continues to argue for a carbon border adjustment mechanism.

This is why the payment looks more like a temporary fix than a coherent policy. A general problem should normally receive a general answer. Instead, Cabinet has selected one company and negotiated a commercial agreement whose detailed terms have not been published. Perhaps that was unavoidable in the time available, but the Government has dealt with the immediate threat to the plant without resolving the distortion facing other emissions-intensive manufacturers.

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: “The return of corporate welfare”, “Who gets saved?”, and “Public money and private decisions”.

Read more

Nicola Willis has confirmed she is seriously examining structural separation in the supermarket sector, including forcing Foodstuffs to split Pak’nSave and New World into separate businesses.

As reported by Tom Pullar-Strecker in The Post today, the Economic Growth Minister says there could be merit in such a “banner split”, and that officials are working through what it would cost, how it could be implemented and whether it would produce lower prices.

Willis told Pullar-Strecker there was “clear evidence” that the groceries market was not as competitive as those in comparable countries. “The option of a structural separation in which we take interventions to encourage them to compete more strongly with each other ... is one that I have been looking at in detail,” she said.

It is essentially a version of the policy Winston Peters announced in April. Labour has now made clear that it opposes forced banner sales.

Nothing has been decided. No proposal has gone to Cabinet. The cost-benefit work may eventually be used to explain why a split would be too expensive or risky. We have seen plenty of stern warnings to the supermarkets turn into very little.

But this is an important change. Structural separation is no longer just an idea promoted by New Zealand First, the Opportunity Party, consumer advocates and anti-monopoly campaigners. A senior National Party minister is taking it seriously.

The split is back on the table

Officials are considering how a forced restructuring of Foodstuffs would work, what it would cost and whether it would genuinely produce lower prices and more choice. Willis says the cost-benefit analysis is also undergoing external review, and that the results of the work will be released before the end of the parliamentary term.

National will then decide what policy it takes into the election.

Willis is right to be cautious. Forcing a major restructuring of privately owned grocery co-operatives would be an extraordinary intervention, and the consequences could not easily be reversed.

“We would want to have confidence that the end result would be a more competitive industry that would deliver better prices and better options for the New Zealand shopper,” Willis says, “and so it’s not something you go into lightly.”

Yet it is also the option politicians have spent years avoiding because it is difficult.

In March last year, Willis put the supermarkets “on notice” and declared that “all options are on the table”, including structural separation. By August, the emphasis had shifted to making New Zealand more attractive to an overseas entrant: faster consents, easier overseas investment processes and a worldwide hunt for another supermarket company.

Willis acknowledged the limit of that approach at the time: “I can’t force a third entrant in. All I can do is open my arms as wide as possible.”

Despite the invitation, nobody has committed to entering.

Why the red carpet failed

Just over a week ago, David Seymour was in the Beehive announcing that “we are rolling out the red carpet”. The Government was doing everything it could, he said, “short of putting a big sign at Cape Reinga”.

Seymour said the Government had “led a horse to water, but not made them drink just yet”. Aldi and Lidl had declined to participate in the Government’s search for a new entrant, while Willis’s meeting with Tesco had led nowhere. No supermarket company had applied to use the special fast-track process.

Seymour remained hopeful: “Just because something hasn’t succeeded to date doesn’t mean it’s not a good strategy.”

Tom Raynel reported in the Herald last week that officials had drawn up a list of 21 target grocery companies and contacts across ten countries. At least five held meetings or discussions with officials, three declined to engage, and six were contacted with little or no response.

Officials approached Carrefour, Coles and other overseas businesses without getting anywhere. No international supermarket chain has confirmed an intention to enter the New Zealand grocery market.

Willis has now acknowledged the weakness in the strategy. Removing planning and investment barriers may not be enough when a new business would still have to confront two deeply entrenched incumbents.

“What I’d acknowledge is that for anyone thinking about entering the New Zealand supermarket sector right now, what they see is a very powerful duopoly with two major players in the form of Foodstuffs and Woolworths that have significant market power,” she told Pullar-Strecker.

“So it’s a big ask to say ‘let’s come in and compete effectively and not get squashed by those big guys’, and that’s the nub of the issue that I’m exploring.”

Sue Chetwin, Tex Edwards and Consumer NZ have been making versions of this argument for years, often from the margins of the official policy debate. It has taken until election year for a senior minister to put the point so plainly.

Planning barriers are real

Seymour is not wrong that planning rules have protected the incumbents and made entry much harder. Eric Crampton of the New Zealand Initiative (which has supermarkets as members) published new research in The Post this week examining planning rules in Auckland, Hamilton, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin.

His provisional mapping project identified 13 areas that explicitly cap the number of supermarkets. Other areas restrict their total floor space, while applicants can be required to prove that a new store will not damage the “vitality and viability” of an existing commercial centre.

Crampton’s response is characteristically blunt: “If this kind of geographic market segmentation were done by a quiet handshake among the larger retailers, they’d be in court on charges of anticompetitive conduct. But planners can do it with impunity.”

The Government is right to remove such barriers. Councils should not protect existing supermarkets from competition, whether deliberately or through planning rules that assume another store is unnecessary because one already exists.

The new supermarket fast-track processes and changes to overseas investment rules are sensible. But Aldi does not look at New Zealand and see only a complicated district plan or an Overseas Investment Office form.

It sees a small and remote country in which Foodstuffs and Woolworths hold most grocery sales. The two groups have stores in many of the best locations, established distribution systems, strong supplier relationships, popular home brands and large customer databases.

Chetwin made the same point in the Herald last week. The Government’s invitation to international supermarkets sounded sensible, she said, but “if that were the answer, it would have worked by now”.

She argues that easier planning and overseas investment rules leave the central problem untouched: “the power of Woolworths and Foodstuffs, and a market structured around protecting them”.

Foodstuffs presents a very different account. Foodstuffs North Island chief executive Chris Quin told an industry conference last month that the grocery market had “become more competitive”, with competition arriving “from every direction”. He pointed to Costco, ethnic supermarkets, pharmacies, hardware stores and meal-delivery companies.

Quin puts the combined Foodstuffs-Woolworths share at about 77%. The Commerce Commission’s latest annual report puts it at 82%, essentially unchanged over five years.

The difference between those figures needs explaining, but neither describes a healthy market. If competition is coming from every direction, the main supermarket groups are coping with it remarkably well.

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: “Labour returns to wholesale”, “Would a split really work?”, and “An election argument worth having”.

Read more