The Government is reviewing the Official Information Act behind closed doors. Most readers will immediately grasp the irony.

This review of the OIA wasn’t announced. It wasn’t publicised. It came to light because transparency advocate Andrew Ecclestone happened to be told about it, then revealed it to attendees at a parliamentary forum on democracy last month.

Newsroom’s Sam Sachdeva followed up, getting confirmation from Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith that the Ministry of Justice had quietly commissioned consultancy firm TBL to research the cost drivers of OIA responses across 40 public service agencies.

There was no press release. No public consultation. No statement of intent. Instead it’s a review of the law that exists to open government up, conducted in the dark.

This is more than just ironic. It’s also typical of how New Zealand governments — every single one of them — have treated the OIA since it passed in 1982.

But this time the situation is sharper. For decades, the erosion of the OIA was largely a cultural problem: a slow drift toward secrecy driven by bureaucratic incentives and ministerial convenience. What’s changed is that the threat has become explicit and political.

The Government is now openly discussing changing not just how the OIA is administered, but what the legislation covers. Goldsmith’s comments to Newsroom were telling: he’s concerned that under current OIA procedures, “every different little element of communication has been included.” He’s not really talking about admin delays. He’s talking about cutting back what the public gets to see. It’s a signal that the Government may want to narrow what citizens are actually entitled to see.

This is the crossroads. The OIA could be weakened in ways it has never been weakened before, using a manufactured cost narrative as justification.

Or, and this is genuinely possible, the current moment of scrutiny could produce the reform push that the law has needed for years to be improved and updated. There are voices making that case, some of them from unexpected quarters.

Whether that happens now depends on pressure. That’s what this column is for.

The False narrative about costs

The government’s stated rationale for the review of the OIA is a claimed 394% increase in OIA requests since 2016. The number sounds alarming. It shouldn’t be taken at face value.

Ecclestone has gone through this claim in detail. It turns out that the spike is, in large part, a counting artefact. Agencies have been expanding what they classify as an OIA request. Some are now logging insurance company queries about traffic accidents. Others are counting finance companies’ requests to track down debtors. Police have been adding requests from people challenging speeding tickets by seeking speed camera images.

Also, government job cuts mean that departmental experts who once answered informal enquiries off the cuff are no longer employed — or are now required to log those conversations as formal requests.

So, this is not some great democratic wave. A lot of it is just agencies counting differently.

There’s also a more structural explanation. The No Right Turn blog, which has tracked the OIA closely for years, makes the point bluntly: much of the real increase in requests is coming from service delivery agencies — Corrections, ACC, MSD — because the government has become more adversarial. It’s denying benefits, tightening entitlements, cutting services, and so people are using the tools available to them to push back and enforce their rights. Which is exactly how the OIA is supposed to work. Using that as a justification to weaken it is a deeply cynical move.

The Culture problem

Before last week’s news, the sharpest piece on the OIA in recent months was David Harvey’s essay in the Herald in February: “How a transparency law was hollowed out.” Harvey is a former district court judge, and his analysis is damning without being hysterical. The OIA legislation, he argues, is fundamentally sound. The problem is the culture that has grown up around it: strategic delays, political interference, preferential treatment, and the quiet erosion of record-keeping. His closing question was sharp: “If transparency is the law’s default, what is it that they fear?”

The record-keeping point matters more than it first sounds. It’s not just that agencies delay or redact. It’s that officials have, in some cases, been actively discouraged from creating records in the first place.

Health New Zealand has been the most egregious recent offender. The Ombudsman found the agency had been operating practices “contrary to law.” In September, Andrea Vance reported that Health NZ had unlawfully withheld nurse staffing data for a year — data showing 37-40% of hospital shifts were understaffed — while publicly claiming to be over-recruiting nurses.

The PSA’s national secretary Fleur Fitzsimons was pointed about who bore responsibility: “He can’t keep demanding savings and then blame officials when the impacts of cuts are felt.” The minister sets the resourcing. The minister owns the failure. Courts have agreed — in December, the High Court ordered the Corrections chief executive personally to obey the law, raising the prospect of fines or imprisonment for continued non-compliance.

And still, the Government wants to narrow the OIA rather than fix its agencies.

Matthew Hooton observed in 2017, in what has become a kind of dark axiom for OIA watchers, that the trend across governments was clear: “The Muldoon regime administered the OIA well, the Lange government did so only adequately, the Bolger-Shipley government reluctantly, the Clark government disgracefully and the Key-English government abused it shamelessly.” Each new government, he said, was worse than the last. The trendline suggested the worst was always still to come. There’s no reason to think the current government is the exception.

The paywall now starts at halfway through all Democracy Project newsletters. Please take out a paid sub if you want to support this service and access the full content, including the following sections: “Enter AI — for better and worse”; “The Finlayson surprise, and the Allen problem”, “What would actually help”, and “Why this matters in an election year”

Read more

New Zealand has just been ranked one of the happiest countries in the world. This is obviously good news. But there is something badly wrong beneath that glossy headline, especially in terms of loneliness and youth.

The 2026 World Happiness Report, released last month, ranked New Zealand 11th out of 147 countries – up one spot from last year, and the highest-ranked English-speaking nation. On the surface, that sounds pretty good. Better than Australia, better than the United States. Finland, inevitably, came first.

But buried inside the report was the figure that actually matters. For changes in happiness among 15-to-24-year-olds, New Zealand ranked 126th out of 136 countries. Young people’s happiness over the last decade has been plunging. We sit alongside the United States, Australia, and Canada in what researchers have labelled the “NANZ” group: affluent nations where youth happiness is in freefall while older generations report world-leading life satisfaction. In contrast, according to the report, 85 of 136 countries saw youth happiness increase.

AUT wellbeing economist Stephanie Rossouw, a contributor to the report, was blunt about what this means. “This is not a short-term dip,” she told media, “but a sustained decline over more than a decade.” She pointed to social media, especially the algorithmic kind – the doom-scrolling platforms, not the communication tools – but also to something deeper. Nordic countries have social media too. Their young people are not collapsing in the same way.

What the Finns have that we don’t

The difference between Finland and New Zealand, Rossouw argued, is social trust, safety nets, and the strength of social connections. The Finns score far higher than us on all three.

Finns have a deep-seated belief that people will do the right thing, a cultural expectation that reduces the stress of daily life. For example, if you ask a Finn whether they’d get their wallet back if they lost it, they assume yes. And in fact, in Helsinki 11 out of 12 dropped wallets are returned. New Zealanders don’t trust like that anymore.

RNZ ran a piece the same week quoting Finnish philosopher Frank Martela, who offered a useful corrective to the usual happiness discourse. Finland’s secret, he said, is not that Finns are especially joyful. It is that they have fewer people who are deeply unhappy. Universal healthcare, free education, low corruption, and a culture of cooperation create a floor. Nobody falls too far. The result isn’t joy, it’s something more like security.

Rossouw made a similar point in her RNZ Nights interview. Asked why Latin American teenagers report higher life satisfaction than ours despite using social media just as heavily, she pointed to the other variables: worry, sadness, and social connection. New Zealand’s young people carry higher levels of anxiety and lower levels of positive emotion than their Latin American counterparts.

Writing in today’s Post newspaper, Josie Pagani has also dealt with the happiness results. She is right to sneer a bit at the happiness industry. These rankings can be goofy. But the useful part of the report isn’t the ranking itself, it is in the variables that predict the scores: social trust, corruption, safety nets, generosity, the sense that someone would return your lost wallet. New Zealand is slipping on nearly all of them.

Pagani explains also that part of the problem is that experts are no longer very trustworthy for the public. Increasingly, we simply don’t believe what academics, technocrats and officials tell us. This was even part of the pandemic experience, she says: “Experts told us to bump elbows and wash our fruit during Covid. Neither stopped the spread of the airborne virus.”

How cohesion actually works

Danyl McLauchlan’s Listener article this week (“Waning trust, the rise of populism”) is an interview with Sir Peter Gluckman and United Nations development economist Pedro Conceição, and it’s vital for understanding the anxious political state of New Zealand society at the moment.

Conceição’s central finding is stark. Six out of every seven people on the planet now report feeling insecure. People who feel insecure, his data shows, trust others less, drift toward political extremes, and shift their support from competent leaders to dominant ones. A quarter of all countries are now governed by populists – double the previous peak from the 1920s and 1930s – split roughly evenly between left and right.

Gluckman (the former Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor) told McLauchlan that social cohesion is probably the most valuable thing New Zealand has: “New Zealand trades on that cohesion. It’s what allows us to get needed skills coming in by way of migration, it’s why people come here for education, why we get foreign direct investment. We are seen as a stable, cohesive, internally compliant-with-law country.”

According to McLauchlan, “Gluckman recalls growing up in a New Zealand where sporting clubs, schools and church groups routinely brought together people of different ethnicities and economic standing.” This has all changed. We are witnessing a hollowing out of the institutions and social bonds that once made this place function. And the sense of cohesion, Gluckman says, is not “self-repairing”. Instead, the forces eroding it are now accelerating.

Gluckman also tells a story about an acquaintance who moved to a small village in Switzerland, wished to buy a house, and so learnt to play the euphonium. The choice of musical instrument might seem bizarre, but the friend explained to Gluckman the logic: “Because by joining the village band, I become part of the community. And the community will now support me to buy a house. Which they have to vote to give permission to do.”

The point is that cohesion is built through shared institutions and repeated contact across social boundaries. Robert Putnam made the argument two decades ago in his book, “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community”. This is a landmark account of how “third spaces”, where strangers become neighbours, were collapsing across the Western world. Conceição cited Putnam directly in his conversation with McLauchlan.

The digital world has replaced many of these spaces, but what replaced them doesn’t work the same way. It polarises, McLauchlan says. Gluckman put it plainly: “The digital world pulls people apart.”

The Vanishing clubroom

This is not abstract in New Zealand. It is actually quite measurable.

Sport club volunteering has dropped 45% since 2019. Under the new Incorporated Societies Act, thousands of community organisations faced a deadline this month to re-register or be dissolved. As of January, fewer than half had done so. More than 200 have already been wound up. The amateur sport sector has called it a potential “extinction event.”

Church attendance has declined from roughly 20% of the population in the 1960s to about 10% now. By 2033, more New Zealanders will live alone than with another person. In towns like Waiouru, six rugby teams have become none. Golf clubs survive on a dozen members. The volunteering that remains is increasingly casual – a few hours here and there rather than the sustained commitments that once created community.

These are the places where people used to encounter each other. It wasn’t a big deal, yet it also had a big impact.

David Farrar, the National Party pollster, told McLauchlan in his earlier Listener piece on voter tribes that people used to describe themselves as “a National voter” or “a Labour voter” – husbands and wives voted the same way. None of that holds any more. The institutions that once gave voters a shared understanding of politics – newspapers, churches, unions – are weaker than they were, he said. The media market has not just moved elsewhere. It has contracted.

Without these shared spaces, the only common ground left is online. And online, as Gluckman says, people fragment. McLauchlan adds that: echo chambers work like civic associations turned inside out: they give you a tribe, but only by giving you an enemy.
The paywall now starts at halfway through all Democracy Project newsletters. Please take out a paid sub if you want to support this service and access the full content, including the following sections: “Mental health and loneliness”; “Voters who have stopped showing up”; “The Political question”; “Bowling alone in NZ”

Read more

Yesterday I wrote my own analysis of Christopher Luxon’s Cabinet reshuffle, arguing it was fundamentally about a Prime Minister punishing his rival and rewarding his loyalists. Today I want to go through what the political editors are actually saying about it, because on several points, the verdicts line up.

How the reshuffle was rushed into existence

Thomas Coughlan’s analysis in the Herald is the most revealing account of how the reshuffle actually came about. His key finding: it wasn’t supposed to happen this week.

As of Monday, there was no plan to reshuffle Cabinet on Thursday. Luxon had been teasing it since January, but it appears something changed between Monday and Tuesday. Coughlan reports that a mysterious Sunday night meeting of Luxon loyalists – Mark Mitchell, Paul Goldsmith and Simon Watts – may have been the catalyst. This was separate from an earlier, routine “kitchen Cabinet” meeting attended by Erica Stanford and, via Zoom, Nicola Willis.

The second meeting “got tongues wagging,” Coughlan writes, and the allegation doing the rounds is that Mitchell, Goldsmith and Watts confronted Luxon with news he was losing support in caucus and needed to act fast.

The contents of that meeting remain unconfirmed. But Luxon turned up to caucus on Tuesday and announced the reshuffle was happening. National Party president Sylvia Wood was spotted back in Wellington on Wednesday (unusual for a non-Tuesday). And on Wednesday night, as the caucus ate KFC in Parliament at 9pm, many MPs were still in the dark about their fates or even when the reshuffle would be announced.

This explains the chaotic feel of the whole thing. Jenna Lynch in Stuff confirmed this picture from her end. She reported that the Prime Minister’s own staff were scrambling and did not know what time the press conference would take place until about two hours before it happened. Staff on events-based contracts were left dangling over the Easter break, not knowing if they still had jobs.

The Cricket tickets line

Then there was the cricket line. When asked about stripping Chris Bishop of the Associate Sport portfolio, Luxon replied: “Yeah, didn’t think we needed it. Chris Bishop will be able to get cricket tickets, it’ll be alright.”

Lynch’s response was blunt: “Ouch. Pretty dismissive.” She noted it drove home the souring of the relationship between the two Chrises.

Luke Malpass at the Post opened his entire piece with the cricket tickets line, letting it hang there as the defining image of the press conference. The fact that Luxon didn’t just remove the portfolio from Bishop but abolished it altogether is, as Coughlan observed, a move “seems designed to take something off Bishop rather than anything else.” Coughlan also noted the irony: Bishop’s last cricket trip was to India on a sports diplomacy mission to shore up New Zealand’s reputation as Luxon pursues a free trade agreement. Not exactly troughing.

Hell hath no fury like a Luxon scorned

Lynch’s headline said it all: “It seems hell hath no fury like a Luxon scorned.” Luxon, she wrote, had chosen to “take a strike at Chris Bishop’s political heart.” Not by stripping away the big public-facing portfolios, but by removing the internal levers of influence: campaign chair and Leader of the House. Bishop still has the policy workload. What he’s lost is the power.

Nobody believes the workload excuse

Luxon’s stated rationale – that Bishop was too busy and needed to shed responsibilities – is technically true. Bishop carries housing, transport, infrastructure and RMA reform. He is genuinely one of the busiest ministers in Cabinet.

But the argument collapses the moment you look at who got the campaign chair job. Simeon Brown is already Health Minister. He has now also been handed the Energy portfolio, right in the middle of a fuel crisis. Lynch asked the obvious question: how can Brown plausibly be presented as the more available option? Sam Sachdeva at Newsroom reached the same conclusion. So did Tom Day at 1News. So did pretty much everyone in the gallery.

Coughlan captured Luxon’s stumbling defence perfectly. When pressed on why Brown was less busy than Bishop, Luxon replied: “Uh, no, they’re all busy … I get the questions guys, all I’ve done is given Attorney-General to Chris Bishop and I’ve taken away campaign chair and Leader of the House.”

That’s not a rationale. That’s a description of what he did, minus the reason.

Jo Moir at RNZ was equally direct. When RNZ asked Luxon who was busier – Bishop or Brown – the Prime Minister’s “workload rationale crumbled when he declared they were both busy.” Her verdict: “It’s a nonsense to say Brown has more time for campaign chair.”

Moir, to her credit, acknowledged the political reality Luxon can’t say out loud: “Luxon is hardly going to say he’s moving Bishop aside because he’s sceptical of how supportive the Hutt South MP is of his leadership.”

A Fidgety and grumpily exasperated Prime Minister

Malpass’s description of Luxon at the press conference is worth dwelling on. He described the Prime Minister as “fidgety and grumpily exasperated” as he repeatedly batted away questions about whether Bishop was being punished. “Guys, you’re overthinking it,” Luxon kept insisting, in what became a refrain. At one point, asked why the reshuffle was happening the day before Good Friday, he could be heard to say “Oh yeah, this is funny” before recovering.

The paywall now starts at halfway through all Democracy Project newsletters. Please take out a paid sub if you want to access the full content and support this service. The second half of the column deals with: “The Campaign chair debate”, “Bishop stripped of power but not policy”, “Butterick, rural politics and the battle for the regions”, “Diversity and representation”, and “Does any of this settle the leadership question?”

Read more

Christopher Luxon has announced his election-year Cabinet reshuffle. Chris Penk and Penny Simmonds enter Cabinet. Cameron Brewer and Mike Butterick become ministers outside Cabinet. Simeon Brown picks up energy. Paul Goldsmith gets the public service. Louise Upston becomes Leader of the House. The details matter. But the real story is what happened to Chris Bishop.

Bishop has been stripped of three roles: Leader of the House, associate sport, and most significantly, his position as chair of National’s election campaign. In return, he picks up the Attorney-General portfolio. On paper, you might call that a lateral move. In practice, it is a demotion dressed up as a promotion.

The pre-reshuffle commentary from the press gallery had been remarkably united on one point: the reshuffle would tell us more about Luxon’s leadership than about his ministers. They were right. The reshuffle says less about renewal than about insecurity.

What the insiders were saying

Before we get to what happened, it is worth dwelling on what was being said in the days leading up to the announcement. Because the pre-reshuffle commentary functioned as an extraordinary insider audit of National’s caucus: who is up, who is down, who is trusted and who is feared. Political journalists and well-connected insiders laid out their assessments of each minister. The picture they painted was of a Government and a Prime Minister in deep trouble.

Thomas Coughlan, writing in the Herald today, captured the shambolic feel of it all. The reshuffle had been talked about since January, he wrote, but “appears hastily arranged. As of last night, no one knows what time Luxon will unveil it, or how.” MPs who were directly affected had still not been told their fates on last night. When National’s caucus gathered for dinner (at KFC, apparently), Coughlan reported, “most were completely unaware of what awaits them today.”

This is supposed to be the Prime Minister who prides himself on people management. The former CEO of Air New Zealand, the man who talks constantly about putting his “aces in their places.” And yet his own MPs were eating in the dark, hours before the biggest personnel decision of election year.

Coughlan framed the stakes clearly: “For Luxon, whose leadership is currently under pressure, the reshuffle has the added complication of needing to draw a line under caucus instability.” Whether the actual reshuffle achieves that is debatable.

What happened to Bishop

Much of the pre-reshuffle commentary centred on whether Luxon would use the reshuffle to clip Bishop’s wings. The answer is now clear: he has.

Bishop was already carrying half the Beehive on his back: housing, transport, infrastructure, RMA reform, Leader of the House, and National’s campaign machine. Most important of all was the campaign chair role. That is not decorative, it is where internal power sits.

The campaign chair controls the machinery of the election effort: strategy, messaging, candidate selection support, resource allocation. Bishop chaired the successful 2023 campaign. Removing him from that position seven months before the next election is a dramatic act. It’s also quite odd to have an partisan electioneering role dealt with in a ministerial reshuffle – but this just reflects that contemporary politicians regard governing and campaigning as indistinct.

Coughlan had warned this demotion was coming. “With Bishop said to be behind last year’s embryonic coup,” he wrote, “Luxon may choose to make an example of him. The question then isn’t so much whether Bishop will lose a portfolio, but which ones.” Henry Cooke, writing in The Post today, reported that last night “one source close to the party suggested that the reshuffle might have angered senior Minister Chris Bishop.” The Post asked Bishop about the claim “and did not receive a response.”

Now we know. Bishop has not just lost portfolios – he has been removed from the two roles that gave him the most internal party power. Leader of the House controls the Government’s legislative programme. Campaign chair controls the election machine. Both have gone to Luxon loyalists: Louise Upston gets Leader of the House, Simeon Brown gets campaign chair.

Cooke had speculated that it could be housing that Bishop lost, noting that he “has stood apart from his party in openly calling for house prices to fall and his desire to allow far greater density in Auckland has been repeatedly cut down by his Cabinet colleagues.” In the event, Luxon left Bishop’s policy portfolios intact and instead stripped him of his structural power within the party. That is arguably a much more pointed punishment.

In Audrey Young’s half-term Cabinet report card last year, Bishop scored 9 out of 10 – one of only three ministers at that level. She described him as “a superman in terms of workload and achievement” who was “working through his agenda with great efficiency.” The Herald’s Mood of the Boardroom survey rated him as one of the Government’s top performers. He remains, by any serious measure, National’s most effective minister. And he has just been publicly cut down to size by a Prime Minister who looks more interested in containing Bishop than empowering him.

The consolation prize is Attorney-General. Audrey Young had actually recommended this in her column, noting that Bishop has a law degree and “the intellect to win respect in the role quickly.” But she also recognised that he could not take it on without shedding workload. Luxon has made that trade for him, but not kindly.

Simeon Brown: the new enforcer

The elevation of Simeon Brown to campaign chair is striking. Brown already held Health and SOEs. Now he adds Energy, taken from Simon Watts, with Luxon justifying the move by saying “the past few weeks have underlined how important energy security is.” Brown also picks up the campaign machinery.

Luxon is plainly betting on Brown. Brown scored 8 out of 10 in Young’s report card. She wrote that he had “made such light work of challenges in previous portfolios” that he was “the obvious choice to take on the hardest job in the cabinet.” He is widely regarded as Luxon’s most loyal senior minister. Giving him the campaign chair puts the election effort in the hands of someone the Prime Minister controls, rather than someone who might use the role to build an independent power base.

Whether Brown can actually run a winning campaign while simultaneously managing Health and Energy during a fuel crisis is a big question. It’s a colossal workload.

The paywall now starts at halfway through all Democracy Project newsletters. Please take out a paid sub if you want to access the full content and support this service. The second half of the column deals with: The Winners and the survivors; Why Meager missed out; The Polls behind the panic; The Leadership question that will not go away; The Staffing cost and the political risk; The Report card context; What it all means, and links to Further Reading.

Read more

The bill to ban greyhound racing is entering the final stages of debate in Parliament this week. It should pass tomorrow with broad support once some of the contested details are ironed out.

The ban may be a good thing. But it is also a useful moment to look harder at the gambling and racing world behind it, because some very big questions about power, money and political influence have gone largely untouched in New Zealand.

I’m not a gambling specialist. But the more I’ve looked at this world over the last few weeks, and the more people I’ve spoken to, the less comfortable I’ve become. There is a lot going on here that has escaped serious political scrutiny. This is my first attempt to map some of it. And if readers know more, I’d genuinely like to hear from them.

The billion-dollar handover

The starting point is this: the Entain gambling company has promised about $1 billion to the New Zealand racing industry. Entain is a global gambling giant headquartered in the Isle of Man and listed on the London Stock Exchange. And in 2023 it was handed a 25-year monopoly over TAB NZ’s betting operations in exchange for the $1 billion.

The 2023 deal between the TAB and Entain was approved by Labour’s Racing Minister Kieran McAnulty (who had previously worked in the gambling industry before going into politics). It gave Entain day-to-day control of the entire TAB betting and broadcasting operation, with profits split 50-50.

There was also a sweetener: an extra $100 million, payable only if Parliament legislated to ban offshore competitors and hand Entain a true online monopoly on sports and racing betting. That legislation (“the Racing Industry Amendment Bill”) was duly passed in 2025, under the current government.

As Fox Meyer reported in Newsroom last week, Entain is now eyeing the next frontier. The company’s Australia and New Zealand chief executive, Andrew Vouris, has confirmed Entain intends to apply for three of the 15 new online casino licences being offered under Brooke van Velden’s Online Casino Gambling Bill. If successful, Entain would be the only operator in New Zealand able to offer bets on sports, racing, and casinos, and advertise across all three. Vouris called the opportunity “massive.”

So, a single foreign corporation could soon dominate virtually every legal form of online gambling in New Zealand. That is an astonishing amount of market power to hand over.

“Reinforcing loops of decay” in the racing industry

Today in the NBR, journalist Tim Hunter’s report on the racing industry adds an important new dimension. Hunter has obtained a TAB New Zealand Racing Advisory Committee report which reveals the racing industry is caught in what it calls “reinforcing loops of decay.”

The structural deficit is more than $50 million a year. Hunter reports that without reform, key racing codes face exhausting their reserves around the time Entain’s guaranteed funding ends.

That’s a remarkable admission. The very deal that was sold to the public as the industry’s salvation is, on the advisory committee’s own analysis, merely delaying the reckoning. Now Sir Peter Vela’s committee is back asking for tax breaks on horses, permission for TAB NZ to offer online casinos and in-race betting, and shifting the cost of the Racing Integrity Board to the government.

Having been given a monopoly, and having received more than a billion dollars in guaranteed support, the racing industry is back asking for more. The committee’s proposed solutions read like the usual corporate welfare script: tax breaks, and a plea for the public to pick up even more of the tab. A spokesperson for Racing Minister Winston Peters told NBR the minister had not requested the report. Meanwhile, TAB NZ reported net losses of $38.6 million in 2025 and $42.4 million in 2024.

Who actually benefits from this arrangement?

Racing’s special treatment

The academic case is pretty damning too. In February, Lisa Marriott and Max Rashbrooke laid it out bluntly in The Conversation, with an article titled “Racing enjoys special treatment under NZ gambling laws. Why?” Their findings are stark.

The racing industry is the only sector with a specific provision in the Gambling Act allowing it to return gambling proceeds to its own industry. Lotto must redistribute all profits to the community. Casinos and pokie trusts face their own levies and distribution requirements. But racing? Racing gets to keep the money.

The numbers bear this out. In 2024, total distributions of racing and sports betting profits were approximately $199 million, of which $195 million (98%) went to racing. Community sports organisations received $3.5 million – only 2%.

And the tax privileges are extraordinary. A 4% totalisator duty on betting was progressively removed, reaching zero in 2021. This saved the racing sector $11.5 million a year. That’s foregone government revenue, handed directly to an industry that causes measurable social harm. As Marriott and Rashbrooke argue, state support for racing tends to mean more gambling on racing, and more gambling means more harm.

None of this has received anything like the political attention it warrants.

The Entain problem

Then there is the matter of Entain’s own track record. Fox Meyer’s Newsroom piece last week spells it out clearly: the Australian financial crimes regulator AUSTRAC has commenced civil penalty proceedings against Entain. AUSTRAC, as Meyer reports, alleges “serious and systemic non-compliance” with anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing laws over six years.

AUSTRAC alleges Entain accepted over A$150 million worth of wagers from 17 individuals with “suspected criminal profiles and associations” whose identities were deliberately obscured. Entain has set aside A$100 million in preparation for penalties. A court date is tentatively set for November 2026.

That timing matters. As Meyer notes, the hearing would come just weeks after the NZ Government makes final decisions on whether Entain will receive online casino licences.

There are other examples of Entain’s integrity failures. In 2022 the UK Gambling Commission fined Entain £17 million for failures in safer gambling and anti-money laundering within its Ladbrokes brand. In 2023 an Australian state regulator fined the company after it solicited a heavy gambler who then opened an account under a false name.

And yet it was handed the monopoly. The Department of Internal Affairs flagged the risk in a memo to Peters. As reported by RNZ, officials warned that the arrangement could create a perception that a foreign corporation was being handed a monopoly at the expense of domestic returns.

The contract itself remains secret. TAB NZ has refused to release the full details under the Official Information Act. The Post has been trying to prise it out through the OIA since July 2023. Nearly three years later, the public still cannot see the deal that handed a foreign company control of New Zealand’s betting system for 25 years.

Winston Peters and the racing industry conflict question

You can’t write about racing industry politics without writing about Winston Peters. He has been Minister of Racing across three separate governments: 2005–2008, 2017–2020, and now the current term. The pattern is hard to miss. Racing figures back NZ First. Peters backs racing.

The paywall now starts at halfway through all Democracy Project newsletters. Please take out a paid sub if you want to access the full content and support this service.

Read more

The Fisheries Amendment Bill has its first reading in Parliament this afternoon. It arrives after an embarrassing backdown over undersized fish, with Winston Peters and Christopher Luxon both scrambling to claim credit for forcing Shane Jones to retreat. But the real story is not the clause that was dumped. It is the rest of the legislation.

This is not just a messy fisheries bill. It is a bill that would hide camera footage from the public, make court challenges harder, normalise dumping fish at sea, and let catch settings run for years with less public scrutiny. And it is being fronted by a minister whose relationship with the fishing industry has long raised obvious questions.

The Government sells the bill as being about streamlining and “common sense”. But it’s deregulation dressed up as tweaks, fitting the Government’s pattern in other sectors, from mining to fast-track consents. Many of the changes sound technocratic and boring. But technical changes are where the biggest shifts in power hide, giving the fishing industry more power.

If any of that strikes you as concerning, read on. This is one of those policy fights that tells you a lot about how power works in New Zealand: quietly, technically, and usually in favour of those already at the table.

The U-turn that wasn’t enough

Last week’s drama centred on a clause buried deep in the bill that would have scrapped minimum size limits for commercial fishers, effectively allowing them to catch and sell baby snapper, tarakihi, and trevally. The clause was only discovered when volunteers from the recreational fishing advocacy group LegaSea read the draft legislation line by line after it was released with almost no notice.

The backlash was immediate. Matt Watson went hard, accusing Jones of writing rules for his mates in the commercial industry. Recreational fishers swarmed MPs online. Environmental groups joined in. Within days, what had looked like a technical amendment had become politically radioactive.

Jones was defiant, until he wasn’t. As recently as the Monday before the backdown, he was entirely unapologetic, dismissing critics as just “noisy voices.” He called Watson a small-tailed fish – “reflective of the biology of the person you’re referring to” – before walking off stage.

Within days, however he was talking about democracy in action, and on Wednesday he folded. Just like that. But the scramble for credit for his U-turn was something to behold. Winston Peters posted to social media claiming he had spoken to Jones and “decided to review this part of the legislation.” Nine minutes later, Christopher Luxon posted his own statement claiming he had spoken to Jones that morning and secured the removal. Act’s Cameron Luxton weighed in too: “Fishers spoke up, Act listened.”

Jones insisted only one person could instruct “the matua” and that was “the rangatira Winston.” Peters told Stuff that Luxon had “absolutely nothing” to do with it. Luxon said the important thing was the Government had “got rid of the most egregious” part of the bill. He then let slip something revealing: the size-limit changes were “not made clear as part of the cabinet process.”

That is quite something: the Prime Minister appearing to suggest he did not fully grasp what was in legislation that had gone through his own Cabinet. Either that process was remarkably sloppy, or Luxon is now trying to distance himself from a political embarrassment.

The Herald published an editorial correctly pointing out that it was public pressure, not internal politics, that forced the U-turn. The newspaper credited LegaSea’s Sam Woolford and Matt Watson, and acknowledged its own front-page splash had helped detonate the controversy. The Spinoff’s Hayden Donnell captured the absurdity, noting that the only ones not claiming credit were “Jones himself, the fishing industry and large fishes.” RNZ’s Jo Moir added that “Santa Claus seemed to be the only person not claiming to have put a stop to this controversial change.”

What makes this episode politically revealing is not just the policy itself. It is the way the Government handled it: the lack of scrutiny up front, the public squabbling afterwards, and the obvious attempt to treat one retreat as proof that the wider bill is fine.

What’s still in the bill

The size-limit clause was clickbait last week. That’s how LegaSea’s Sam Woolford put it. The real danger is everything elsewhere in the bill.

Start with the cameras. Since onboard cameras were installed on fishing vessels, reported fish discards increased by 46% and albatross bycatch incidents rose 3.5-fold compared to what crews had been self-reporting. Cameras proved the industry had been massively underreporting waste and wildlife kills.

The industry’s response? Not to clean up its act, but to lobby for less transparency. And Jones delivered. The bill would exempt fishing boat camera footage from the Official Information Act, meaning the public and journalists can no longer obtain videos of what happens at sea. It would even impose a $50,000 fine on anyone who publishes such footage.

As Greenpeace’s Elijah Hooper put it: “A transparent industry that boasts their world-leading fisheries management wouldn’t need these cover ups. It just looks like they’re trying to hide the plain facts of their activities, from hauling up coral to killing fur seals and dolphins as bycatch.”

Then there’s the restriction on judicial review. Environmental groups like Forest & Bird and the Environmental Law Initiative have won important court cases in recent years forcing ministers to rebuild overfished stocks and comply with sustainability requirements. In the tarakihi case, the Supreme Court confirmed that when a stock is overfished, the law requires rebuilding it based on biology, not economics. Jones’ response to being found wrong in court isn’t to correct course, it’s to limit the courts’ ability to say so.

He’s proposing strict time limits on challenges and narrowing the grounds on which decisions can be contested. The window for appealing fisheries decisions would shrink from several months to just 20 days. Matt Watson has pointed out that OIA responses routinely take longer than that, meaning opponents couldn’t even gather evidence before their time ran out.

Jones frames this as stopping “vexatious, protracted litigation that glugs the system up.” He wants to ensure that “an ecosystem-based approach doesn’t become an ideological weapon to wipe out commerce.” Watson’s response: “That’s not democracy.”

The bill would also legalise the discarding of unwanted fish at sea and give quota owners the right to carry forward increased amounts of uncaught catch into another fishing year. Fisheries scientists warn legalising discards will mask the true scale of fish mortality and incentivise high-grading – keeping only the best fish, tossing the rest. Forest & Bird was blunt: “It’s as if the Minister has looked through all the good things in the Act and wiped them out entirely.”

All of the above raises the obvious question: Why is Jones so determined to push through changes that overwhelmingly advantage the commercial sector?

Follow the money

All of the above raises the obvious question: Why is Jones so determined to push through changes that overwhelmingly advantage the commercial sector? To answer this, the money trail is worth examining.

The paywall now starts at halfway through all Democracy Project newsletters. Please take out a paid sub if you want to access the full content and support this service.

Read more

Arguments about the current energy crisis have shifted. It is no longer just about what ministers are doing now. It is also about what they chose not to do when they had the chance.

This morning brought the clearest accountability journalism to this debate. Kate MacNamara in the Herald and Edward Miller in The Post both zero in on the same issue: New Zealand was left more exposed than it needed to be, and ministers were warned about the country’s lack of fuel reserves.

The Diesel reserve we scrapped

Kate MacNamara’s Herald investigation published in the Herald today lays out the timeline with forensic insight. After Marsden Point’s refinery closed in 2022, the Labour Cabinet agreed that a 21-day minimum diesel stockholding was not enough. They committed to a government-contracted public reserve of an additional seven days. That’s 70 million litres of diesel to be stored in the old crude tanks at Marsden Point. MBIE issued a request for proposals in late 2023. The plan was to have fuel in the tanks by early 2025.

It never happened. First, Labour left the capital costs (in the region of $100 million) unfunded. And while the incoming coalition made plenty of noise about fuel security, Associate Energy Minister Shane Jones then killed off the plan in a July 2024 Cabinet Paper.

His reasoning was laid bare in the document: “Procuring reserve diesel is expensive. At current prices, 70 million litres would cost $84 million. As the current fiscal environment constrains our ability for new capital investment, I seek your agreement to stop work on securing tank storage and purchasing diesel through this arrangement.”

The paper acknowledged the consequences plainly: “This will prolong our vulnerability to a diesel supply disruption until potentially 2028 but this is unavoidable without committed funding.”

That $84 million figure — roughly $1.20 a litre stripped of taxes and levies — has been, as MacNamara puts it, “thoroughly flattered” by a Middle East war that has doubled the price. The price tag that ministers balked at last year now looks cheap. And now the country is scrambling without the reserve it rejected.

After axing the plan, MacNamara explains that Jones commissioned fresh consultants (Castalia and Enerlytica) who duly reached the same conclusion their predecessors had: diesel would likely run short in a 90-day disruption. The Government’s response was to push the obligation onto fuel companies, requiring them to build reserves to 28 days. The deadline? July 2028. That pushed the problem onto industry but gave them a major extension of time.

MacNamara’s summary is withering: “For years, New Zealand’s diesel dilemma has been whether to pay for extra stockholdings for use in the case of emergencies or risk it. So far, we’ve been risking it.”

Edward Miller’s companion piece in The Post today is the insider’s version of the same story. Miller fought from the union movement side to keep Marsden Point’s refining capacity operational, and his account of the decisions that followed its closure carries particular weight.

He notes that MBIE itself verified that the refinery could have been retained as emergency resilience capacity: producing fuel inefficiently but indefinitely in a worst case, enough to keep ambulances and food trucks running. The owner of Marsden Point is Channel Infrastructure, and its CEO Rob Buchanan told Newstalk ZB last week that two recommissioned crude tanks at Marsden Point — holding some 90 million litres — could be ready in two to three months. Jones had this option available. Miller points out that he did not take it.

Miller’s verdict is blunter still: “You can’t call the insurance company after you’ve crashed your car and request a policy. Your best bet might then be to blame the other driver, which may help explain why Jones has been particularly vocal of late on the question of who is responsible for our precarious fuel security position.”

Miller’s retrospective account of the diesel reserve decision is damning in the same way MacNamara’s is, but sharper: “Having been told that increased diesel storage was the cheapest option to safeguard resilience, Jones’ failure to pursue that option in the last year has left us dangerously exposed.”

Labour bears plenty of blame. It let the refinery close and didn’t properly fund the reserve plan. But the decision to actually kill the reserve, in writing, sits with this Government.. Jones is now hinting at using regional development funds to buy the very diesel storage he scrapped eighteen months ago.

What if the forecasts are wrong?

Richard Harman’s Politik column today explains that the Government is quietly preparing to access 40 days’ worth of emergency fuel stocks held in the UK, the US and Japan under International Energy Agency agreements. Jones confirmed it at Friday’s briefing: “The Minister of Finance and I are taking advice from the officials as to the most efficient and effective way to use those options to bolster a buffer for New Zealand.”

Harman points out that the fact that this is being discussed tells you something the public messaging doesn’t: the Government believes this crisis will last months, not weeks. And there is a logistical problem nobody has solved: Marsden Point has storage capacity for only about a week’s use of any procured IEA reserves. One option being floated is chartering a tanker and mooring it at the port as floating storage. The fact ministers may need to park a tanker off Marsden Point because there isn’t enough onshore storage tells you how badly basic resilience planning has failed.

Harman’s sharpest insight concerns the data. The entire crisis management apparatus rests on forecast data supplied by the fuel companies themselves. At Friday’s briefing, Jones was careful to note: “The fuel companies have not once confirmed with us that they believe that they’re going to suffer any supply problems.” But the Government is simultaneously preparing for the possibility that those forecasts prove wrong. You can’t simultaneously assure the public nothing will go wrong while chartering floating storage tankers for when it does. That contradiction is getting bigger.

Nathan Surendran, an energy systems engineer writing on Substack, makes the most pointed version of this argument. The Government published six triggers for moving from Phase 1 to Phase 2 of its fuel plan. The first is export restrictions imposed by countries whose refineries supply New Zealand. South Korea imposed mandatory export caps on 13 March, and China banned fuel exports entirely. Thailand followed by banning most refined product exports. By the Government’s own published criteria, the trigger for Phase 2 was crossed weeks ago. Surendran’s contrast is sharp: New Zealand launched an EECA advertising campaign urging people to carpool, while every country in our supply chain declared some form of emergency.

Meanwhile, the Government’s billion-dollar LNG terminal is its signature answer to the electricity dry-year problem is starting to look dead on arrival. Energy Minister Simon Watts said in February that Cabinet had made “a definitive decision to build.”

Beehive sources now say the economics have “fundamentally changed” with LNG prices more than doubling since the war began, and ministers are privately considering walking away. The terminal was designed on the assumption of cheap Qatari gas. Qatar’s Ras Laffan facility, which is the source of a fifth of the world’s LNG, has been hit in strikes and may be partly offline for three to five years. In other words, ministers backed an electricity-security fix that depended on a global gas market now in chaos.

Who’s actually leading?

Luxon’s absence has become part of the story now. That is not just media froth. It matters. A Prime Minister doesn’t get to vanish into the background while his Finance Minister becomes the public face of a national fuel emergency.

The paywall now starts at halfway through all Democracy Project newsletters. Please take out a paid sub if you want to access the full content and support this service.

Read more

A year ago, breaking up the electricity gentailers was protest-chant politics. Consumer advocates pushed it. So did some unions and the odd contrarian academic. It sounded too “radical”, too “anti-market”, too likely to be swatted away with the ritual phrase “investor confidence”.

Over the past week, the proposal to break up New Zealand’s gentailers — splitting the big four power companies into separate generators and retailers — has gone from fringe idea to something approaching a national conversation. And the people driving it aren’t leftwing agitators or fringe populists. They include the founder of Xero, the former leader of the National Party, the managing director of New Zealand’s largest KiwiSaver provider, and the chief operating officer of an independent power company.

That’s the story this week. Not the policy itself — I wrote about that when Peters announced it last Sunday — but the strange new coalition forming around it. And what it tells us about the growing chasm between the political establishment and everyone else.

The Telecom moment, again

The comparison everyone reaches for is Telecom. In 2006, the Government forced the separation of Telecom’s network infrastructure (Chorus) from its retail business (Spark). The same objections were made then: too disruptive, would chill investment, uncertain outcomes. It happened anyway. Broadband improved.

Peters and Shane Jones have both been invoking this comparison since February. Peters told RNZ that the current electricity system was set up 28 years ago, there was always a proviso that prices would be regulated if they failed to plateau, and that proviso was never used. “New Zealanders are being screwed,” he said.

NZ First has also quietly published an actual policy paper. Titled “Fixing a Rigged Game: A New Electricity Era for New Zealanders and New Zealand Businesses,” it runs to 18 pages. No media outlet has reported on it, but the paper is worth reading. It goes well beyond stump-speech rhetoric. See the file here:

Fixing A Rigged Game - NZ First policy paper

4.52MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

One figure stands out: in the decade to 2023, the gentailers paid total dividends of $10.7 billion — including excess dividends of $4.2 billion — while investment on plant, property and equipment came to only $4.5 billion. For every dollar invested in actual infrastructure, $2.41 went to shareholders. The paper calls this the predictable result of a system that rewards scarcity and punishes supply. It also deploys a phrase that deserves wider use: the electricity sector, it claims, has relied on “weaponised complexity” to stagnate any reform process. If the jargon is thick enough, the theory goes, the public gives up.

It also raises the solar buyback issue, which hasn’t attracted nearly enough attention. Peters noted that households wanting to feed excess solar power back into the grid are “just being ripped off” on buy-back rates. The paper backs mandated net metering in which households pay the same rate for exported power as they pay when they buy. This single change, the document argues, could mobilise mortgage capital into rooftop solar at scale.

Whether the detail survives scrutiny is another question. But the document exists, and that counts for something. When I wrote last week that the energy policy came without a credible implementation plan, NZ First has at least tried to fill the gap. The other parties should be held to the same standard.

Danyl McLauchlan’s diagnosis

The sharpest analysis of what’s happening here comes from Danyl McLauchlan in this weekend’s Listener, in a piece called “Fuel for a Crisis.” It deserves reading.

McLauchlan sets the scene: Fitch has revised New Zealand’s credit outlook to negative. GDP per capita continues to slump. The country has borrowed its way through four once-in-a-generation shocks in 18 years and the room to do it again is running out. Against that backdrop, Peters picks up what McLauchlan describes as “the most dumbfoundingly obvious cost-of-living policy during an energy crisis because none of the other parties seem to notice it lying there.”

His framing for why it happened, and why none of the other parties got there first, is cutting. Napoleon, McLauchlan writes, apocryphally said he simply found the crown of France in the gutter and picked it up. Peters has done something similar. There was even, McLauchlan notes, “a hint of bafflement to his announcement. Why don’t his political rivals do any politics?” It’s actually a devastating question.

McLauchlan’s explanatory framework in the Listener is the concept of the “Stakeholder State,” which he borrows from Paul Ovenden, Keir Starmer’s former head of political strategy. Ovenden described it as “the gradual but decisive shift of politics and power away from voters and towards groups with the time, money and institutional access to make themselves too important to ignore.” Ovenden described Westminster as captured by “a complex coalition of campaign groups, regulators, litigators, trade bodies and well-networked organisations.”

McLauchlan’s observation is simple: “This is a perfect description of Wellington.”

He then lands a detail that deserves far more attention than it has received. Christopher Luxon’s chief of staff is the former chief executive of the Electricity Retailers and Generators Association, which is the industry’s own lobbying group. That is not a conflict of interest you can hand-wave away.

McLauchlan’s verdict on the two major parties is bleak. National and Labour have spent a decade “flailing about for energy policies — any energy policies! — that could protect the electricity cartel.” He lists them: pumped hydro at Lake Onslow, an LNG terminal in Taranaki, a polite letter from Nicola Willis to the gentailers suggesting they might like to build more supply. McLauchlan imagines the gentailer executives in their boardroom, shaking with laughter, commanding an underling to read the letter aloud one more time.

His conclusion is devastating. The implicit pitch from both Labour and National is managed decline. Hipkins might accelerate it with more borrowing. Luxon offers a slower, more cautious collapse.

When the Business Establishment breaks ranks

Here’s what makes this political moment genuinely strange.

Rod Drury — Xero founder, recently crowned New Zealander of the Year — published a detailed LinkedIn paper on structural separation this week. Drury has been pushing this for some time, but the NZ First move prompted him to lay it out formally.

Drury’s argument isn’t mostly about bills. It’s bigger. Strategic opportunity. He thinks New Zealand’s electricity market is failing to deliver affordable, competitive, renewable energy, and that structural separation would unlock something: real competition, lower costs, innovation, faster decarbonisation.

He envisions a National Electricity Infrastructure Company, which would be something like Chorus but for generation, attracting capital from global super funds, mandated to overbuild toward 100% renewable electricity. The goal, in his framing, is “the lowest cost renewable energy in the world.” He even suggests New Zealand could become an exporter of clean energy to offshore AI data centres. “There hasn’t been much excitement for New Zealand voters for a decade,” Drury wrote. “Perhaps the vision of Lowest Cost Renewable Energy in the World becomes our next nation-building project.”

His post was liked by the Reserve Bank’s chief economist Paul Conway, David Cunliffe, Paddy Gower, and Sam Stubbs.

Simon Bridges went further. The former National Party leader and current CEO of the Auckland Business Chamber said NZ First’s policy was right. On LinkedIn he was explicit this week: “It’s really good to see NZ First Leader Rt Hon Winston Peters confirm his Party’s campaign to split New Zealand’s gentailers going into this election. This has been the position of Auckland Business Chamber and the Northern Infrastructure Forum for well over a year now.”

Notably, his post was liked by Rod Drury, Sam Stubbs, Fran O’Sullivan, Paul Conway (the Reserve Bank’s Chief Economist), and Tex Edwards, among others.

These are not radicals. Simon Bridges ran the country’s largest political party. Drury is the most celebrated tech entrepreneur New Zealand has produced. When figures like these start calling for structural separation, and doing so publicly, the Overton window doesn’t just shift a little, it cracks right open.

Stubbs, Cooney, and the other voices

Sam Stubbs, managing director of Simplicity KiwiSaver, has a sharp column in today’s Sunday Star-Times that takes a slightly different angle. His target is politicians, not gentailers. Governments have maintained 51% ownership and 100% control while refusing to fund new generation. The result is textbook rent-seeking. Build less, raise prices, pay dividends. Treasury estimates cumulative gentailer dividends since listing at $5.4 billion.

Stubbs nails the ugly irony: politicians who oversaw this dividend addiction now publicly blame the companies’ management for high prices. “It’s like your manager making a mistake, but publicly shaming you.” His solution is to allow New Zealanders to own more of the government’s stake, diluting Crown control while keeping a blocking stake. His solution differs from NZ First’s, as it’s more cautious, less radical. But he’s pointing the finger at exactly the same place: successive governments that created this mess.

Margaret Cooney, chief operating officer of Octopus Energy, wrote in the Post this week that politicians should “go bold and fast on electricity.” Her argument: you cannot rely on the incumbent gentailers to lead the transformation. They are rational businesses built for steady-state growth, managed risk and reliable dividends. Dry year risk went unmanaged. The decline of domestic gas went unplanned. The Huntly firming deal only happened under political pressure. As Cooney puts it: “Waiting for incumbents to voluntarily disrupt their own profitable status quo is not a strategy. It is wishful thinking.”

She also flags a structural absurdity: gentailers can cross-subsidise their retail arms at prices that independent retailers cannot replicate. The two companies that won Consumer NZ’s People’s Choice award in 2025 — Flick Electric and Frank Energy — have since closed or been absorbed by the very gentailers they were competing with. That’s not a competitive market.

Three parties, and a squiggly piece of paper

As Mandy Te reported for Interest.co.nz, NZ First, the Greens and Labour are now all now eyeing changes to the gentailer model. But most importantly, Green MP Scott Willis has had a Members’ Bill in the ballot since early 2024 that would enforce corporate separation. When Peters announced the NZ First policy this week, Willis promptly wrote to him suggesting NZ First could simply support the existing bill and get it done now.

Peters responded by holding up a piece of paper with crayon squiggles on it, claiming his team was trying to figure out what it said. It was humourous, but also revealed something real: Peters wants to own this policy, not share it. If Willis’s bill is sitting there, ready to go, why not just say yes? Because NZ First needs this as an election platform, not a legislative achievement. Fair enough politically. Less fair to the households paying the bills in the meantime.

Chris Hipkins told reporters he was “absolutely leaving the door open to fundamental changes to our electricity market.” That is the political version of a holding statement. But it is further than Labour has gone before.

Luxon shut it down: splitting the gentailers would “drive a lot of uncertainty in the energy sector when we need a lot of certainty right now.” His chief of staff used to run the gentailer lobby. Connect those dots yourself.

The Numbers the politicians are ignoring

One of the underreported aspects of this debate is how much support the breakup already has in the business community. The Auckland Business Chamber poll found 49% of voters wanted the split, with only 20% opposed. The 2024 Mood of the Boardroom survey asked business leaders whether the government should “do a Telecom” and separate retailers from generators: 39% said yes, 23% said no, 38% were unsure.

So, support for the split runs almost two-to-one over opposition among business leaders. The policy establishment has been well behind public and business opinion on this for years.

Who this is really about

There is a contradiction sitting at the centre of all this that deserves naming. The people calling loudest for reform are establishment figures. Simon Bridges ran National. Rod Drury built Xero. Sam Stubbs runs Simplicity. Margaret Cooney runs Octopus Energy NZ. Yet it’s the establishment parties — National and Labour — refusing to move.

McLauchlan’s stakeholder state concept explains the gap. The major parties are not paralysed by ideology. They are captured by institutional relationships. Both have become addicted to the dividend flows. The legal and regulatory framework around the electricity market was designed by, and for, the incumbents. Changing it would mean a fight with some of the most powerful corporate interests in the country. Neither party seems willing to pick it.

Peters, for all his track record of campaign promises that evaporate between election day and coalition negotiations, at least has. McLauchlan is honest about the risk. NZ First has its own stakeholders: forestry, fishing, racing, mining, tobacco. The policy may vanish, he writes, “like cigarette smoke on a windy street.” But it is a specific alternative that cuts against stakeholder interests in favour of the public. And right now, that is more than anyone else is offering.

The deeper story here is not really about electricity. It is about whether New Zealand’s political system is capable of taking on entrenched interests when those interests are transparently working against the public. The gentailer breakup has become a kind of litmus test — not just about energy policy, but about whether politicians are willing to confront concentrated corporate power when it matters. The evidence so far is not encouraging. But the conversation has moved further in a week than it had in a decade. The pressure is building. And the politicians who think they can ride this one out may find the ground has shifted underneath them.

Dr Bryce Edwards
Director of the Democracy Project

Further Reading:

Subscribe now

Read more

New Zealand’s annual trust survey is out. The trust figures are not good. But this year, the most alarming finding in the 2026 Acumen Edelman Trust Barometer isn’t really about trust at all. It’s about hope.

Only 17% of New Zealanders believe the next generation will be better off than today. That’s a nine-point drop from last year, a sharp collapse in optimism, and it puts us among the most pessimistic countries in the developed world. Lower than Australia, lower than the US, lower even than the United Kingdom.

The survey asked respondents directly: compared to how things are today, will the state of things be better for the next generation? More than four in five said no, or weren’t sure. That’s a country that has effectively given up on the idea that the future will be better than the present. And in an election year, it’s political dynamite.

From Grievance to insularity

The Acumen Edelman Trust Barometer is an annual global survey, now in its 26th year, produced internationally by the Edelman PR firm and run locally by Wellington-based consultancy Acumen. This year’s theme is “Trust Amid Insularity,” which follows last year’s “Crisis of Grievance.”

The progression is revealing. In 2025, the data showed a country seething with resentment toward a system it believed was rigged. In 2026, it shows something arguably worse: a population that has stopped engaging with people who think differently. People aren’t just angry, they’re retreating into their shells.

The headline insularity figure is striking. Three in four New Zealanders (76%) are now hesitant or outright unwilling to trust someone whose values, beliefs, approach to problem-solving, or cultural background differs from their own. Only 23% remain “open.” New Zealand’s 76% sits well above the global average of 70%.

Edelman’s story about the last few years is simple enough: first division, then grievance, now withdrawal. People think the country is split, think the system is rigged, and end up trusting only their own kind.

Acumen chief executive Adelle Keely puts it diplomatically. New Zealand is seeing “a clear shift away from ‘we’ to ‘me’,” she says – “towards caution and selectivity in who and what we trust.” What Acumen politely calls caution looks more like atomisation.

A Society fragmenting

This fits a wider pattern. New Zealand is becoming more disconnected, and younger people seem to be feeling it most sharply. Outward Bound’s recent “Crisis of Confidence” survey report found that 57% of young New Zealanders think the world is declining, and more than a quarter of them (26%) believe they have no power to change themselves for the better. And one in four young men reported having no close friends at all. These are young people who feel, as RNZ reported, “isolated, disempowered and divided from their peers.”

Outward Bound CEO Malindi MacLean described the finding as confronting. Young people increasingly feel “the system is rigged against them,” she said, and a quarter of them have translated that into a sense that they can’t change anything. So why try?

Call it atomisation – individual withdrawal, not collective political anger. Not protest but resignation.

And, yes, political class tends to talk about young people as if the problem is just their “engagement”: get them voting, get them reading news, get them civics education. That’s all fine. But the more basic problem is that many of them don’t feel they belong to anything stable, and they don’t believe they have agency.

Distrust remains the baseline

New Zealand’s overall Trust Index score is 49 out of 100, up from 47 last year. On Edelman’s scale, anything below 50 is “distrust” territory. So we’ve improved, technically, but we’re still distrustful. We sit 25th out of 28 countries surveyed, level with Colombia, below every other English-speaking developed nation except the US. The global average is 57.

Looking at the results institution by institution, we can see that trust in government remains stuck at 45%, deep in distrust territory. Media has edged up from 35% to 39% – still the least trusted institution in the country. Business sits at 57%, NGOs at 55%.

Break it down by income and the picture sharpens. Among high-income New Zealanders (top 25%), trust is 56%. Among low-income earners (bottom 25%), it’s 43%. That gap matters. Better-off New Zealanders still have some residual faith in the system. Poorer New Zealanders much less so.

Government trust peaked at 57% during the pandemic years. It has been sliding ever since.

The Gap between expectation and delivery

The most politically devastating finding might be one that gets less attention than the headline figures. The survey asks whether institutions are doing a good job of bridging divides and facilitating trust-building between groups who distrust each other. It also asks whether those institutions have an obligation to do so.

In terms of government: 81% of New Zealanders say it has that obligation to bridge divides. Only 21% say it is doing the job well. That is a 60-point chasm between what people expect and what they see. For media, the gap is 45 points. For business, 32 points.

The public still seems to want institutions to hold the country together. What’s collapsing is confidence that the people running those institutions are capable of doing that. And 80% want politicians to stop using rhetoric that blames or vilifies particular groups. Seventy-nine per cent say politicians should be required to engage in civil discourse. These are not radical demands. The fact that overwhelming majorities feel the need to state them tells you how far the standard has fallen.

What it means for the election

In an election year, data like this should concentrate minds. It won’t, probably, but it should.

Once trust gets this low, the usual campaign talk stops working. Slogans like “Back on track”, “A brighter future”, “steady leadership”: it all starts sounding like wallpaper. The ground is there for anti-establishment disruption.

Danyl McLauchlan’s recent analysis of New Zealand’s five voter “tribes” – based on data from the 2023 New Zealand Election Study – is useful context here. Two of his tribes, the “Precarious Left” and “Alienated Conservatives”, together make up roughly 35% of the electorate. They score well below average on institutional trust. They are the most disaffected voters in the country, and they are the least well-served by the party system. Labour and the Greens have oriented themselves toward “Educated Progressives”. National and Act serve the “Establishment Right”. Both sides chase Middle New Zealand. The “Precarious Left” and the “Alienated Conservatives” get very little.

This is where anti-establishment politics can grow. And 68% of New Zealanders in the Edelman survey say that people with different views distrust each other so much they actively work against one another; 26% would support reducing the number of foreign companies even if it meant higher prices. These are significant sections of New Zealand embracing the kind of economic nationalism and anti-system sentiment that has already reshaped politics overseas.

New Zealand has so far avoided the sort of political blow-ups seen with Brexit, Trump, or the European hard right. MMP has helped, functioning as a pressure-release valve. But the underlying conditions are present and deepening. Matthew Hooton has argued that after a decade or two of economic drift under successive governments, New Zealand is falling steadily down international living-standards tables while both major parties paper over the decline with focus-grouped slogans. Josie Pagani writes that the country needs a cultural reset, and that voters in this election will back risk-takers who “tell it like it is.” The trust data supports both diagnoses.

Handle the framing with care

A caveat. The Edelman Trust Barometer is produced by the world’s largest PR firm, and Acumen is a communications consultancy. The report’s prescription – that businesses should lead on trust-building, that employers are the institution best placed to bridge divides – is not innocent of commercial interest. Recommending that corporates invest more in trust-building is the kind of advice that generates consulting revenue.

The numbers are useful. The framing is another matter. The survey shows people believe the system is rigged, that government serves the few, that the wealthy benefit unfairly. And then, predictably enough, the answer becomes workplace trust and better leadership. Maybe. But that lets the system off the hook. If inequality, insecurity and political failure are driving the distrust, no amount of managerial language will fix it.

The report is good at describing the symptoms. It is much less interested in the causes.

Dr Bryce Edwards
Director of the Democracy Project

Further Reading:

Subscribe now

Read more

“Thought Covid was bad? If New Zealand runs out of diesel, Covid will look like the rehearsal.” That line from Matthew Hooton in the Herald this morning lands like a slap. Not because it’s designed to alarm, but because Hooton is making a precise argument, not a rhetorical one. During the pandemic, the circulatory system of the economy kept pumping. He explains today that trucks still delivered to supermarkets, harvesters still picked crops, milk tankers still collected from farms, and ambulances still ran. None of that is guaranteed now.

The Government today released the details of its National Fuel Plan — the alert-level framework for managing any move towards rationing. That is the right thing to do. But the real question is whether this Government, and the political class more broadly, has actually grasped the scale of what may be heading our way. There are growing signs it hasn’t.

The Delusion of distance

One of the most enduring myths in New Zealand politics is that geographical isolation is a form of protection. Hooton’s takedown today is brutal. He lines up Christopher Luxon’s boast that New Zealand was “incredibly well positioned” alongside Chris Hipkins’ claim during Covid that we would be “at the front of the queue” for vaccines. Different eras, but it’s the same instinct of Kiwi self-delusion.

The reality, as Hooton argues, is the reverse: “Being the last station on the southern line makes New Zealand more vulnerable to disruptions to supply lines, not less.” We are not a big enough economy for anyone to prioritise us when the queue forms.

According to Hooton, Australia gets this. Canberra is using its leverage in coal and iron sands to push to the front of the queue for diesel and petrol. Hooton describes it in brutal terms: “You want coal? Then gizza your diesel.” According to reporting in BusinessDesk today, Australia has already secured fuel shipments from the US Gulf — the most shipped from there in a single month in more than three decades.

Murat Ungor, a Senior Lecturer in Economics at the University of Otago, has described New Zealand’s exposure as “double”: higher global prices, and the risk of delayed supply, because the refineries in Singapore and South Korea that supply our fuel depend on crude oil that travels through the Strait of Hormuz. The closure of Marsden Point in 2022 stripped away the last buffer between us and that exposure. We now import every litre of refined fuel we use.

The problem is diesel, not petrol

Too much of the political conversation has been about petrol prices. That misses the point. Diesel is the crisis. And diesel shortages are going to be more than just inconvenient or expensive.

Associate Energy Minister Shane Jones has been appropriately blunt, telling Newsroom: “A shortage of diesel would literally bring the economy to its knees”. On CNBC, he put it plainly: “You cannot have a food industry, you cannot have a forestry industry, you cannot have a fishing industry, you cannot have a horticultural industry unless you’ve got significant security and robustness about diesel supplies.”

Luisa Girao’s reporting from rural New Zealand this week conveys the pain and problems. A North Canterbury cropping farmer burning 1,500 litres on a typical harvest day, a bill that has more than doubled in weeks. A Reefton construction business owner describing his situation by saying he was “just sitting in the corner crying.” A North Canterbury farmer: “We’ve already taken all the fat out of the system. There’s nothing left to cut.”

Transport Minister Chris Bishop told an Infrastructure NZ conference in Auckland yesterday something that politicians rarely say: “It’s a scary prospect and I’m not 100 per cent sure the public have quite worked it out yet” – as reported by Dileepa Fonseka for BusinessDesk. Bishop added: “We do not want to get into a situation where the worst arrives, and we are doing everything that we can to make sure that doesn’t happen, but the reality is, it could happen.”

Politicians do not normally say things like that. When a minister says the reality is that the worst could happen, and the public hasn’t yet understood, that is a significant admission. It suggests the Government privately understands the situation more clearly than its public messaging has indicated.

Bishop also let slip something quietly extraordinary about the Government’s signature transport policy. Asked whether the fuel crisis would affect the Roads of National Significance programme, he conceded: “To fully fund the 17 roads of national significance requires putting up petrol tax by 70 cents a litre. It’s not going to happen, is it? It wasn’t going to happen anyway, certainly isn’t going to happen now.”

Supply chains people haven’t thought about

Thomas Coughlan has reported something that has not received nearly enough attention. Health Minister Simeon Brown is seeking advice on the supply of helium — which is essential for MRI machines, because liquid helium cools the superconducting magnets that make scanning possible. Between a quarter and a third of the world’s helium comes from Qatar’s Ras Laffan facility, which has been struck. That supply has dried up. MRI scans are a frontline tool in cancer diagnosis. If helium runs short, cancer care gets delayed. This is no longer a hypothetical.

Then there is what Jonathan Milne’s Newsroom reporting revealed from the trucking sector. The Wareing Group, a major South Island logistics operator with 270 drivers, has been hitting fuel outages since Tuesday. Truck stops in Taupō, Sanson, parts of Christchurch, Ashburton, Oamaru, and Winton have been running dry. The company is paying $10 million more than it expected for fuel.

Z Energy chief executive Lindis Jones agreed the crisis demands something approaching wartime cooperation between business and government. “I heard it described as the biggest energy shock in the history of the world,” Jones told Newsroom. “It certainly feels like it.”

These supply-chain risks extend further than most people have considered. The Strait of Hormuz carries significant volumes of Fertilizer. Higher fuel costs plus higher Fertilizer costs are squeezing farm margins from both ends simultaneously. Food prices will follow.

Is the Government doing enough?

On the evidence so far, no. But it’s not all bad, and it’s worth saying where they’ve got things right

The Government has moved on fuel specifications, aligning them with Australia’s to broaden supply options. The National Fuel Plan announced today is the kind of infrastructure that should have existed before any crisis arrived, but at least it exists now. And in making their announcement today, Willis and Jones exuded confidence and proficiency (in a way that their bosses, Luxon and Peters, probably couldn’t have).

Nicola Willis has shared data, acknowledged uncertainty, and avoided the “everything is fantastic” style that often characterises this Government’s economic messaging. Hooton praised her earlier in the week, noting she “has discussed matters concerning global supply chains better than Luxon ever could, despite his professed background in logistics.”

Audrey Young, in her Herald politics newsletter yesterday, concluded the Government “hasn’t put a foot wrong” on the mechanics: the specification changes, the diplomatic outreach, the targeted relief. But she also flagged the persistent bug: Luxon’s “repeated claims that fuel stocks are healthy.” The Government has not wanted to produce panic, but “painting the picture as rosy is close to misleading,” Young writes

Janet Wilson, writing in The Post, was more generous, arguing Nicola Willis has emerged as the de facto crisis leader, projecting authority while Luxon’s own political standing has taken a hit. Wilson drew the comparison to Jacinda Ardern’s Covid crisis management.

This Government has leaned heavily on reassurance. Its instinct has been “keep calm and carry on.” And there is a logic to that, because nobody wants panic buying to drain stocks faster. But there is a difference between managing public communication responsibly and downplaying a crisis.

Gordon Campbell put his finger on it. The Government is “talking optimistically, while trying to ease the public gradually into a sense of crisis.” He called the current mood a “phoney war”: war declared, but the real shocks not yet fully landed. The messaging, he suggested, amounts to “Panic yesterday and panic tomorrow, but not today.”

That is a rational short-term strategy. It is also, depending on how this unfolds, a recipe for a credibility collapse.

Hooton’s challenge: Act now, and act hard

Hooton’s core argument is not a critique of competence in managing spreadsheets and communications. It is a challenge about scale and speed.

He wants diesel rationing now, while it might still make a difference. He wants the Government to behave like a state in an emergency rather than like a market-respecting coalition that is allergic to the optics of another Ardern-style intervention. He draws the Covid parallel explicitly: “Just as it would have been better had Jacinda Ardern acted against Covid in late February or early March rather than wait, the sooner tough measures are taken, the better off we will all be.”

His more provocative proposal involves food. New Zealand has something other countries want. Hooton suggests Luxon should be using that leverage with counterparts in Singapore, South Korea and Malaysia: “We’ve got food, and if you want some, your money’s no good here — the price is diesel, jet fuel and petrol.” He acknowledges this would require “some sort of state control over international trade that we haven’t seen since 1984.” But, he argues, the scale of the potential crisis justifies it.

The timeline matters here. Hooton cites prediction markets giving the Strait only a one-in-three chance of reopening by the end of April, odds that don’t improve much beyond that. He says: “FuelClock.nz that indicated New Zealand had just 14 days’ supply of diesel onshore, plus another seven days confirmed as on its way” and “New Zealand could run out of diesel on April 16 under business-as-usual. Even with an emergency lockdown, it suggested diesel stocks might run dry as early as the end of next month.”

In a “Mad Max world,” Hooton writes, “it’s always a race to the bottom.” Australia has already lowered its fuel standards once. When New Zealand followed, Australia had lowered them again.

The Transparency problem

Richard Harman’s reporting for Politik this week exposed a more troubling dimension to all of this. MBIE was forced to issue an embarrassing out-of-cycle update after independent analysts, using ship-tracking data, pointed out that its official figures on incoming fuel supplies were wrong.

A website run by a BNZ financial markets analyst had better data than the ministry charged with managing the crisis. The Taxpayers Union’s FuelClock.nz was similarly more accurate, suggesting significantly less diesel cover than MBIE’s official numbers. Harman asked the obvious question: what aren’t we being told?

That question is not merely rhetorical. Harman also revealed that the Prime Minister held a private webinar briefing for top business CEOs (with MBIE officials and the head of DPMC) while media were excluded. That is the kind of insider access that should raise eyebrows in a democracy, especially when the public is simultaneously being told stocks are “healthy.”

The political incentives here are obvious. The Government does not want to trigger panic buying, which can turn a manageable shortage into a crisis. That is a legitimate concern. But there is a line between responsible communication and misleading reassurance. If New Zealand ends up at Level 2 or Level 3 of the fuel plan in a few weeks, having been told the situation was fine, public trust will be difficult to rebuild.

A Reckoning for energy policy

Whatever happens with the immediate supply question, this crisis has already exposed years of policy failure that span both sides of politics.

As economist Murat Ungor has noted, since Marsden Point closed in 2022, New Zealand relies entirely on imported refined fuel. New Zealand also has one of the highest car ownership rates in the world (815 light vehicles per 1,000 people) and road transport consumes nearly 40% of all energy used in the country.

Jonathan Milne’s Newsroom analysis this week drew the Norway comparison: a similar population, similar coastline, 98% EV uptake for new passenger car registrations, and electricity that is 99% renewable. No carless days for Norway. Meanwhile, academic Robert McLachlan has pointed out that New Zealand’s oil consumption is currently at a five-year high, driven largely by the rollback of EV incentives, public transport cuts, and rising road user charges.

The Government’s proposed response — a $1 billion LNG import terminal — was already facing serious questions before a single missile was fired. Simon Upton, the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, had warned Energy Minister Simon Watts in a letter that the terminal risked being “the worst of both worlds”, locking New Zealand into higher emissions while potentially raising energy prices.

Only 17% of respondents in a Horizon Research poll supported the electricity levy to fund it. Now the Qatar facility that would have been a key source of supply has been struck, Asian countries are locking up long-term shipping contracts, and global LNG prices have more than doubled since the war began. Yet Watts insists the project remains “on track.” One wonders whether anyone in Cabinet has reconsidered the assumption that cheap global gas will be available for import when the infrastructure that produces it is being bombed.

The international picture is grim. Sri Lanka is rationing fuel, with motorists limited to 15 litres a week. The Philippines and Pakistan have moved to four-day working weeks. South Korea has introduced five-day vehicle rotation schemes. More than 500 petrol stations in Australia have run dry. The scale of the global disruption is not a backdrop to New Zealand’s crisis, it is the reason the queue for fuel will not move for us simply because we’d like it to.

Margaret Cooney, Chief Operating Officer of Octopus Energy, has argued in The Post that this crisis should accelerate a shift to electrification, not deepen dependence on imported fossil fuels. “Waiting for incumbents to voluntarily disrupt their own profitable status quo is not a strategy,” she writes. “It is wishful thinking.”

Timothy Welch from the University of Auckland has made the case for free public transport for at least three months. His argument is not sentimental: three months of free fares would cost roughly $80 million in forgone revenue, less than a quarter of the Government’s $373 million in-work tax credit package. Unlike the cash transfer, it would actually reduce fuel consumption rather than simply cushioning households against the cost. Auckland recorded 2.25 million public transport trips in a single week (a seven-year high) as fuel prices rose. But the Government appears ideologically allergic to the idea.

What genuine seriousness looks like

Hooton’s column today ends with a striking personal admission. He would rather his call to action become as embarrassing as Luxon’s unfortunate “incredibly well positioned” reassurance than face the alternative: “where our ability to feed even ourselves, let alone our export markets, comes into question over the next 21 days.”

The test of democratic governance in a crisis is not just competence in managing the immediate mechanics. It is whether the Government is honest about the risks, fair about who bears the cost, and brave enough to act before it’s forced to. So far, the record is patchy.

Between the data debacle at MBIE, the private CEO briefings, the repeated assurances about healthy stocks, and a relief package that excludes beneficiaries — including more than half of children in material hardship — the Government’s credibility is more fragile than it seems to realise.

Chris Bishop has been honest enough to say the public hasn’t worked out how bad this could get. The Government should trust the public enough to tell them.

A Government that is genuinely taking this seriously stops managing the optics and starts managing the crisis: visibly, urgently, and with a great deal less spin.

Dr Bryce Edwards
Director of the Democracy Project

Further Reading:

Subscribe now

Read more

How much does it cost to sit next to the Prime Minister at dinner? In New Zealand, in 2026, the answer is $10,000.

The National Party is holding a “Mainland Dinner” at Christchurch’s Town Hall next month, hosted by party president Sylvia Wood, and the invitation was accidentally posted on Facebook by National MP Maureen Pugh before being swiftly deleted.

The invitation lays out the “price list for power” with remarkable clarity. For $5,000 you get a seat at the “silver” table. For $8,000, you sit with a Cabinet minister. And for $10,000 (the “platinum” tier) you get Christopher Luxon himself.

So, it’s a seating plan that doubles as a price list for political access. The more you pay, the closer you sit to the centre of power. Six of National’s twelve Cabinet ministers are on offer: Nicola Willis, Simeon Brown, Erica Stanford, Louise Upston, Mark Mitchell, and the outgoing Judith Collins. Ministers Matt Doocey and Nicola Grigg are also attending.

The invitation carefully refers to these figures by their party titles — “leader” and “spokespeople” — not their ministerial ones. That wording matters. Without it, National would be openly selling access to Cabinet ministers, which would cross a constitutional line.

But the distinction is farcical. These people are the Government. Everyone in that room knows it. Calling Christopher Luxon the “party leader” at a $10,000 dinner does not change the fact that he is the Prime Minister. The wealthy donors buying those tables are not paying for the company of a backbencher. They are paying for proximity to the most powerful people in the country.

A Long tradition of cash-for-access politics

Both major parties have been running these events for years. They just prefer that the public doesn’t find out about them.

National’s version used to be known as the “Cabinet Club.” For donations of $10,000 or more, members received exclusive dinners and meetings with Cabinet ministers. It was a literal price list for political access. Labour had its own equivalent, the “President’s Club,” and also ran a “Business Forum” where companies paid close to $2,000 a head to attend events with senior ministers. Different branding, same basic transaction: if you can pay, you get face time with people who make the decisions that affect your life, your business, and your industry.

What makes this latest National dinner notable is not that it is happening. It’s the brazenness of the tiered seating structure. As I told the NZ Herald’s Ethan Griffiths, who broke the story, previous events of this kind have typically charged a blanket fee. Everyone gets the same access. “Whereas in this way, you’re actually getting a visual chart. A map of the power. You get to choose which table you sit at and which minister you get the ear of.”

That’s a significant escalation. The transaction is no longer disguised behind a flat ticket price and a generic “evening with the party.”

The Hat trick

Here’s the constitutional sleight-of-hand: parties pretend ministers are just humble MPs at these fundraisers, “wearing a different hat” per the Cabinet Manual. Your $10,000 fee gets you to chat with the MP for Botany, the Leader of the National Party, not the Prime Minister. The Cabinet Manual requires ministers to keep those roles separate. When they attend party fundraisers, they do so as MPs, not as ministers. They are, in the jargon, “wearing a different hat.”

This is why the Mainland Dinner invitation lists Luxon as “party leader” and his ministers as “spokespeople.” If they were described as “Prime Minister” and “Cabinet ministers,” the event would be an explicit sale of access to the Executive — something that sits uncomfortably, at best, with the Cabinet Manual’s expectations about ministerial conduct. Section 2.105 acknowledges that ministers participate in party fundraising, but the broader framework of the Manual demands that ministers uphold “the highest ethical and behavioural standards” and avoid conduct that creates the appearance of improper influence.

So the parties work around it. They avoid the titles. They describe the events as “campaign dinners.” And they hope nobody notices that the people sitting at the $10,000 table will, the next morning, be exercising the coercive power of the state.

It’s a thin fiction. The wealthy donors in that room are not there because they’re interested in party policy platforms. The attraction is obvious: proximity to ministers who hold real power. Calling it a “party function” does not change what is being sold.

The Public was never supposed to see this

The story only surfaced by accident. Maureen Pugh, a National list MP, posted the invitation to her Facebook page. She quickly deleted it. That tells you everything you need to know about who this event was actually intended for.

My suspicion, which the Herald reported, is that this invitation was meant for a select group of people who could afford to pay, not for general public consumption. These events are designed for the donor class. They are not advertised on billboards or posted on party websites. They circulate through private networks and the business connections of the donor class.

That’s the real problem. This isn’t just a fundraiser, it’s a shadow system: a second track of political engagement that the public never sees. While ordinary voters get a handshake at a public meeting and a leaflet in the mailbox, the people who can make $10,000 payments or donations get dinner with the Prime Minister and a chance to bend his ear about whatever regulatory setting, consenting decision, or tax policy matters to their bottom line.

When a system like that exists but remains invisible to the public, democracy starts to look like a two-tier arrangement. One track for the people who fund politics, and another for the people who merely vote in it.

The Wider fundraising picture

This dinner sits within a much larger pattern of big money flowing into politics in 2026. As I’ve written in previous columns, the coalition parties have already declared $750,000 in large donations this year, dwarfing the opposition parties by a ratio of roughly ten to one. The donors include property developers, gas industry subsidiaries, and wealthy individuals who spread their cash across all three coalition partners on the same day, ensuring they are seen as friends of the Government, whichever minister happens to hold the lever they need pulled.

The Mainland Dinner is not an isolated event. It is a piece of a larger fundraising machine that binds wealthy donors to the parties of Government.

Meanwhile, in the Education Minister’s office…

The blurring of party and state takes another form entirely in a separate story that emerged today. Education Minister Erica Stanford sent an email from her ministerial address to school principals nationwide, urging them to share a video about the Government’s new SMART assessment tool with their teaching staff. The problem is that the video was hosted on the National Party’s YouTube channel.

The link took principals directly to the NZ National Party’s YouTube page, which is the same channel hosting Christopher Luxon and Nicola Willis’s response to the Middle East conflict, clips promoting National policies, and attack videos directed at Labour. At least one principal refused to show the video on the grounds that it came from a party platform rather than the Ministry of Education.

Stanford’s office called it “human error.” The video was taken down after the Herald made enquiries. A new email with the correct link was promised to be sent.

The ‘human error’ explanation may be true. But the mistake is still revealing. It shows how easily party material and ministerial channels can bleed into each other. So this is not an isolated incident in a political context where the line between ministerial communication and party communication is constantly blurring. Ministers use both parliamentary and ministerial resources. They produce videos, send emails, launch communications campaigns – all ostensibly for government purposes, but operating in an environment where the ministerial email lists, videos, staff time, and official communications and the party infrastructure increasingly overlap.

The Fading line between government and party

The Stanford video sits alongside the Mainland Dinner as an example of a broader integrity problem: the line between the party and the state is becoming dangerously blurred.

I’ve written at length this year about the use of parliamentary and ministerial resources for what amounts to electioneering. National MPs have been running a blitz of taxpayer-funded billboards and online ads. Paid content on the Stuff website has been formatted to resemble news articles, complete with editorial-style typefaces and layout, distinguished only by a small “Brand Content” label.

The Stanford incident is a more direct breach — a ministerial channel used to distribute party content to schools — but it sits on the same continuum. When ministers and their offices treat state infrastructure as an extension of the party apparatus, whether through uploaded videos, taxpayer-funded advertising, or ministerial email lists used for party purposes, then governing and campaigning become the same thing

This is not unique to National. For example, Labour spent $260,000 of parliamentary budget on Facebook and Instagram advertising in the first half of 2023. But the fact that it’s a bipartisan disease makes it worse, not better. It means the people who could reform the system are the very people who benefit from it.

What this says about New Zealand democracy

Look at these incidents together, and the pattern is unmistakable. Wealthy donors pay $10,000 for dinner with the Prime Minister, and the public only finds out because of a careless Facebook post. A minister’s office sends a party video to every school principal in the country using a Government email list. Taxpayer money funds billboards and online ads that are functionally indistinguishable from campaign material.

None of this is illegal. But all of it undermines public trust.

Nobody is passing brown envelopes under the table. They don’t need to. The system works perfectly well in the open. It seems that the rules have been written loosely enough that everyone can claim to be operating within them. The winners of this system are the parties already in power and the donors who fund them. The losers are ordinary citizens who are shut out of these arrangements and who, most of the time, don’t even know they exist.

Political fundraising needs better regulation. Cash-for-access events should be disclosed, with attendee lists and ministerial participation made public. The use of parliamentary and ministerial resources for partisan purposes needs a genuinely independent watchdog with real enforcement powers. And the Cabinet Manual’s distinction between ministerial and party roles at fundraising events needs either to be taken seriously or abandoned as the fiction it so plainly is.

Until then, the message from the Mainland Dinner is clear: if you’ve got $10,000, you get the ear of the Prime Minister. If you don’t, you get a pamphlet in the mail.

Dr Bryce Edwards
Director of the Democracy Project

Further Reading:

Subscribe now

Read more

In Dunedin, a charity called Te Kāika has been receiving tens of millions of dollars in government funding to provide health and social services to some of the city’s most vulnerable people. Over the past year, the Otago Daily Times has been methodically pulling back the curtain on what is going on inside this organisation. The picture is not pretty: nepotistic governance, unexplained payments to the leadership, staff fleeing in droves, government contracts unfulfilled, a youth facility shut down over abuse allegations, and a senior manager convicted of domestic violence. The Department of Internal Affairs is now investigating.

And yet, almost nobody else in New Zealand media or politics has said a word about it.

That silence matters too. Because this is no longer just a story about one Dunedin charity going off the rails. Te Kāika shows what can go wrong when the state hands over essential services, then barely checks what is happening on the ground. It’s a story about a gap between the language of empowerment and what actually happens on the ground.

It should make people far less comfortable about the bipartisan faith in outsourced social services

How Te Kāika went off the rails

Te Kāika – meaning “the village” – was established in Caversham, South Dunedin, in 2015 as a GP practice aimed at Māori, Pasifika, and low-income whānau. The kaupapa made a lot of sense: low-cost primary care wrapped around the needs of poorer Māori and Pasifika families. For a while it worked. During Covid-19, Te Kāika ran the South Island’s first mass drive-through vaccination centre. The Otago Daily Times (ODT) editorialised about its “remarkable rise.” People were impressed.

Then it grew extremely fast. Revenue trebled in a single year, from $4 million to over $12 million between 2021 and 2022. Staff went from about 20 to 120. The charity took on dozens of government contracts for everything from addiction services to youth justice. It opened satellite clinics in Queenstown and Oamaru. It built a $10-million-plus “Wellbeing Hub” in Caversham. It even spent $606,000 sponsoring the Highlanders rugby team.

But the governance was flimsy. For nearly five years, the board consisted of just two people: chairwoman Donna Matahaere-Atariki and Matapura Ellison – a breach of the charity’s own constitution, which requires a minimum of three. The University of Otago, which had been involved early on, withdrew its shares in 2020, and all the outside voices on the board departed.

Then in June 2022, founding CEO Albie Laurence was abruptly replaced by Matt Matahaere (the chairwoman’s son). Her daughter, Winnie Matahaere, manages social services. When the board was eventually expanded to three members in 2023, the new addition was an accountant who had previously been suspended from practice for two years for breaching the chartered accountants’ ethical code.

Ask yourself the obvious governance question: how could the chief executive be independently held to account by the board, when the board chair is his mother?

What the ODT uncovered

The Otago Daily Times, principally Rob Kidd and Mary Williams, has been digging into this story for more than a year. The December 2025 series, headlined “Trouble in the Village,” ran across four broadsheet pages – a rarity in modern New Zealand journalism.

The ODT revealed unsecured, interest-free loans to board chair Donna Matahaere-Atariki and to chief executive Matt Matahaere. One former employee’s grievance alleged he had been “bullied and ridiculed… to breaking point.” The charity spent $260,000 on “termination benefits” in a single year.

The ODT also reported on Rema Smith, Te Kāika’s former manager of social practice, who was convicted on charges including burglary, unlawfully taking a vehicle, assault in a family relationship, and breaching the Search and Surveillance Act. He turned up at his victim’s home with patched gang members driving his work vehicle.

Te Kāika’s chief executive sought name suppression for Smith to protect the charity’s reputation. Matt Matahaere also gave Smith a glowing reference to support his move to Dove Hawke’s Bay, a domestic violence support organisation. Dove’s CEO later said he felt “misled”: “If I had all the facts, I wouldn’t have taken him on.”

One Te Kāika youth remand home was shut for nine months after allegations that caregivers had abused young people there. A Te Kāika youth justice worker punched a teenager up to 15 times, stomped on him, then lied to police about it. A doctor allegedly supplied cannabis to a patient in the carpark. The charity’s own GP was convicted of evading nearly $140,000 in taxes, attributing it to “self-entitlement and greed.”

The Story gets worse

To its credit, the ODT has kept digging this year. And the newer material may be even worse, because it goes to the most basic issue of all: are the services actually being delivered?

Over the weekend the ODT reported that Te Kāika’s main site appeared to have just one part-time GP serving thousands of enrolled patients. The Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners recommends a ratio of about 1,000 patients per GP; Te Kāika’s Caversham hub reportedly has one doctor working four days a week for 5,000 to 6,000 patients.

Clinical consultations plummeted by nearly two-thirds in a single year (from 44,939 to 15,874), while patient registrations (and the government capitation payments that come with them) kept climbing. That matters because capitation funding follows enrolled patients, not the number of times they are actually seen.

Te Kāika has also refused to define what it regards as “clinical consults”. One case reported by the ODT tells you a lot. A patient, Rochelle Hodge, told the ODT she only discovered she’d been seen by a nurse rather than a doctor when she read the signature on her prescription for anti-inflammatories. She had come in with a painful foot. The nurse’s treatment didn’t help. A pharmacist later suggested she see a physiotherapist, who organised an X-ray that found her foot was broken. When she returned to complain, she was told that seeing the nurse was “just like seeing a doctor.”

The charity’s latest accounts revealed that $123,000 was paid to a company wholly owned by the board chairwoman, for “research services.” A separate $20,000 contract was also paid to her. Board member James Hennessy received $61,000 into his private company for rental of Queenstown premises. The conflict-of-interest problems are obvious for an organisation funded overwhelmingly by public money and charitable support.

Te Kāika has also again missed a deadline to file its annual financial return with Charities Services. In ten years it has never filed on time. Over the past decade, the DIA granted the charity 17 deadline extensions. And it often missed those too. When confronted by the ODT about the latest failure, Te Kāika claimed it had “mutually agreed on arrangements” with the DIA. The DIA flatly denied this: “No arrangement has been entered into with the company.”

The DIA investigation has now widened to include what it calls “a number of more substantive concerns.” Its charities services manager warned that “being a charity is a privilege that comes with obligations and responsibilities.”

The Failure of government oversight

But Te Kāika is only part of the story. The other part is the state agencies that kept funding it without asking enough questions.

Health New Zealand funded Te Kāika nearly $1.8 million for an alcohol and drug service that was supposed to employ seven full-time qualified staff. The ODT eventually extracted the staffing data through OIA requests: Te Kāika had only 5.8 FTE for most of 2024. HNZ’s own reporting template didn’t even have a field for the charity to report on staffing. When the ODT compared quarterly performance reports a year apart, they found identical text saying group therapy sessions were still “ready to commence,” clinical groups still “planning to commence.” It was just copied and pasted. A year had passed and nothing had happened.

A $587,000 gambling addiction contract required clinical staff. Quarterly reports showed an employee “looking forward” to clinical staff coming on board, which was the same phrase repeated across multiple reports. HNZ said it had “no reason to believe” the service wasn’t being clinically led, but admitted it didn’t collect the data.

Oranga Tamariki funded eight Te Kāika contracts worth over $3.5 million for 2023–24. Six had “funds reconciled due to underutilisation.” The Ministry of Social Development gave $2.7 million in contracts. A Te Kāika social worker raised safety concerns about doing home visits alone in a family violence role, then left. The client feedback section of their report was blank.

One Dunedin social sector leader told the ODT you could “drive a bus” through some charities’ reports. Another said they were “rarely read” by civil servants. Charity governance expert Garth Nowland-Foreman put it bluntly: “When a board is weak and compromised there are likely to be other accountability failures and in far too many cases we need smarter oversight by government.”

Why this is bigger than Te Kāika

The tempting response to all this is to write Te Kāika off as an outlier: one rogue charity, exceptional in its dysfunction. The specific combination of allegations at Te Kāika is certainly vivid. Family governance, interest-free loans, copy-pasted performance reports, a domestic violence conviction in a family violence service, gang affiliations, covered-up youth abuse – it is quite a list. But the underlying structural conditions that allowed all of this to happen are not exceptional at all. They are features of the system.

The Waipareira Trust case makes this plain. Auckland-based Waipareira, led by CEO John Tamihere, faced a years-long investigation by Charities Services over allegedly using charitable funds to support his mayoral campaign and related political activities. Executive pay at Waipareira reached an average of $510,679 – the highest in the New Zealand charity sector. In December 2025, the Charities Registration Board decided not to deregister the trust after it undertook remedial action, but the board’s chair noted plainly: “Had significant remediation not been taken, the Board’s decision would likely have been different.”

Similarly, the Manukau Urban Māori Authority (where Labour MP Willie Jackson’s wife succeeded him as CEO) has faced a number of concerning allegations recently. So, all three of these state-funded charities (Te Kāika, Waipareira Trust, Manukau Urban Māori Authority) have featured what looks like nepotistic governance structures.

The Auditor-General flagged systemic problems with the Whānau Ora programme as far back as 2015, finding the programme “confusing, bureaucratic and poorly administered” and noting that nearly a third of its $140 million in early funding went to administration rather than to helping whānau. A follow-up report in December 2024 found insufficient progress on accountability. The programme was substantially restructured from July 2025, with new commissioning agencies, stronger conflict-of-interest provisions, and enhanced audit powers. Whether that restructure holds is another matter.

The Te Kāika case also shows how badly government agencies can handle outsourced public services, and how rarely they are held accountable when they fail. Health New Zealand, the Ministry of Social Development, and Oranga Tamariki were all channelling millions to Te Kāika. None of them had adequate oversight mechanisms in place.

This goes beyond Te Kāika. It reflects the way the system now works. This is close to what some scholars call the “shadow state”: charities and NGOs taking over public functions, but without the same transparency or discipline expected of government. The state has outsourced enormous amounts of social provision to NGOs, and has simultaneously failed to build the monitoring, auditing, and evaluation capacity necessary to ensure that outsourcing serves the public interest.

So, the state has become very efficient at shovelling money out the door. It has been far less effective at proving what that money achieves. And in a culture where questioning the kaupapa of Māori service providers has become politically sensitive, the space for honest scrutiny has narrowed further.

Why has everyone else looked away?

Broadcaster Peter Williams – not someone whose overall worldview aligns with mine, it should be noted – described the ODT’s December investigation as “the most substantial piece of investigative journalism produced by a New Zealand newspaper this year” and wrote with evident astonishment the near-total silence that followed. Williams noted the total absence of follow-up: not from RNZ, Stuff, the Herald, Newsroom, or The Spinoff.

Williams put forward one explanation: discomfort with stories that cut close to Māori political power. “Transparency is not racism,” he wrote. “Accountability is not colonisation.” I think that captures part of it. There does seem to be a widespread reluctance in New Zealand media and political culture to subject Māori-led organisations to the same scrutiny applied to other publicly funded entities.

The result is ugly. Māori communities end up with weaker accountability, while a small group of insiders can thrive in the gaps, extracting income and status from state contracts that are nominally directed at the most disadvantaged.

But there are other reasons the story has stayed so contained. Newsroom capacity has been gutted at many outlets. Stories that require months of OIA requests and legal risk don’t fit well into the economics of modern digital journalism. And there is a broader tendency, cutting across the political spectrum, to treat the charitable and community sector as beyond criticism. There’s a notion that it is a realm of good intentions that shouldn’t be subjected to the same scrutiny as business or government.

That is a mistake. Once an organisation is heavily funded by the taxpayer, scrutiny should be non-negotiable. When a charity receives $17.5 million a year, mostly from government contracts, there needs to be accountability. The ODT has demonstrated, painstakingly, that this isn’t happening.

What this says about “Broken New Zealand”

I’ve written a lot about what I call Broken New Zealand: a country where institutions increasingly fail at the job they claim to do, while well-connected interests keep doing nicely out of the mess. I’ve spent a lot of time lately examining the broken state of our economy, our monopolistic markets, our captured political institutions. The NGO and charity sector, however, has largely escaped that kind of scrutiny.

Yet Te Kāika is exactly the sort of case I have in mind. Here is a charity receiving over $17 million a year in public funds, run by a family, with a board that broke its own rules, paying its chairwoman’s company $123,000, failing to deliver on contracted services, unable to keep staff, missing every filing deadline for a decade. One staff member designated “chief operating officer” was paid $213,000.

And yet government agencies have kept making their payments. Health New Zealand, MSD, and Oranga Tamariki collectively poured millions into the organisation without apparently reading the performance reports or checking whether contracted staff had actually been hired.

That is institutional failure. And it has become far too normal in New Zealand. This is not the cinematic version of corruption. It’s a slow rot: vested interests insulated from scrutiny, performance never meaningfully measured, public money siphoned through networks of related parties and family connections, with everyone from government funders to media outlets looking the other way. It’s ticket-clipping dressed up as community empowerment.

Others have used stronger language. And in the private sector or economics profession, it’s called “rent-seeking”. Whatever label you prefer, the end result can be the same: money meant to relieve hardship gets absorbed by managers, insiders, and bureaucracy.

What makes this area worth looking at is how little serious political disagreement there is about it. Unlike debates about the banks, the supermarkets, or the electricity companies, where there is at least some cross-partisan agreement that something is wrong, the contracted-out NGO model has largely escaped critical scrutiny. The political right has always liked contracting out as an alternative to state provision; the left liked the community-empowerment language, and in a Māori context, the alignment with tino rangatiratanga. Both sides found it ideologically convenient, and so nobody asked hard questions.

The result is that too many people keep quiet. And that silence has real costs – borne mostly by the people who depend on these services.

The ODT’s own editorial acknowledged the tension: “Te Kāika needs to succeed.” And that’s true. The communities it was set up to serve genuinely need these services. But the organisation cannot succeed with this governance setup and this level of accountability. DIA charities services manager Helen Steven was right: being a charity is a privilege, not an entitlement.

New Zealand needs to think much harder about how it now delivers social services. Contracting out has become almost unquestioned across the political spectrum. But belief in the model is no substitute for evidence that it works. When government hands millions to an NGO, the public has a right to know whether services are being delivered, whether the money is being spent properly, and whether the people running the show are fit for the job. On all three counts, Te Kāika raises serious doubts – and it is almost certainly not alone.

The ODT has done the work. It’s time the rest of the country paid attention. And it’s time MPs started asking questions.

Dr Bryce Edwards
Director of the Democracy Project

Further Reading:

Subscribe now

Read more

Winston Peters delivered his State of the Nation speech in Tauranga yesterday, and it told us something important about where NZ First thinks the 2026 election will be won. Not in the culture wars or in Covid grievances, but in the electricity bill sitting on your kitchen table.

Peters ranged across Fonterra’s sell-off, Te Pāti Māori, the India deal. Slipped up calling his party “socialist” — meant “socially conservative” — then declared NZ First “nationalist with a capital L”. Mangled Rod Donald’s name as ‘Rod McDonald’. Vintage chaos, but you couldn’t look away.

But the headline was energy. NZ First will campaign on breaking up the electricity gentailers, splitting the big four power companies into separate generators and retailers so they can, in Peters’ words, “no longer control both the power and the price.” This is the sharpest political instinct Peters has shown all term.

Why energy is the right fight

To understand why this announcement matters, you have to go back a few weeks. The government’s decision to build a new LNG import terminal in Taranaki, funded by a levy on electricity companies that will inevitably be passed on to consumers, was a disaster for National.

As Danyl McLauchlan wrote in the Listener recently, Christopher Luxon appeared at his post-cabinet press conference to announce the terminal and “seemed genuinely astonished by the questions that followed. Didn’t he promise the country no new taxes? And isn’t ‘levy’ the dictionary definition of a tax? And why were households paying, when the power companies had secured decades of massive profits by underinvesting in energy infrastructure, creating the very crisis the state was now solving?”

Peters and David Seymour both acknowledged it was a tax. Luxon insisted it was a levy. While National taxes households to bail out the energy sector, Peters now promises to restructure it entirely.

The gentailer model has been politically vulnerable for a long time. Peters opposed the partial privatisation of the power companies when National floated them in 2013. The Listener recently published a chart showing that $4.8 billion more has flowed to gentailer shareholders in cumulative dividends than those companies have invested in capital expenditure since the float. That is an extraordinary figure. Ordinary New Zealanders have been paying inflated prices so that shareholders can pocket the difference, while infrastructure has crumbled to the point where the state now has to step in with a billion-dollar gas terminal.

Meanwhile, the big four gentailers are reported to have raked in a combined $1.86 billion in operating earnings for the six months to December alone, roughly a 45% jump on the same period last year. As Duncan Garner thundered in the Listener, this is happening while families are choosing between heating their homes and putting food on the table. Power prices rose 12% last year, and more hikes are coming in April.

The system is broken and everyone knows it. Peters has identified the right enemy at the right time.

The Telecom precedent

Peters and Shane Jones drew an explicit parallel with the breakup of Telecom into Chorus and Spark, a structural separation widely regarded as successful. Liam Hehir, commenting on NewstalkZB, called the gentailer policy “pure populism” but conceded it would be “a real resounding line of attack on the campaign trail.” He noted that the partial privatisations “were never popular to begin with.”

That is the key political insight. It does not matter much whether the Electricity Authority would agree with Peters’ characterisation of the market. What matters is that voters are paying too much for power, they know it, and nobody else is offering to do anything structural about it. National is levying households to prop up the system. Labour has not yet articulated a clear energy position. NZ First is the party promising to break the system open.

The details remain thin. Pressed by media afterwards, Peters referred vaguely to “a paper” that was “pages and pages long.” As Stuff reported, Peters and Jones were “reluctant to give details.” Jones clarified it was a paper prepared by officials laying out options for the energy sector in 2024. That is not the same as a detailed policy. The promises of guaranteed fixed-price contracts for new-build generation and mandatory buyback of household solar at grid price sound attractive but raise questions about implementation and cost that NZ First has not yet answered.

Still, at this stage of the campaign cycle, the lack of detail probably does not matter much. What matters is the framing: NZ First as the party willing to take on the power companies. It is a classic populist move, and it is well timed.

Peters discovers conservatism

There was something else in the speech worth dwelling on. Luke Malpass of the Post picked up on it in his column today, noting that Peters referred to NZ First as “socially conservative” three times. “We are the only socially conservative party,” Peters declared. Malpass observed that this was different, and new. It is not that Peters has suddenly discovered social conservatism; that is how he has always operated, both in belief and instinct. But he has now positioned NZ First as an explicitly conservative party.

Malpass notes that the word “conservative” was used just once in last year’s State of the Nation, and not at all in 2024. There is nothing about conservatism in NZ First’s party constitution, or in its founding principles. “So this is a new thing,” Malpass writes. “And for a party that has always prided itself on common sense and pragmatism, if sustained, it will be a step in the direction of ideology.”

This matters because it shifts NZ First from an ideological blank canvas to something more legible. The party has always been able to play both sides because nobody quite knew what it stood for beyond Peters himself. Claiming the conservative label does not necessarily prevent NZ First from going with Labour after the election, but it lines the party up more clearly with one side of politics than the other.

Peters also used the label to pitch directly at disaffected Labour voters: “For all those conservative, old-school, egalitarian, common sense Labour voters out there who feel abandoned, you’ve only got one place to come.” Whether he can actually win them while simultaneously declaring a war on woke is the tension that will define his campaign.

From culture war to cost of living

The culture war material was present. Peters described the Greens as the party of “Palestine and pronouns,” called Te Pāti Māori “losers,” and railed against what he called the “insipid cancerous spread of the left-wing woke agenda.” He described Green supporters as “woke-obsessed students and weirdos with purple hair.” None of this is new.

But it was not the centrepiece. The economy was. Peters devoted the bulk of the speech to cost-of-living pressures, energy policy, the Fonterra sale, and opposition to selling the government’s Air New Zealand stake.

The war on woke that dominated NZ First’s first two years in government has been repositioned as a supporting act. Lyric Waiwiri-Smith captured this well in her Spinoff report, noting that “waging a war on woke may have been effective in making some noise in the first two years of a parliamentary term, but in an election year, you should expect bathroom politics to be shunted aside to make way for policies focused on financial relief.”

That shift is significant. NZ First voters, according to the RNZ-Reid Research polling data, are struggling with the cost of living more than National and Act voters, and they are more pessimistic about the country’s direction. Those voters want a change in direction, but they are not looking to the opposition parties. They are looking to NZ First. Peters has managed to position himself as the change candidate while sitting at the Cabinet table. It is a remarkable trick.

Peters also took some careful shots at his own coalition partners. He stressed that NZ First had always warned economic recovery would take more than three years, implicitly blaming National for overpromising. He called suggestions to sell Air New Zealand shares “economic neoliberal lunacy,” a clear dig at Act. Peters is trying to cast NZ First as the party that warned you all along, the voice of experience inside a government that has underdelivered.

Ngaro and the talent problem

The other announcement was Alfred Ngaro, the former National minister turned NewZeal party leader, who will stand as an NZ First candidate. It did not go smoothly. Ngaro neglected to introduce himself, prompting shouts from the crowd of “who are you?” Not exactly a triumphant entrance.

But the recruitment matters. Ngaro is a Christian conservative who spent nine years in Parliament and served as a minister under Bill English. In South Auckland, where Pacific and Pasifika Christian communities form a substantial constituency, Ngaro’s recruitment could help NZ First make inroads into territory that has traditionally belonged to Labour and National.

Beyond the Christian vote, there is a structural problem that Ngaro partially addresses. As Adam Pearse noted in the Herald, NZ First is polling at 9 to 11%, which would give it four to six more seats than its current eight. That means the party needs bodies. Aside from Peters and Jones, the current caucus lacks central government experience. If NZ First ends up with 12 or more MPs and another stint in Cabinet, it needs people who know how government works. Ngaro, whatever his awkward introduction, provides some of that.

The Unprecedented position

NZ First’s polling surge is being ignored, yet it is quite significant. In every previous government NZ First has been part of, its support collapsed during the parliamentary term. In 1996 and 2017, it was subsequently thrown out of Parliament altogether. This time, the party is growing from inside government.

Today’s RNZ-Reid Research poll has it at 10.6%. The latest Talbot Mills Research poll puts NZ First at 11%. The Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll earlier this year had it at 11.9%.

Luke Malpass has described Peters as “the Keith Richards of New Zealand politics” who “cannot be killed by conventional methods.” Peters, Malpass writes, is “basically the only party leader to have improved his favourability with voters during this term of Government.” And as Toby Manhire noted in the Spinoff, “on some days, the 80-year-old looks like the most sprightly, vocal and effective opposition politician in New Zealand.”

The global context reinforces this. Reform UK is topping polls at 27%. Pauline Hanson’s One Nation is polling at 28% in Australia. Populist-nationalist parties are surging in country after country, and NZ First is riding the same wave, powered by the same cocktail of economic frustration, anti-immigration sentiment, and distrust of the political establishment.

What was missing

For all its discipline, the speech had notable gaps. Immigration barely featured until the final stretch, despite being one of the party’s strongest cards. The India free trade deal, which has been NZ First’s most effective wedge issue against National, was mentioned but not centred.

The energy policy, for all its populist appeal, came without a credible implementation plan. And the speech was, as it always is, fundamentally about Peters. NZ First remains a one-man show in a way that no other party in Parliament is. Peters hopped on a plane out of Tauranga as soon as he was done, leaving his caucus to work the crowd. The party’s succession question, which should be urgent given Peters is 80, went entirely unaddressed.

The verdict

This was not a speech that broke new ground. It was a speech that consolidated ground already won and pointed to where NZ First wants to fight. The energy policy is the most significant offering, not because it is fully worked out, but because it identifies the right enemy at the right time. New Zealanders are angry about power prices. They are suspicious of the electricity companies. And the Government’s own LNG levy debacle has handed NZ First a gift.

For readers of my recent “Broken New Zealand” series, there is a particular irony here. I have argued at length that crony capitalism, broken markets, and corporate capture are at the heart of New Zealand’s malaise, and that no party in Parliament has been willing to take on the vested interests responsible.

NZ First may be about to prove me partially wrong, at least on the rhetorical front. Whether they would follow through in government is another question entirely. Peters and Jones spent much of this term letting the gentailers bank record profits without complaint. The pivot to energy populism is well timed for an election, but the track record warrants scepticism about delivery.

Still, as a piece of political strategy, the speech was impressive. Peters remains the most formidable campaigner in New Zealand politics. His ability to run as an outsider from inside the government is unmatched, and the global populist tailwind is at his back. Whether he can translate all of this into the kind of result that would make him genuinely indispensable remains to be seen. But on the evidence of yesterday’s speech, the 2026 election is shaping up to be Winston Peters’ best shot yet.

Dr Bryce Edwards
Director of the Democracy Project

Further Reading:

Subscribe now

Read more

The Press newspaper in Christchurch has just published its “Power List” — a ranking of the fifty most influential people in the South Island. It’s a series of articles that updates the list they published two years. The 2026 edition, compiled primarily by senior journalist Philip Matthews, is worth reading closely. Not just for the names, but for what the list reveals about where power actually sits in Te Waipounamu, and how much of it has drifted away from anyone who ever faced an election.

I should say upfront that I’ve always been a bit ambivalent about “power lists”. I’ve reviewed quite a few of them over the years (the Listener’s annual Power List, Metro’s Auckland versions, the NBR Rich List, etc) and they tend to oscillate between the fully illuminating and the self-congratulatory. They can turn influence into a kind of parlour game. But when a good journalist takes the exercise seriously, as Matthews has here, the result can tell you things that daily political coverage misses.

Matthews makes clear that “Power is not the same as wealth and this is not a South Island rich list.” He is right. But neither is this simply a list of who has formal authority. What makes it useful is that it gets at something harder to pin down than formal authority: who actually sets the agenda, and whose phone calls get returned. Of course, any power list is also a political document in its own right, as the choices about who to include and who to leave off tell you something about the assumptions of the list-makers. It’s worth reading with that in mind.

The old idea of power in New Zealand was heavily political and Wellington-based: ministers, mayors, senior public servants, media bosses. But The Press list reveals something different in the South Island. Formal politics is weaker. Local government is less autonomous. Meanwhile, other forms of power are rising: property development, iwi leadership, university management, philanthropy. These newer forms of influence don’t face the same scrutiny that elected politicians do. Nobody gets to vote them out.

Property developers dominate

What jumps out first is the developers. By my count, at least six of the top fifty are primarily in the business of building, owning, and reshaping urban Christchurch: Richard Peebles at number one, Philip Carter at three, Matthew Horncastle at thirteen, Oliver Hickman and Vincent Holloway (of Brooksfield) at sixteen, Mike Greer at nineteen, and Tim Glasson at twenty-one.

It’s a blunt reminder of where economic power in the South Island now sits. It’s not in Parliament or the council chamber, but in the ownership of land.

Richard Peebles, the new Number One, is the developer behind Riverside Market and Little High, which are the hospitality hubs that have transformed central Christchurch’s post-quake landscape. His next project, a $130 million mixed-use development called Downtown, will add apartments, shops, and hospitality outlets to Manchester, Cashel, and Lichfield streets. That is an extraordinary amount of urban power concentrated in a few private hands.

Profiled by Liz McDonald for The Press, Peebles comes across as likeable and civic-minded: a local boy from Sockburn who narrowly survived the February 2011 earthquake and chose to stay and rebuild rather than take his insurance money and walk.

Fair enough: Peebles does come across as a decent person doing interesting things with the city. But step back and look at the structural picture: he now controls a major part of the physical heart of a rebuilt city. Urban New Zealand is increasingly shaped by the passions, tastes, and design instincts of wealthy developers. This is not democratic planning in any meaningful sense. It is a form of semi-private city-making. Sometimes it produces good results. Riverside and Little High have undoubtedly helped give Christchurch a new heart. But it also means unelected commercial actors are deciding more and more about the social geography of our cities.

Philip Carter, who topped the 2024 list, has slipped to third. Matthews explains that some of the Carter Group’s bolder ambitions have stalled: the planned Catholic precinct was scaled back, new buildings around Cathedral Square haven’t materialised. In the property game, power depends on what you can actually get built.

Matthew Horncastle, at thirteen, is the most politically outspoken of the developer contingent. He and his partner Blair Chappell have built 2,500 homes through Williams Corporation, and Horncastle has become a media personality: outspoken, rightwing, given to sweeping pronouncements. He told The Press: “I am not woke. But I’m a libertarian... I am just trying to save the country from communism.” The fact that Williams Corporation is planning to list on the stock exchange in 2027 suggests the influence is real, but it is just being packaged differently from the old corporate style.

This developer class overlaps significantly with the people identified in The Press’s earlier investigative series of late last year, “Who Owns Christchurch,” which mapped the city’s $170 billion property landscape and found it concentrated in remarkably few hands. In this, Peebles’ property interests were valued above $400 million; Carter’s exceeded $200 million. These are not just influencers. They are the people who own the city centre.

There’s a well-known research finding in American political science (from researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page) that when the preferences of economic elites conflict with those of ordinary citizens, the elites almost always win. In the South Island, property developers shape zoning outcomes, sit across the table from council planners, and get to decide what the rebuilt city centre looks like.

And the basic Thomas Piketty point about inequality applies here too: the biggest South Island fortunes are built on land, and land keeps appreciating. Money makes money. That’s not a controversial observation, it’s just what the list shows.

The rise of Ngāi Tahu

If property developers are the most numerous presence on the list, the most significant trend is the growing power of Ngāi Tahu. Five individuals with direct leadership roles appear in the top fifty: Justin Tipa at two, Te Maire Tau at four, Tipene O’Regan at ten, Edward Ellison at seventeen, and Eruera Tarena at forty-five. Lisa and Francois Tumahai are at thirty-one.

This is more than token recognition. Ngāi Tahu is not just culturally significant or economically large — it is increasingly politically and intellectually assertive in national life. Matthews notes that Ngāi Tahu’s presence at Waitangi this year, leading the South Island delegation for the first time, signified “it’s new, more expansive view of its place in the national conversation.”

Justin Tipa, who became kaiwhakahaere of Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu in 2023, has grown decisively into the role. His ranking at number two — ahead of the other property developers, every politician, every CEO — is a deliberate editorial choice, and a defensible one. Te Maire Tau, at four, is described by Matthews as “an ideas man.” Tau is the iwi’s lead plaintiff in a potentially landmark freshwater claim before the High Court, a case that could reshape the governance of South Island waterways and the agricultural industries that depend on them. The stakes here are real: this is power that can re‑write the rules for whole industries.

And then there is Tipene O’Regan at number ten. He is 86. The fact that a man who negotiated the Ngāi Tahu Treaty settlement in the 1990s still makes a top-ten power list three decades later says something important. Some influence lasts. O’Regan did not just win a settlement, he also shaped the cultural and legal framework through which the iwi operates.

The growing prominence of Ngāi Tahu raises important questions about the evolving relationship between iwi authority and democratic governance. Ngāi Tahu is a major commercial operator with a property portfolio approaching $300 million in Christchurch alone. But it’s also something more than that: a cultural body with formal, legislated representation on Environment Canterbury..

It’s a kind of power that doesn’t fit neatly into any category. It’s commercial, cultural, and political, all at once. And there’s nothing else quite like it on the list. Ngāi Tahu is a major corporate entity, but one whose stated purpose is the long-term wellbeing of its people. That’s a fundamentally different kind of accountability from a developer answerable to shareholders. In practice, it functions as something close to a parallel governance structure. Whether you find that reassuring or concerning probably depends on your politics. But either way, it’s a significant constitutional development.

This is one of the most significant developments in New Zealand power over the last decade. If older South Island power rested on farming, church networks, old business families, and provincial boosterism, the newer power map has iwi leadership close to the centre. That is a profound change.

The invisible politicians, and who has replaced them

What’s really telling is who isn’t on the list: politicians. Only three national politicians appear in the top fifty: Matt Doocey (Waimakariri, the only South Island Cabinet minister) at twenty-four; Megan Woods (Wigram, Labour) at eighteen; and James Meager (Rangitata, National) at forty-eight. That tells you everything.

Meager holds the title of Minister for the South Island, which is a position created to give the impression that the coalition cared about the region. Matthews is blunt: Meager has been “quiet and invisible” and has “failed to deliver very much.” As he writes, critics suspect the whole ministerial position “was a gesture to placate” the South Island at a time it was feeling “shortchanged by Wellington”. His placement near the bottom of the list is a damning assessment.

The late New Zealand political writer Bruce Jesson warned us decades ago about the creation of a “hollow society.” Jesson argued that the extreme free-market reforms of the 1980s allowed corporate leaders to colonise the public sector, disempowering democratic processes and reducing public policy to dollars and cents. Looking at the 2026 power list, Jesson’s fears have been substantially realised. Central government representation is shockingly low, and the politicians who do appear are ranked well below private capital.

Local government power is being actively curtailed too. Rates caps constrain councils’ financial independence. Regional councils face amalgamation or abolition. Central government is increasingly making decisions on housing, infrastructure, health that were previously the province of local authorities.

Matthews writes plainly: “Elections are won or lost in Auckland, not the South Island.” The Dunedin Hospital saga — where a community’s legitimate concerns about the scale of a public hospital rebuild have been systematically delayed by a Wellington-based health bureaucracy — is the clearest current example of what that centralisation looks like in practice. It is, in my view, the single most important political story in the South Island right now.

Business Canterbury’s quiet power

So if the politicians aren’t running things, who is filling the gap? Consider Leeann Watson.

Watson is the Business Canterbury CEO, ranked at twenty-eight. She is neither elected nor the CEO of a major corporation. She runs an industry advocacy group. And yet, as The Press reports, she has conducted more than thirty ministerial meetings in the past year, makes six-weekly advocacy trips to Wellington, and holds quarterly meetings with every Canterbury mayor and council CEO.

Most tellingly, Watson says: “If I need to pick up the phone and talk to a minister, I can”. She confirmed she has Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, opposition leader Chris Hipkins, and Finance Minister Nicola Willis on her phone.

Most citizens cannot do this. The average person cannot simply call the Prime Minister about the cost of living. But the representative of Canterbury’s business community can. Watson’s influence flows from relationships, information, and the trust of decision-makers. In a system with no lobbyist register and no formal record of who meets ministers, this kind of quiet access is both enormously consequential and entirely opaque to the public.

Watson describes her approach as “robust, but constructive,” and she is, by all accounts, skilled in how she exercises that access. But the structural point stands: informal, unelected influence of this kind is never equally distributed. Not every community group or environmental advocate gets thirty ministerial meetings a year. The Canterbury business community does.

That gap between who we elect and who actually calls the shots is one of the defining problems of modern democracy. I made a similar argument about the NBR Rich List last year: the lists themselves are interesting, but what’s more interesting is the gap between the wealth they celebrate and the democratic accountability we should expect from people with that kind of influence.

What the list tells us about power in 2026

What the list really shows, and what Matthews, to his credit, seems to understand even if the format doesn’t quite let him say it — is that the South Island is now run by developers who rebuilt a city in their own image, and by iwi leaders whose authority is growing in ways genuinely new in New Zealand politics. Behind them sits a professional class whose access to ministers is invisible to the public and unregulated by law.

Property capital is now the engine of South Island power. The earthquake created a window and those with capital walked through it. The result is is a concentrated ownership of the new urban landscape. Ngāi Tahu is in the ascendancy, and a meaningful counterweight to purely commercial power, accountable to a community and increasingly willing to take public positions on contested issues. The formal political system has largely abandoned the South Island: three politicians in the top fifty, none in the top ten, and the one with the specific ministerial brief for the region ranked forty-eight.

And then there are the names that make you wonder whether profile and power are really the same thing. Scott Robertson appeared at number six on the 2024 list, having just been appointed All Blacks coach. He does not appear on the 2026 list at all. As Matthews writes with a certain dry satisfaction: “Time did tell, as it turned out. Time has a funny way of revealing who really has power and who does not.”

Sam Neill, at six this year, is listed for his willingness to use his celebrity standing to criticise the fast-tracking of the Santana Minerals gold mine in central Otago. Fair enough. But is celebrity-driven moral advocacy the same kind of power as Justin Tipa’s institutional authority or Leeann Watson’s ministerial access? I’m not sure it is.

Sir Peter Talley, at twenty-two, is perhaps the most politically charged name on the list. The Nelson seafood magnate has a well-documented history of political donations and fierce opposition to environmental regulation. That Talley appears on a power list is accurate.

Traditional media clout has frayed. As Matthews notes with some honesty, no individual media figure made the top fifty: “The days when a daily newspaper editor was automatically one of the city’s power brokers are long gone.”

In place of old media gatekeepers, The Press has elevated a new range of social authority figures: Hugh Wilson is there because his restoration model at Hinewai has become a moral and ecological example. Melissa Vining is on the list for helping drive the Southern Charity Hospital into existence. Phil Rossiter built the Old Ghost Road trail largely through volunteer labour and sheer persistence. Callam Mitchell is there because Electric Avenue has put Christchurch on the entertainment map. These people do not have wealth or formal authority, but they have something that many politicians and businesspeople lack: moral credibility.

The list is also overwhelmingly Christchurch-centric: more than half the names are based in or around the city. This means that Dunedin, the West Coast, and Southland get comparatively little attention. And it is light on women. While Cheryl de la Rey, Megan Woods, Lydia Gliddon, and Suzanne Pitama feature prominently, the overall composition skews heavily male. Power lists everywhere tend to reflect rather than challenge existing inequalities.

That brings us to the limitations of the exercise itself. Power lists are, at their core, a series of portraits rather than an investigation into power structures. They name the influential and describe what those people have done. What they tend not to do is ask harder questions about how that power is exercised and who benefits from it. The Press Power List is better than most at pointing towards these questions, but it remains a collection of individual stories rather than a structural analysis.

For all their limitations, though, exercises like the Press Power List serve a genuine democratic function. They name the people who shape our lives — people who are often invisible to ordinary citizens because they operate through commercial decisions, institutional appointments, or quiet lobbying rather than elections. In a country without a lobbying register, where donation thresholds are weak and transparency is patchy, anything that names the people who actually hold influence is valuable.

Some of those named are entirely admirable. None of this is necessarily sinister. But let’s not kid ourselves about what it means for accountability. Modern power is harder to see than the old kind: it lives in boardrooms and quiet lobbying more than in parliamentary votes, and it often lasts longer precisely because nobody ever gets to vote on it. The Press has, perhaps unintentionally, documented that transformation.

If politicians matter less, and if local government is increasingly constrained, then where are the checks and balances on the new influential class? Who scrutinises the developers remaking our cities, the wealthy individuals whose “vision” increasingly becomes urban reality? We are witnessing the quiet consolidation of what I think we should start calling a new “southern oligarchy”.

Dr Bryce Edwards
Director of the Democracy Project

Further Reading:

Subscribe now

Read more

The scandal around Paul Eagle keeps getting uglier.

Last week this column set out the Auditor-General’s damning findings on Eagle’s tenure as chief executive of the Chatham Islands Council: the $460,000 gold-plated house renovation, the fabricated documents, the forged builder’s signature, the admission that he “panicked.” The Serious Fraud Office is now assessing whether to open a criminal investigation.

What has received less scrutiny is the other major thread running through this scandal — the lobbying-consulting firm involved. Andrea Vance reported in The Post yesterday that the Chatham Islands Council paid Agite Consulting Limited (pronounced “ah-jeet”), a total of $433,509.91 between January 2024 and November 2025. That is, as Vance put it, “nearly half a year’s rates” for a council that serves around 600 people, runs at the edge of a $500,000 bank overdraft, and gets more than 95 per cent of its revenue from the Crown.

Nearly half a year’s rates. To one Wellington firm. On a verbal contract. Without a tender. Not to fix water pipes or shore up a wharf, but to buy strategy, governance reviews, stakeholder engagement, and the machinery of political influence.

How the money flowed

The Auditor-General’s report described how Eagle engaged “a consultancy firm with which he had a pre-existing connection” without following the council’s procurement processes. The engagement began without a formal contract — just a verbal arrangement. On hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of evolving consultancy work. In a public organisation. When contracts were eventually signed, they were “generally retrospective, in whole or in part.”

The invoices show where the money went, and the answer is not into pipes, roads, or ferries. The biggest bucket was “government relations”: $164,639. Then came the 30-year plan at $120,556. The “island deal” cost another $86,250.

The number of hours worked was not evident on the invoices. Interim chief executive Bob Penter confirmed there was no formal tender, no request for proposals, and no internal evaluation of the work. What did ratepayers get for that level of spend? The council’s own information request response says it is “not aware of any internal evaluation reports relating to the work undertaken by Agite.” When you are buying influence-industry goods — narrative, positioning, stakeholder strategy — you often don’t get measurable outputs. You get process, meetings, documents, and the feeling that something is happening. The invoice arrives regardless.

Around $164,000 of the Agite bill was claimed from “Better Off Funding”, which is Crown money established by the previous Labour Government through its Three Waters reforms, intended for community wellbeing projects. When the Department of Internal Affairs asked in May 2024 whether unspent funds could go to urgent water infrastructure, Eagle told them $175,000 was “fully contracted and being delivered.” At the time, just one $20,000 contract actually existed. The Auditor-General called that misleading. It shows how quickly discretionary central government funding can be repurposed into the influence economy rather than spent on tangible delivery.

The “Pre-existing connection”

The Auditor-General’s report, tabled in Parliament last week, does not name the firm. It refers to a “supplier” with which the chief executive had a “pre-existing connection.” That “pre-existing connection” line? It’s auditor-speak for “calling in a favour”. Eagle did not go to the market. He went to people he already knew. The Auditor-General is careful in tone, but the substance is blunt: Eagle “did not follow the Council’s policy, use a robust procurement process, or demonstrate good contract management practices.” No competitive process. No documentation showing value for money. Contracts signed retrospectively. Eagle retained management of the contract despite the obvious conflicts.

That line about “pre-existing connections” should trouble anyone who cares about clean government. Procurement rot starts here. Normalised. Not criminal; it’s worse. The political class entitlement: mates first, process later.

Who is Agite?

Agite was until January 2024 called Pollock Consulting Limited, a vehicle for Greg Pollock. Pollock is a former General Manager of Metlink at Greater Wellington Regional Council and former Managing Director of Transdev New Zealand. He is also a board member of the Wellington Chamber of Commerce and an independent director of Tranzit Group, the largest family-owned bus company in the country, which operates about 60 per cent of the Metlink bus network under contract to the very same regional council where Pollock once worked. He now runs a consultancy advising on transport and infrastructure issues in the same policy world he once helped manage. The layers of intersecting interests are considerable.

In January 2024 the company rebranded and brought Raphael Hilbron on board as partner and director. Hilbron’s CV is a how-to guide for the revolving door: Press Secretary to Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters, then to Prime Minister Jenny Shipley, then 15 years at SenateSHJ, where he rose to Managing Partner of its New Zealand operations. Six months after Hilbron left for Agite, SenateSHJ collapsed into liquidation, owing approximately $538,000 to former partners. At least two senior staff migrated to Agite, transplanting a chunk of SenateSHJ’s government relations capability into a new shell.

SenateSHJ’s final years were themselves controversial. An RNZ investigation by Guyon Espiner revealed its staff had been physically embedded in Commerce Commission offices while simultaneously representing private clients in the same sectors. The firm billed more than $616,000 for advice on selling Three Waters to the public. Emma Ward, another Agite associate partner, came across from SenateSHJ where she worked on Three Waters communications.

This concentration of insider knowledge and institutional access is what Paul Eagle was buying with Chatham Islands ratepayer and Crown funds.

The Revolving door: Campbell Barry and Peri Zee

The revolving door is not subtle here.

Campbell Barry, former two-term Mayor of Lower Hutt and former Vice President of Local Government New Zealand, joined Agite in November 2025 as Head of Local Government and Partnerships — weeks after leaving office as Mayor. The firm’s press release described him as bringing “extensive knowledge and experience from 15 years in local government.” Which is one way of putting it. Another way: he is monetising his insider access to the sector he just left. A commenter on Wellington.Scoop captured the mood: “People worry about the central government–lobbyist pathway … seems alive and well in local government too.”

An official information release of text messages shows that when Barry joined Agite, he texted Prime Minister Christopher Luxon to let him know and to offer help. Luxon responded positively, suggesting Barry contact Ministers Simon Watts and Chris Bishop, noting there was “a bit going on in the LG space” where Barry’s perspective might be useful. No impropriety. But it illustrates, in unusually candid form, how easily a former mayor parlays political relationships into commercial access on behalf of a consulting firm.

Then there is Peri Zee. Before she won the Upper Hutt mayoralty in October 2025, Zee was a senior consultant at Agite. In fact, she was the project lead on the Chatham Islands engagement. According to Vance’s reporting, Zee wrote the islands’ failed government regional deal bid and was present at council meetings throughout 2025. She was, in other words, one of the people billing the cash-strapped Chatham Islands Council while simultaneously preparing to stand for election. When asked about the spending, Zee instead referred questions to Agite. Agite declined to answer.

At the very same October 2025 election, Barry left the Lower Hutt mayoralty and joined Agite. Zee left Agite and won the Upper Hutt mayoralty. A tag-team exchange across the Hutt Valley: one mayor out the revolving door into the Agite consultancy, one Agite consultant through it into a mayoral chain. The two cities share a border. The networks could hardly be tighter.

The Wife and the subcontract

One of the Agite contract variations, worth $109,600, proposed Eagle’s wife Miriam as on-island project lead for the council’s 30-year strategy. Her estimated monthly fee: $27,400 plus GST.

The Auditor-General found no evidence that other councillors or staff were told about the conflict. Eagle continued to manage the contract.

Although Miriam Eagle’s subcontracting was formally approved, the work did not in the end proceed. So, here we have a CEO using Crown money, paying a firm he had pre-existing ties with, and proposing to subcontract part of that work to his own wife. This is where the scandal stops being about sloppy administration and starts looking like self-dealing.

A Labour circle?

Eagle was a Labour MP for six years, the first Māori male to win a general electorate seat for the party in more than a century. He remains, as far as anyone knows, a party member. The Agite lobbying firm is not formally Labour-affiliated. But its orbit includes several people with Labour-adjacent networks: Zee’s sympathies appear centre-left, Barry was a Labour-aligned Hutt mayor, and the work Eagle commissioned was funded partly through Labour’s Three Waters’ “Better Off Funding”.

None of this proves a political arrangement. But it is worth asking: is the Eagle-Agite contracting an example of politically connected people looking after each other? Not in the crude, cash-in-a-brown-envelope way. In the New Zealand way: contracts, “strategic advisory,” and the quiet recycling of insiders into paid influence work funded by public money.

Labour still has not said a word. No condemnation. No expression of concern. No statement about whether Eagle remains a member. Local Government New Zealand (LGNZ) has also been completely silent, despite this being one of the most significant local government integrity scandals in years. LGNZ is the organisation that should be loudest about clean procurement and governance when councils get captured by poor process. Yet its former Vice President now works for the firm at the centre of this scandal. That may explain the silence.

The SFO and what comes next

The Chathams council has unanimously referred the Auditor-General’s report to the Serious Fraud Office. The SFO confirmed it is assessing whether to open an enquiry or criminal investigation. Local Government Minister Simon Watts called it “a very serious matter.”

Jonathan Milne reported in Newsroom yesterday that the council is now in do-or-die talks with government, with Regional Development Minister Shane Jones refusing to release more quota and grant funding until the community draws on its own resources. The financial mess Eagle left behind is shaping survival negotiations for 600 people on a remote island.

Wellington looks after Wellington

This scandal is not really about one man in a remote council. It is about how easily public money can be directed to politically connected firms when there are no rules. We don’t have a lobbying register or cooling-off periods. New Zealand doesn’t even have any requirement to use competitive procurement for advisory work.

Unsurprisingly, New Zealand ranks 35th out of 38 OECD countries for regulating influence on policymaking. Australia mandates an 18-month cooling-off period. Canada, five years. New Zealand? Zero.

The Agite-Chatham affair is a case study in what that void looks like. A firm built on revolving-door credentials — a former public transport chief, a former Beehive press secretary, a former mayor, a soon-to-be mayor — secures a major contract with a tiny, Crown-funded council on the basis of a personal connection, without a tender, without itemised invoices. And when the arrangement is investigated, the person who engaged them fabricates documents and lies to regulators.

The bigger question: why do we keep building a democracy where insiders are rewarded through public contracting arrangements that are poorly scrutinised, weakly evaluated, and culturally protected? This is how trust is drained. Not in one grand act, but in the steady conversion of public money into insider-economy money, while everyone insists it is all perfectly normal.

Labour has said nothing. LGNZ has said nothing. Agite hid behind a lawyerly non-answer. That is not an accident. That is the culture. What it all tells you is that nobody in this Eagle-Agite network wants sunlight on how the game is played.

Dr Bryce Edwards
Director of the Democracy Project

Further Reading:

Subscribe now

Read more

New Zealand politics just got personal. On Sunday evening, Labour leader Chris Hipkins’ ex-wife Jade Paul posted a series of claims about him on her private Facebook page. The post was deleted. Hipkins issued a five-word denial: “I reject the allegations entirely.” He’s seeking legal advice. And just like that, we’re having a national conversation about the oldest and most uncomfortable question in political life: when does a politician’s private behaviour become the public’s business?

I spoke about these issues on RNZ’s Afternoons with Jesse Mulligan earlier today. This column expands on many of those points, in an attempt to help navigate an episode that is ethically fraught, politically explosive, and not going away soon.

Let me be clear at the outset: this column does not repeat the specific allegations. They are unsubstantiated, contested, and do not involve criminal conduct. Children are involved. What I’m interested in is the politics around the scandal: the media ethics, the strategic and historical patterns, and what it means for our democracy.

What we know

The verifiable facts are thin. Paul posted to her private Facebook page on Sunday evening while on holiday in Fiji with the couple’s two children. She framed her claims as a direct response to Labour’s campaign slogan “Jobs, Health, Homes.” The post was removed, but not before it had been screenshotted and sent to newsrooms.

Newsroom’s Marc Daalder traced the pathway: Paul’s friend list reportedly included Police Minister Mark Mitchell, Winston Peters’ press secretary John Tulloch, National’s pollster David Farrar, and commentator Ani O’Brien. Screenshots reached newsrooms late Sunday. By 8am Monday, the screenshot was posted publicly on X. The story escaped the private sphere in under 18 hours without any journalist needing to independently investigate; they only had to decide whether to amplify what was already circulating.

Labour’s Barbara Edmonds described it as “a very difficult situation” and warned against going down the route of “deeply personal” attacks, saying: “I don’t think New Zealand likes that.”

Should the media be chasing this?

The NZ Herald’s editor-at-large Shayne Currie told Ryan Bridge on Monday morning that he believes the public interest threshold has been met. That’s a significant editorial judgment from a senior figure, and it shouldn’t be dismissed. But it deserves scrutiny.

There are essentially two tests that have traditionally governed how New Zealand journalism handles politicians’ private lives. The first is the hypocrisy test: personal conduct warrants reporting if it directly contradicts a politician’s public platform or reveals a meaningful double standard. The second is the power imbalance test, sharpened by the #MeToo era: was there an abuse of power, a misuse of public resources, or conduct that made the private genuinely political?

On the hypocrisy test, there’s a thin but real argument. Paul framed her original post as a direct response to Labour’s campaign slogan “Jobs, Health, Homes.” The suggestion was that Hipkins’ public messaging was contradicted by his private behaviour. That’s a hypocrisy argument. It’s not a strong one — Labour’s platform doesn’t claim Hipkins is a perfect husband — but it’s not nothing either.

For now, most major outlets have drawn that line in the right place — reporting the existence of the dispute and Hipkins’ denial, without publishing the specifics. That position is defensible, but it won’t hold for long. It invites curiosity without really settling anything.

In the end, it’s worth remembering that there’s a meaningful distinction between “the public might be interested” and “it’s in the public interest.” The NZ Media Council’s privacy principle demands an “exceptional degree of public interest” where children are involved. The Broadcasting Standards Authority explicitly distinguishes legitimate concern from mere “curiosity on a human level.” These standards exist for exactly this kind of moment.

Newsroom’s Jonathan Milne made perhaps the most interesting case for continued coverage. Paul’s account, he wrote, “if true, could raise public interest questions about Hipkins’ judgment and use of his office.” He pushed back against the blanket denial, arguing there will be “an unavoidable public expectation that Hipkins now put his side of the story more substantially than yesterday’s curt five-word denial.” Former ministerial adviser Ben Thomas agreed, warning that if Hipkins doesn’t confront the claims, there’s a risk of a perception he’s “using his position and resources to try and shut down his former partner.”

But the allegations remain unverified. An Nor do they allege any illegality. There is no police complaint, no court filing, no investigation. As Milne himself acknowledged, short of “a grotesquely unpleasant civil court case,” no authority can determine the facts. Journalists should not be investigating the minutiae of the Hipkins marriage without an extremely good reason. To do so would legitimise the tabloidisation of New Zealand politics and incentivise future actors to weaponise family disputes.

The Collapse of the privacy ringfence

New Zealand has long been different from the US or the UK when it comes to politicians’ private lives. We never developed a tabloid press.

A 2004 study in Parliamentary Affairs concluded that New Zealand media coverage of the political process had “generally avoided excessive intrusion into the private lives of politicians,” attributing this to a sense of “fair play” that survived even commercial pressure.

For decades, a kind of informal pact held – what I’ve described in previous columns as the “Mutually Assured Destruction” doctrine. Both major parties knew that all sides harboured individuals with personal vulnerabilities. So they didn’t go there. Yes, politicians kept “dirt files” on their opponents, but the missiles stayed in the silos.

John Key was pretty explicit about this when he was Prime Minister. In 2013, he told Labour MPs he’d written down their alleged misdeeds and put them in his top drawer. The following year he was even blunter: “I have quite a long list. If Labour members really want to invite me to table all of those, they are welcome to do that, but I just make one little warning to them: do not go there.” The threat worked because the pact was symmetrical. Both sides had something to lose.

But that compact is now dead. Social media killed it. When any Facebook friend can screenshot a post and send it to a newsroom, the old agreement simply cannot hold.

Every one of New Zealand’s major personal-life scandals has been broken through a channel outside traditional media. David Lange’s affair was exposed when his wife went to the papers. Don Brash was chased by media after Labour MPs raised his affair in Parliament – David Farrar has long argued the media shouldn’t have done so, and the case remains a touchstone for those arguing double standards.

Len Brown’s affair was broken on Cameron Slater’s Whale Oil blog, linked to a rival campaign. Slater was explicit about his motives: “Of course politics was involved. Of course I wanted to knock Len Brown over.” Brown survived but was finished as an electable figure. As political scientist Grant Duncan wrote today, drawing a direct parallel: “A common [opinion] was: if his wife and family can’t trust him, then we can’t trust him either.”

Jami-Lee Ross’s personal conduct was weaponised by his own deputy leader. Ian Lees-Galloway was fired after a third-party tip. Benjamin Doyle resigned from Parliament following on from Winston Peters amplifying private social media posts. And now Hipkins is under pressure, via a private Facebook post screenshotted to journalists.

The technology changes; the pattern doesn’t. The press gallery’s gatekeeping function is has been bypassed every time.

It’s worth noting the parallels between the family scandals of Lange and Hipkins – they have both been caused by spouses speaking out. Lange’s affair with his speechwriter Margaret Pope had been an open secret in Wellington for years. The press gallery knew; nobody published. That convention held until Lange’s wife Naomi and his elderly mother went to the media and named Pope. Once the family broke the silence, the dam broke too. Farrar drew that parallel explicitly today, writing that the media generally shouldn’t report on politicians’ private lives, but “It is a more difficult call when a family member states things in a public forum”.

Another detail worth noting. When Hipkins became PM in January 2023, he told the press gallery this about his former wife: “We remain incredibly close. She’s still my best friend.” He then asked media to respect his family’s privacy. For three years, they did. Farrar raised the obvious problem on Kiwiblog: “it is very, very hard to reconcile what Hipkins said in 2023 with what Paul is saying today… Either Hipkins was lying in 2023 when he said Paul was still his best friend and they were incredibly close, or something has happened since then so that they have gone from being best friends to threatened defamation lawsuits.” That gap between the public narrative and the current reality is, at minimum, a credibility question – even for those who think the underlying allegations are nobody’s business.

The Dirty politics dimension

A “dirty politics” possibility could become the next major phase of the story. Where journalists absolutely should be digging is the story behind the story. How did a private Facebook post become a national headline? Who distributed those screenshots? Perhaps that’s where the real public interest lies.

Jade Paul is not merely a private citizen. Newsroom reported she had been working as an adviser in the ministerial office of NZ First Minister Casey Costello, leaving about a year ago. Her Facebook friend list included some of the most connected people on the political right. All have denied sharing the screenshots.

Ani O’Brien, a political campaigner and former National Party staffer who now works for Jordan Williams, posted to X around the same time as the original Facebook post, writing: “They will call her crazy. She is not crazy. I suspect they will try say she is an alcoholic or something similar. They will do anything to discredit her.” She says she didn’t share the screenshot and had “always cautioned” Jade Paul about what media would do to her. But she had also publicly hinted at the relationship breakdown weeks earlier, in February, responding to a column describing Hipkins as likeable with: “Ask Hipkins’ ex-wife.”

This is not to suggest orchestration. But the composition of the audience, and the speed with which the post reached X and then newsrooms, raises questions about who it was that was spreading the Facebook screenshots. If it emerges that Hipkins’ political opponents played any role in elevating the story, the political dynamics shift dramatically. It might even generate sympathy for Hipkins – the narrative flipping from “what did he do?” to “who orchestrated this?”

And it could trigger the exact MAD retaliation the old convention was designed to prevent. Labour would have every incentive to publicise personal life details of those on the other side, of which there are surely many examples. Politicians keep dirt files. If one side is seen to have pressed the button, retaliatory strikes follow. That would be an ugly outcome for our democracy.

“The personal is political” – and selective solidarity

In her second Facebook post, Jade Paul was explicit about the feminist politics underlying her decision to speak: “So many women are hurt by high profile men who just do what they want with no consequences. We get told all of the time that if we speak out then our lives will be ruined, our kids will be impacted. We get labelled as ‘crazy’ or defamatory when we tell the truth. Today I have had enough.”

Paul’s second post plants this scandal firmly in the #MeToo frame and the feminist principle that “the personal is political”. Grant Duncan made the sharpest observation about the gender dimension. Labour relies heavily on female voters – a February Roy Morgan poll had Labour at 35% among women versus 24.5% among men. Voters, “especially women voters,” Duncan wrote, will “want to understand how kind and trustworthy Hipkins really is.” People do not mentally compartmentalise a leader’s private conduct from their public trustworthiness.

There is an uncomfortable irony that needs to be stated plainly. Some on the political left who have championed the principle that women’s allegations deserve to be heard – who have endorsed “believe all women” as a starting point – appear to have gone conspicuously quiet now that the allegations involve a leader on their own side. Others have actively sought to minimise Paul’s claims. If the principle only applies when it’s politically convenient, it isn’t really a principle at all.

Milne captured part of this: “I imagine there are many women who would like him to at least address his ex-wife’s claims with respect.” Grant Duncan was blunter: Labour “can’t try to silence or ignore the woman’s voice without crass hypocrisy.”

At the same time, the right’s sudden discovery of concern for women’s voices can also ring hollow when you remember how quickly “believe women” becomes “she’s crazy” the moment an allegation is inconvenient.

What opponents will be thinking

The election is set for 7 November. Labour and National have been polling within a point of each other. Hipkins has benefited from what Grant Duncan called “an underlying trust factor” – in a 2023 Reid poll, 53% trusted Hipkins, versus 37% for Luxon. That trust premium is now under threat. Not because the allegations are proven, but because the fog of unresolved personal scandal corrodes exactly the kind of vague goodwill that “trustworthiness” measures capture.

Opponents are staying publicly silent. That’s the MAD doctrine at work. No senior National, Act or NZ First figure has commented. They don’t want the same scrutiny applied to their own team. But indirect amplification – feeding the story to sympathetic commentators and talkback while maintaining plausible deniability – is another matter entirely.

The strategically significant wildcard: Winston Peters’ refusal to work with Hipkins. If the scandal triggered a leadership challenge, a new Labour leader could unlock NZ First as a coalition partner, paradoxically strengthening Labour’s governing prospects. For now, caucus discipline holds. But eight months is a long time in a race this tight.

The likely electoral impact is probably less about “mass voter conversion” and more “base corrosion plus distraction”. Scandals hit hardest among a politician’s own supporters. Duncan warned bluntly: “This Hipkins scandal could resurface any time before election day, possibly under cover of parliamentary privilege. And Kiwi voters don’t forgive and forget this kind of thing.”

What kind of politics do we want?

This is hardly the biggest scandal ever. It is a painful, private marriage break-up that collided with social media and an election campaign.

In the end it’s not entirely clear how the media should be covering this. Clearly, journalists should not be chasing the salacious version of events. And if the story is simply that a private relationship has ended badly and someone is furious, then much more restraint is required. The correct democratic response is for the media to step back, treat it as private, and refuse to serve as the battleground.

But journalists also can’t pretend the story doesn’t exist, because it’s already circulating widely, and it involves the leader of the opposition in an election year.

But how we respond matters. If we normalise the weaponisation of deeply personal allegations – unsubstantiated and involving children – we will simply get more of it. Once that boundary breaks, nobody can credibly complain when it’s their turn. The missiles fly both ways. Politics gets uglier and less focused on things that actually matter.

Every news cycle consumed by unverified personal claims is a news cycle not spent scrutinising policy, holding the government to account, or debating the choices New Zealanders face in November. That is the democratic cost of scandal politics, and it is real whether the allegations turn out to be true or false.

Politicians are imperfect. That’s not the question. The question is whether we want an election fought on verifiable records and policy trade-offs, or on screenshot warfare that leaves families as collateral damage. Voters ultimately care more about jobs, health, and homes than ex-spouse posts. Politicians and media would be wise to remember that.

Dr Bryce Edwards
Director of the Democracy Project

Further Reading:

Subscribe now

Read more

A huge new data centre has just been approved for Southland, and the tone of much of the coverage so far has been one of celebration. The headlines talk about a “$3.5 billion bet” on the south, an “AI factory”, a futuristic leap into the knowledge economy. Local leaders are upbeat. Business groups are upbeat. The company itself is, unsurprisingly, very upbeat.

And perhaps some of that enthusiasm is justified. New Zealand does need more serious digital infrastructure. Southland does need more economic diversification. And if a giant new industry is going to arrive anywhere in the country, there is a reasonable case that the deep south is one of the more logical places for it.

But that’s only half the story. Because behind the futuristic language and the civic cheerleading sits a much tougher set of questions. What exactly is being built? Who really benefits? Where will the electricity come from? What pressures will this place put on the national grid? What does New Zealand get in return for handing over land, water, political attention, and a very large slice of renewable power to a data venture geared heavily to offshore markets? And why has so much of the public discussion felt strangely muted, given the sheer scale of what is being proposed?

None of this is anti-technology, and it is not anti-Southland either. It is what basic democratic due diligence looks like.

What is actually being built

Datagrid New Zealand has now received resource consent for a hyperscale data centre at Makarewa, north of Invercargill, along with approval for an international subsea cable landing at Ōreti Beach. The project has been talked about for years, but the latest announcement makes it far more real. The sheer size of it hits you when you see the numbers.

The site is planned to include six data halls spread across a large campus. It is being sold as New Zealand’s first “AI factory”, language borrowed from the global tech industry to describe facilities built not just for ordinary cloud computing, but for the training and operation of artificial intelligence systems. That already tells us something important: this is not just another warehouse with servers in it. This is a proposed industrial-scale node in a global AI economy.

And that matters because a project like this is not simply local. It might be physically located in Southland, but it is designed to plug into international networks, international finance, international tech demand, and international profit streams.

That doesn’t automatically make it bad. But it does mean we should be wary of the way it is sometimes framed as a straightforward regional development story. It isn’t straightforward at all.

The sales pitch is easy, but the electricity question is not

The case being made for Datagrid is familiar enough. Southland has a cool climate, which helps with data-centre cooling. It has renewable electricity nearby. It has land. It has distance from some of the congestion and constraints of the upper North Island. It has civic leaders eager for investment. Put all that together, and the region can supposedly become a major player in the digital economy.

Fine. But the hard question starts where the sales pitch ends: power.

The reported electricity demand is around 280 megawatts. That’s a huge amount of power. It would make Datagrid the country’s second-largest electricity user after Tiwai Point. Once you get to that scale, this stops being just a private commercial project. It becomes an issue of national infrastructure and political economy.

As University of Auckland computer scientist Dr Ulrich Speidel told Mike Hosking, 280 megawatts is “about 70 percent of what Christchurch consumes” and “not a trivial amount.”

And yet the public still doesn’t have a clear enough explanation of where all that power comes from, on what terms, with what back-up, and with what effect on the rest of the country.

That’s the nub of it. If New Zealand had abundant surplus generation, fat hydro lakes, robust dry-year security, and falling power prices, this would still be a major issue, but a more manageable one. Instead, we’ve spent years being told that electricity is tight, that dry-year risk is real, that new generation needs to be built urgently, and that households and businesses should brace for higher costs.

So where does a 280MW AI datacentre fit into that picture?

Some supporters argue that Datagrid could help unlock new wind and solar investment by providing the sort of large, stable demand that developers need in order to finance new generation.

There is some logic to that. Big industrial demand can indeed help underwrite new supply. But that is only reassuring if the timing, scale, and system effects actually line up. If they don’t, what you have is not a virtuous circle but a squeeze: a giant new load arriving before the promised new generation fully materialises.

That is exactly the sort of thing the public should not be expected to accept on trust.

Not all large power users are the same

The Tiwai comparison is useful, but only up to a point. For years, New Zealand politics obsessed over the aluminium smelter and what would happen if it closed. That debate at least had one virtue: everyone understood that a plant using that much electricity had national consequences. The same should apply here.

But there is another issue. Some industrial users can reduce consumption at times of system stress. Demand response matters in an electricity system. It gives the grid breathing room. A giant AI datacentre may be far less flexible. If so, the implications are obvious. A very large, relatively constant load is not the same thing as a very large but potentially interruptible one.

None of that sinks the project. But it changes the burden of proof. If Datagrid’s demand is hard to reduce, then what obligations should come with that? Should there be stronger disclosure? Specific curtailment arrangements? A much clearer account of how the project fits within national energy planning? At the moment, that discussion feels underdeveloped to the point of absurdity.

Forty-five jobs?

Then there is the issue of jobs, where the rhetoric quickly outruns the reality. Promoters point to the big construction phase. Fair enough. Building something of this scale will employ a lot of people for a period of time. In a region like Southland, that matters.

But construction jobs are not the same thing as long-term transformation. Once the place is up and running, the reported workforce is tiny relative to the scale of the investment and the resource demand. Around 45 permanent staff has been the figure repeatedly cited.

Forty-five jobs? For a project of this scale, that is not an economic transformation.

A datacentre is not a factory in the old sense. It doesn’t absorb large numbers of local workers year after year. It doesn’t create a broad labour market in the way some traditional industries do. It is capital-intensive, electricity-intensive, infrastructure-intensive, and highly automated. That is not some scandalous revelation. It is simply the business model.

Which is why the standard regional-development script sounds a bit flimsy here. Southland may get a temporary building boom and some useful spillover benefits. But if New Zealand is effectively allocating huge volumes of renewable electricity and grid capacity to a project that directly employs only a few dozen people once operational, then we should stop pretending this is mainly a jobs story.

It is really a power-allocation story.

What does New Zealand actually get?

This is where the wider economic nationalism question creeps in, whether people like it or not.

Datagrid’s defenders would say the benefits are broader than the payroll. Better digital infrastructure. New international connectivity. More resilience. A signal that New Zealand is open for advanced-tech investment. Maybe all true.

But even then, the obvious question remains: how much of the actual value stays here? If the power is here, the land is here, the water is here, the public infrastructure is here, and much of the decision-making and profit sit offshore, then New Zealanders are entitled to ask whether this is a high-value future industry for us, or whether we are mainly providing a convenient platform for someone else’s.

That might sound harsh. But it is a perfectly normal question to ask of any export-oriented, foreign-owned, resource-hungry venture.

The phrase “AI factory” has a glamorous ring to it. Yet there is a risk that New Zealanders hear that and imagine some flourishing local ecosystem of researchers, startups, software firms, and spin-off innovation. Perhaps some of that will happen. But it may not. A lot of the real value in artificial intelligence lies not in the physical shed full of servers, but in the software, intellectual property, data, models, and platform control built on top of the hardware.

And that is precisely the sort of value that can flow elsewhere.

Water, environment, and the local costs

Electricity is the biggest national question, but it is not the only one. The project is also consented to draw a very substantial volume of groundwater for cooling and potable supply. There are reported effects on wetlands, questions around the cable landing, and cultural and ecological concerns associated with Ōreti Beach and marine life, including toheroa. The consent process has put mitigation measures and monitoring around some of these issues. That is good. But it doesn’t make the issues trivial.

Too often in New Zealand, environmental concerns are treated as if they are merely irritants once a project has been deemed economically exciting enough. They shouldn’t be. They are part of the real balance sheet.

And there is a democratic point here too. If a project of this magnitude proceeds largely through technical reports, non-notified processes, and a limited public arena, then the country misses out on the kind of serious, open debate such a development deserves.

That is not a procedural nitpick. It is a political problem.

Who has had access?

Then there is the influence question. As with many big projects in New Zealand, Datagrid has not emerged from nowhere. It has spent years cultivating relationships, meeting ministers, working with officials, building regional alliances, and making its case. Again, none of that is inherently improper. That is how major developments often proceed. But it does matter.

It matters because New Zealand has a very casual culture around lobbying and access. We still tend to act as if influence is only worth discussing when there is a smoking gun. In reality, influence is usually quieter than that. It is about who gets meetings, who gets heard early, who is treated as a strategic partner, who is inside the room when frameworks are being shaped, and who is left reading about it later.

Datagrid appears to have been very effective on that front. Good for them. But that is exactly why the rest of us should be more questioning, not less.

When a foreign-owned company seeking major access to land, water, electricity, and regulatory pathways has been moving through the political system for years, the burden should not fall on the public to prove something sinister. The burden should be on the system to be more transparent.

The international warning signs

Supporters of the project sometimes talk as if New Zealand would be foolish to hesitate. The future is digital. AI is booming. Countries are competing for this investment. If Southland can host a major facility, why overthink it?

Because other countries have already gone through this. Overseas, datacentres have become politically contentious for good reason. They chew through vast amounts of electricity and water. They can strain local infrastructure. They often deliver far fewer jobs than the hype suggests. And they raise a deeper strategic question about who bears the physical costs of the digital economy.

Ireland is the closest analogue. Data centres grew from consuming 5% of Ireland’s national electricity in 2015 to 22% by 2024. In Dublin, they now consume approximately 50% of all metered electricity. Irish households pay among the highest electricity rates in the EU. In 2021, Ireland imposed a de facto moratorium on new data centre grid connections in the Greater Dublin Area after the grid operator warned of rolling blackout risk.

That doesn’t mean New Zealand should slam the door. It does mean we should stop behaving as if every warning amounts to backwardness.

A mature country would look at the international experience and say: right, what are the conditions under which this works for us? What safeguards are needed? What disclosures should be mandatory? What public benefits should be locked in? How do we protect households and smaller businesses from being the residual shock absorbers of somebody else’s energy demand?

Instead, much of the response here still feels cringy. More like excitement at being invited to the party than a serious assessment of the bill.

This may still be a good project, but Datagrid needs to prove it

To be clear, I’m not arguing that Datagrid should automatically be stopped. The project may well go ahead and become an important part of New Zealand’s digital infrastructure. It may help bring forward new generation. It may improve connectivity. It may help Southland diversify. It may even become one of those rare big bets that genuinely pays off.

But if that is the case, then the proponents and political champions should have no problem answering some very basic questions in public.

Where is the electricity coming from? What happens in tight years? How flexible is the load? What are the long-term public benefits beyond the construction phase? How much value remains in New Zealand? What are the full trade-offs for households, other businesses, and the wider grid? And why, given the sheer scale of the project, has there been so little sustained national debate?

Those are not the questions of luddites or nimbys. They are the questions of citizens.

Right now, the cheerleaders are out in Southland, and perhaps that is understandable. But the rest of the country should be a bit more hard-headed. New Zealand has a long history of waving through big developments on the basis of glowing promises, only to discover later that the gains were narrower, the dependencies deeper, and the public leverage weaker than first advertised.

Maybe Datagrid will be different. But if so, now is the time to show it.

Dr Bryce Edwards
Director of the Democracy Project

Further Reading:

Subscribe now

Read more

Paul Eagle has been found out. Not by the press, though journalists have been circling for months, but by the Auditor-General, whose inquiry report into the Chatham Islands Council was tabled in Parliament yesterday. It is one of the most damning official documents produced about a New Zealand public servant in years. And the man at the centre of it is not some anonymous council manager who got in over his head. He is a former Labour MP, a former deputy mayor of Wellington, and a political operator with decades of experience in public life.

The report lays out a pattern of conduct that goes well beyond poor judgement. Eagle oversaw a $460,000 renovation of the council-owned house he lived in. He hired consultants he already knew and arranged for his wife to be subcontracted. And when auditors came asking questions, he fabricated documents, copied a builder’s signature on contracts the builder had never seen, and denied it – before eventually admitting he had “panicked.”

Eagle resigned last month. But resignation is not accountability. The question now is whether anyone – the police, his former party, central government – will impose real consequences. Or whether, as happens so often in New Zealand public life, a quiet exit will be treated as punishment enough.

The House that Eagle gold-plated

The centrepiece of the scandal is a council-owned house on the Chatham Islands, rented to the chief executive as part of the job. The property needed work, and in 2022 the council budgeted $200,000 for it, funded from “Better Off Funding”, which was Crown money meant for community wellbeing projects.

Then Eagle arrived. Before he even started, he and his wife inspected the house and sent through a wishlist: new kitchen cabinetry, stainless steel benches, bathroom fittings, deck work, a garage conversion. The budget was bumped to $460,000. Eagle took sole control. He directed the builders, approved costs, managed contractors. No independent oversight. He was the tenant, the beneficiary, and the one signing the cheques.

The Auditor-General is blunt: the arrangement was “inappropriate.” Suppliers described the spending as “widely considered to be excessive.” One detail captures the tone of the whole affair. The original builder’s quote allowed $10,000 for Fisher & Paykel kitchen appliances. Eagle swapped in Miele – the premium German brand – at $18,102. He ordered them before the council had even approved the revised budget. He also continued work on the garage conversion after the council explicitly rejected it.

All of this on a council that is, by any honest accounting, broke. The Chatham Islands Council serves about 650 people. It runs at the edge of a $500,000 bank overdraft. It cannot fix potholes or connect houses to water. More than 90% of its revenue comes from the Crown. Auditors have raised “significant doubt” about whether it can continue as a going concern. This is the institution Paul Eagle was treating as a personal renovation fund.

Fabricated documents and a copied signature

If the house renovation were the only problem, it would be bad enough. But what lifts this affair into a different category of scandal is what Eagle did when investigators came knocking.

The NZ Herald’s Ethan Manera put it plainly: Eagle “misled an official probe into his ‘excessive’ spending… by creating his own financial records, including adding another person’s signature to documents.” He submitted quotes and contracts to auditors that appeared to come from the builder. They did not. Eagle had created or altered them himself. He obtained the builder’s signature separately and attached it to contracts the builder had never reviewed. He backdated procurement memorandums prepared in 2025, making them look as though they had been written in 2024.

Initially he denied it. Then he changed his story. His eventual explanation, offered in a letter published alongside the report, has already become notorious: “In hindsight, I recognise I panicked when I realised documentation was incomplete and I tried to fix this.”

That word “panicked” is doing extraordinary work. What Eagle describes as panicking, most people would call fabricating evidence during an official investigation.

The Auditor-General found the information Eagle provided was “misleading” and “created an incorrect picture about when certain events occurred (for example, when a contract was signed) or whether they had happened at all.” Eagle’s actions were “unacceptable and demonstrated exceptionally poor practice and judgement.”

Andrea Vance reported in The Post that the documents Eagle supplied “appeared to be from contractors but had actually been edited or created by him.” Catherine McGregor, writing in The Spinoff’s Bulletin today, noted the inquiry grew out of a 2024 annual audit that flagged spending “that could be seen to give private benefit to staff.”

Corruption, fraud, forgery?

The Auditor-General’s report stopped short of pronouncing on legality. It says it has “not reached a view on the legality of the chief executive’s actions” but considered it “sufficient to draw the Council, Parliament, and the public’s attention to the matter.”

That language is deliberately a signpost for someone else – the Police, the Serious Fraud Office – to pick up the trail.

The No Right Turn blog was characteristically direct. As the blogger wrote: “there are a number of names for it: corruption. Fraud. More specifically altering documents with intent to deceive, and using altered documents with intent to deceive. These are serious crimes, and Eagle needs to be prosecuted for them.” When a person in power abuses their position to enrich or advantage themselves, the blog argued, “that is corruption, and they need to be held to account.”

That seems true. Creating false documents, adding someone else’s signature without their consent, providing misleading information to statutory investigators, backdating procurement records. These are not administrative slip-ups. They sound a lot like offences under the Crimes Act.

The Wife, the consultants, and the conflicts

The house renovation is the headline. But the Auditor-General’s report reveals a broader pattern of behaviour that is just as troubling.

Eagle hired a consultancy firm he already knew, without following procurement processes. No formal contract was signed initially – they relied on a verbal agreement. Over time, the council paid this firm approximately $350,000 plus GST. Eagle’s wife, Miriam, was proposed as a subcontractor on a $109,600 contract variation to lead a 30-year strategy project. The Auditor-General found no evidence other councillors or staff were even told about the conflict of interest.

He also provided misleading information to the Department of Internal Affairs about how far the consultancy work had progressed, claiming it was “fully contracted and being delivered” when only a $20,000 contract existed. This matters because Better Off Funding – Crown money for community wellbeing – was being used to pay for some of this work.

RNZ’s Bill Hickman reported that staff told investigators of a “toxic” working environment and said concerns raised about spending had been “dismissed by senior leaders.” The Auditor-General confirmed: “There was a culture of blame that was set from the top.” When a former employee eventually made a protected disclosure, they weren’t raising an administrative red flag. They were sounding an alarm about the ethical collapse of their workplace.

A political animal, not a hapless bureaucrat

Eagle’s defence leans heavily on the excuse that he started three months early, that his predecessor fell ill, that he had no formal induction. These are mitigating circumstances for minor procedural slips. They do not explain ordering $18,000 of premium appliances before the budget was approved, managing a renovation you personally benefit from, hiring your wife as a subcontractor, or forging a builder’s signature on contracts you created yourself.

This is not a man who stumbled into a role he didn’t understand. Eagle was Wellington’s deputy mayor. He was a Labour MP for six years. He ran for mayor. He is a political operator with decades of experience in local and central government. The idea that he did not understand basic procurement obligations, conflict-of-interest rules, or the duty not to fabricate documents is not credible.

Jonathan Milne’s reporting in Newsroom has been particularly revealing. As far back as January, Milne flagged Eagle’s scrutiny over the “premium German-engineered fridge-freezer” and procurement questions. At that point, Eagle insisted he would not resign. Then in February, two hours after telling Milne he hadn’t heard the audit’s final conclusions, the mayor announced his “agreed” resignation. The timeline speaks for itself.

Should the Police investigate?

Yes. Obviously yes.

The Auditor-General’s deliberate refusal to opine on legality is a red flag, not a green light. Someone needs to pick it up. Creating false documents, adding a person’s signature without their informed consent, providing misleading information to investigators, backdating procurement records – in any other context, this behaviour would attract serious scrutiny from the Police.

The interim chief executive, Bob Penter, has declined to say whether the council is referring the matter to police. He should. Local Government Minister Simon Watts has described the situation as “a very serious matter” and said the community “deserves accountability.” He is right. But accountability means investigation, not just ministerial statements.

We cannot have a system where “I panicked” is a valid defence for the falsification of public records. If a low-level clerk in a government department had done this, they would be facing criminal charges. Why should a former MP be treated any differently?

Where is the Labour Party?

This is the question that will not go away. Eagle was Labour’s man in Rongotai for six years. He was the first Māori male to win a general electorate seat for the party in over a century. He ran for the Wellington mayoralty with Labour’s endorsement. He is, as far as anyone can tell, still a Labour Party member.

And yet: nothing. No statements or attempts to distance the party from Eagle. There hasn’t even been an expression of concern. The silence from the Labour benches has been deafening. They were happy to ride his coat-tails when he was winning electorate seats in Rongotai. They seem remarkably shy now that he has been caught creating fake contracts and forging signatures.

If Labour takes integrity seriously, it cannot stay silent. At what point does a former MP who fabricated official documents, misled a statutory watchdog, used public money to upgrade his own home, and funnelled contracts to his wife cross a line that triggers consequences from the party?

Labour should be asked directly: is Paul Eagle still a party member? Does the party condone his conduct? If Labour is serious about transparency, accountability, and service to communities, it should be putting clear distance between itself and Eagle. Expulsion from the party would be a proportionate response. Silence is not.

A Community left holding the bag

Into this fragile community stepped a politically connected former MP who gold-plated his kitchen, channelled public money to mates and family, created a toxic workplace, and then fabricated documents to cover his tracks. The community didn’t just lose a CEO. It lost time, trust, and scarce public resources it could not afford to waste.

Former mayor Monique Croon, who signed off much of Eagle’s spending, told Newsroom: “I live in a very small community, and I’ve got people looking at me as if I’m a criminal.” That is what happens when public officials treat public money as their own. It poisons a whole community.

Resignation is not accountability

Eagle’s offer to participate in a hui to apologise for his “shortcomings” should be seen for what it is: an attempt to frame a systemic integrity failure as a personal growth opportunity. The language of his response letter – “I accept and take ownership,” “I deeply regret,” “my confidence was misplaced” – is the polished vocabulary of a professional politician managing a scandal. It is not a reckoning.

New Zealand has a chronic problem with accountability in public life. Officials who breach the public trust resign and move on. Sometimes they resurface in new roles. Sometimes they run for Parliament again.

This case should be different. The police should examine whether the document fabrication and misleading of investigators constitute criminal offences. Labour should publicly address Eagle’s continued membership. And “I panicked” cannot be allowed to stand as a defence for the falsification of public records. For a community as vulnerable as the Chatham Islands, the damage done by Eagle’s tenure demands a full reckoning – from the police, from Labour, and from a political class that has tolerated this kind of conduct for far too long.

Dr Bryce Edwards
Director of the Democracy Project

Further Reading:

Subscribe now

Read more

Election year is ten weeks old and already the donations register at the Electoral Commission tells a familiar but uncomfortable story. Nearly a million dollars in large donations has been declared so far in 2026. The coalition parties have opened the year with a commanding fundraising lead. The opposition parties are barely visible. And the people making the biggest donations are the same sorts of donors who usually dominate this terrain: wealthy businessmen, corporate entities with regulatory interests, and a handful of individuals who spread political money across parties the way investors spread risk.

What follows is a guide to where the money is coming from, who these donors are, and why some of these donations should trouble anyone who cares about the health of New Zealand democracy.

The Numbers

The Electoral Commission’s register of donations exceeding $20,000 is one of the few windows we have into who bankrolls our politicians. In election years, these large donations must be declared within 20 working days. As of early March, the three coalition parties have collectively received $750,000 in disclosed large donations. Act leads the pack with $350,000. National has pulled in $250,000. NZ First has received $150,000.

On the other side? Labour has received $22,333. The Greens have received $43,015. That is a ratio of roughly ten to one in favour of the political right.

Some of this gap is normal. Parties of government always attract more donor attention than parties in opposition. But the sheer scale of it, this early in the cycle, is extraordinary. As Anna Whyte reported for Interest.co.nz, the money started flowing earlier than in 2023, when the first large declarations did not appear until late February.​

And remember: this is only the tip of the iceberg. The $20,000 threshold captures the biggest donations, but plenty of five-figure sums sit beneath it, invisible until the annual returns land in April or May next year. And donations made during 2025 are still hidden from public view. They will not appear until the annual returns are published in the next couple of months. So, what we can see on the register right now is a fraction of what is actually sloshing around the system.

A Gas company says thank you

The single most striking entry on the 2026 register is GMP Environmental Limited, which gave $100,000 to each of the three coalition parties in mid-February. That is $300,000 in total, spread identically across National, Act, and NZ First. Same amounts, near-identical dates.

The name GMP Environmental does not tell you much. It sounds vaguely green. But a quick trip to the Companies Register reveals the truth: GMP Environmental is a subsidiary of Greymouth Petroleum, one of New Zealand’s largest oil and gas operators. The use of a subsidiary with “Environmental” in its name rather than the parent company name is worth noting. Nothing illegal about it. But it has the convenient effect of making the donation look rather different at first glance.

And the timing makes this impossible to ignore.

In 2021, the previous Labour government passed the Crown Minerals (Decommissioning and Other Matters) Amendment Act, a direct response to the Tamarind disaster which left taxpayers facing a bill of about $400 million to clean-up an abandoned offshore oil field. The law imposed automatic liability on oil and gas companies for their own decommissioning costs. The industry despised it.

When the National-led Coalition took power in late 2023, the lobbying began. The result was the Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2025, enacted in August last year, which rolled back key parts of that protection. The new law weakened decommissioning liability, introduced ministerial discretion over who pays for cleanup, and changed the very purpose of the Crown Minerals Act from “manage” to “promote” petroleum exploration. Greymouth Petroleum was among the most vocal lobbyists for these changes.

Just months later, one of Greymouth’s subsidiaries transfers $100,000 to each of the three parties that delivered exactly the legislative outcome the gas industry wanted.

The blogger No Right Turn put it with characteristic bluntness, calling the donations “payment for services rendered” and describing what he sees as “naked corruption. Bribery. Law for sale.” He noted that it takes little effort to follow ownership up the corporate chain to see who is really paying, or to consider the legislative history to see what they are paying for.

That is strong language, and not everyone will agree with it. But the sequence is hard to ignore. A company lobbies hard for legislative relief. The government delivers it. The company then funds the government parties in equal measure through a subsidiary that obscures the connection. You do not need to prove a formal quid pro quo for this to corrode public trust. The appearance alone is enough. The No Right Turn blog argued that we need to “ban large donations, get money out of politics forever, and break the power of the rich over our political parties.”

Brian Cartmell: half a million and counting

As RNZ’s Farah Hancock reports, the largest individual donor to emerge so far is Brian Cartmell, a Queenstown-based technology entrepreneur who, by his own account, has distributed at least half a million dollars across the political parties.

Cartmell’s $100,000 donation to the Opportunity Party was declared in early March. Act confirmed receiving $200,000 from him in 2025. Cartmell himself said he donated equally to the three coalition parties, though neither National nor NZ First would confirm amounts.

RNZ’s Farah Hancock has shed useful light on his background. She reports: “Cartmell moved to New Zealand in 2010 and gave up his US citizenship in 2015. His former professional background includes working for the Internet Entertainment Group, an online pornography company. It was a pioneer in live webcam shows and subscription services.” According to Hancock, Cartmell also founded a domain registry firm that managed the .cc country code for the Cocos Islands. He was also an early investor in Bitcoin.​

Today the Companies Register shows Cartmell as a director and shareholder in a range of New Zealand companies, from the crowdsourcing platform PledgeMe to the craft beer brand Yeastie Boys. According to Hancock, he also holds a small stake in Invisible Urban Charging, an electric vehicle company co-founded by former National Party candidate Jake Bezzant.

In a statement on his website, Cartmell said the coalition parties represent “the best available chance of navigating” a period of significant change, and that “healthy democracies need parties willing to put forward ideas major parties won’t.” Cartmell’s statement that “voters, not donors, decide the direction of New Zealand” is at best a convenient fiction.

He says he supports transparent political donations. Fair enough. That is more than many big donors manage. But when one individual is distributing more than half a million dollars across the political system, ordinary voters are entitled to ask what kind of access that money buys.

The Hedger

Another donor deserving attention is Michael Grant Sullivan, an Auckland building and civil engineering businessman who donated $200,000 across all three coalition parties on the same day in January. National received $100,000. Act and NZ First got $50,000 each.

Sullivan founded Clearwater Construction in 1984 and has built a reputation in large-scale residential, commercial, and industrial projects across Auckland and Christchurch, including luxury apartment developments. He is now the director of Countrywide Properties, the firm behind some of the most expensive luxury apartment projects in the country. His latest project, 22 Karori in Orakei, features a penthouse that recently sold for around $17m, a record-breaking price for the New Zealand apartment market.

He had previously given $50,000 each to Act and National before the 2023 election. When contacted by Interest.co.nz, Sullivan preferred not to comment.

His approach is the textbook hedge. He is not backing one party. He is backing the entire coalition. The message is fairly clear: whoever holds the relevant ministerial warrants after the election, Sullivan wants all three parties to know he supported them.

This matters. Because governments don’t just set general policy, they shape the planning system, consenting pathways, infrastructure decisions, procurement settings, and tax preferences that can massively affect property and construction profits. When a single wealthy donor in that sector funds every party in government on the same day, it is hard not to read that $200,000 donation as an investment in a relationship with power. In fact, for property developers whose business depends on the speed and profitability of high-end developments, a $200k investment in the three parties holding the levers of housing and Fast-Track reforms is simply good business.

Act: the party that’s cleaning up

If any single party is doing conspicuously well in this early money rush, it is Act. The party has declared $350,000 in large donations so far this year, more than National and NZ First combined.

Alongside GMP Environmental’s $100,000 and Sullivan’s $50,000, Act has received $100,000 from Nicholas Mowbray and another $100,000 from Van Den Brink Karaka Limited.

Mowbray is the co-founder of Zuru, the global toy and consumer goods empire that has made the Mowbray family one of the wealthiest in New Zealand. His political giving is prodigious and almost entirely directed rightward. Public donation records show $100,000 to Act in late 2024, $150,000 to Act in 2023, and $250,000 to National in 2022. Add the $100,000 to Act in February this year and his cumulative political donations since 2022 exceed $600,000, the vast majority flowing to Act.

Van Den Brink Karaka Limited sits within the Van Den Brink family’s poultry empire. The family business, founded in 1954, is one of New Zealand’s three largest poultry processors, has a turnover reported at around $200 million, and employs between 400 and 600 staff. Brinks Chicken is the brand most consumers will recognise. This is a significant corporate donation from a major player in New Zealand food production.

The pattern is hard to miss. Act, the party most committed to deregulation, lower taxes, and smaller government, is attracting the lion’s share of big corporate and wealthy individual money. Whether those donors are buying specific policy outcomes or simply supporting a party whose ideology they share is the eternal question of political finance. But the alignment between Act’s agenda and the commercial interests of its major donors is not accidental. Less regulation, lower compliance costs, a friendlier environment for business. The donors know what they are doing. They know what they are funding.

The Left’s thin war chest

Look at the other side and the contrast is painful.

Labour’s sole declared donation is $22,333 from Mary Theresa O’Brien, a Beach Haven, Auckland resident. O’Brien passed away on 1 March 2026, aged 92. Her obituary described her as a brilliant violinist and devoted teacher. It is a poignant donation. It looks nothing like the corporate and business money flowing to the right.

The Green Party’s only declared donation of $43,014.56 came from Francisco Hernandez, one of their own list MPs. This is an internal party tithe — Green MPs routinely donate a share of their parliamentary salary back to the party — not the same as corporate money buying access.

Phillip Mills, the Les Mills gym franchise boss and founder of the environmental advocacy group Pure Advantage, is the one significant donor operating on the centre-left. He gave $50,000 to the Opportunity Party in January, the first big donation of election year to cross the disclosure threshold. He told the Herald’s Adam Pearse he was confident the Opportunity Party could break into Parliament, drawing a comparison with the “teal” independents who shook up Australian politics. “What we’ve seen from the current coalition Government is some really environmentally destructive stuff,” Mills said. “There are just a lot of people that are really pissed off about it.”

Mills also confirmed donating $100,000 to Labour and $50,000 to the Greens late last year, amounts that will appear in the annual returns due in April. His vision is a Labour-Greens-Opportunity coalition. Whether that is realistic or not, his willingness to spread money to a new party reflects genuine frustration with the existing options.

The Opportunity Party wildcard

One intriguing subplot is the emergence of the Opportunity Party as a serious fundraising operation. Between Cartmell’s $100,000 and Mills’s $50,000, the small party has declared $150,000 in large donations. For a party that received around $300,000 in total donations across all of 2023, and has never won a seat in Parliament, that is a dramatic start.

The party’s general manager is Iain Lees-Galloway, a former Labour minister, and its new leader is Auckland businesswoman Qiulae Wong. Lees-Galloway told RNZ the donations were “incredibly helpful” for a party without parliamentary resources. “A donation like this makes a huge difference to us to be able to get our message out.”

What is interesting is that the Opportunity Party is attracting money from opposite ends. Cartmell backs the coalition. Mills backs Labour and the Greens. Both have chosen to also put money behind this small outfit. That could signal genuine crossover appeal. Or it could simply reflect the eclectic tastes of people rich enough to spread their political giving around without worrying about the bill.

What this adds up to politically

If you zoom out from the individual donors, a bigger pattern appears.

The coalition’s ten-to-one fundraising advantage over the main opposition parties is not just a curiosity. It is a problem for democracy. Not because wealthy people should be barred from political participation, but because this level of financial imbalance inevitably distorts who gets heard.

Many of these 2026 examples of donations illustrate what is wrong. The GMP Environmental donations come straight after they have successfully lobbied for a major legislative change. Whether or not there was an explicit deal, the appearance of purchased influence is toxic. And the hedging by Sullivan and Cartmell reinforces the point. These are not donations driven by ideological passion for one party’s philosophy. They are strategic investments to keep doors open in whatever minister’s office matters after the election.

And what we can see is only a fraction of the total. Cartmell’s 2025 donations to the coalition parties are not yet on the public record. We know about them only because a journalist (RNZ’s Farah Hancock) asked and Cartmell chose to confirm some of them. Without that journalism, voters heading into the general election later this year would have no idea. The disclosure system catches the big fish eventually, but the lag between when donations are made and when the public can see them remains enormous.

Every election cycle we have this same conversation. The money flows in, questions get raised, politicians insist donations do not buy influence, and nothing changes. Until New Zealand gets serious about limiting the power of money in politics, we will keep watching the same pattern play out: a handful of wealthy donors and corporate interests bankrolling the parties most sympathetic to their worldview, while everyone else is left to hope their single vote still counts for something.

Dr Bryce Edwards
Director of the Democracy Project

Further Reading:

Subscribe now

Read more

The final phase of the Covid inquiry is out, and almost nobody will be fully happy with what it says. The report says New Zealand got plenty right, but it also lays out a string of failures, blind spots and overreaches. It is neither the devastating indictment that opponents of the Labour government wanted, nor the full vindication that its defenders might have hoped for.

That is probably why the political reaction has been so predictable. National and Act have seized on the sections about Auckland’s lockdown, excessive spending, and the poor handling of some vaccine mandates. Labour has highlighted the overall conclusion that New Zealand’s decisions were mostly “considered and appropriate” and that the country had “among one of the best pandemic responses in the world.” Even New Zealand First, which pushed hard for this second phase of the inquiry, is claiming vindication while also dismissing the process as inadequate. Winston Peters dismissed the inquiry itself as “totally deficient, in terms of reference, in terms of personnel”.

So everyone walks away with something they can claim as vindication, but also something they’d rather not talk about.

As RNZ’s Ellen O’Dwyer framed it neatly, politicians on all sides found exactly what they needed in the report’s 530-plus pages. Luke Malpass, writing in the Post, nailed the politics of the thing. He describes the report as a good thing for New Zealand, arguing its real impact will be felt in future rather than now. Right now, it is “mainly a helpful tool for the Government to use to whack Labour — and in particular Chris Hipkins — for decisions made during the lockdowns.” Although, he added, “probably not as helpful as some in the Government had hoped.”

Malpass argues people were scared, and that the politics of the time rewarded caution over risk‑taking. Whether a lockdown lasted a week longer here or there “is hardly uncovering some enormous blunder in the context of the overall response.”

The Auckland question

The finding doing the most political work right now is the one about Auckland’s long 2021 lockdown. The report confirms that Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield recommended Auckland move down from Alert Level 4. Instead, then Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins took a paper to Cabinet recommending an additional five days at Level 4, and Cabinet agreed. There is also the matter of the Auckland boundary over Christmas 2021. The Royal Commission found that Cabinet decided to keep it in place until January 16, against advice from officials that the restriction was “not necessary or practical.”

Heather du Plessis-Allan put it bluntly. Bloomfield “wasn’t the conservative one urging caution. In fact, he was more reasonable than the Government.” With the lockdown costing Auckland up to $100 million a day, she argued, “Chippy unnecessarily killed jobs and businesses when he didn’t have to.”

It’s not that simple, though. Marc Daalder, writing for Newsroom, pointed out that the Royal Commission did not explicitly conclude that the Auckland lockdown went on too long. The report hedged, noting that the lack of transition planning may have contributed to its length, but adding that “it may be that outcomes would have been the same or not significantly different overall.” On other occasions, ministers actually overrode health advice in the opposite direction: reducing restrictions in Auckland in early November despite officials recommending they be maintained.

Hipkins has contested the framing too. His office pointed to post-Cabinet transcripts where Bloomfield himself advised that “another week in alert level 4 in Auckland gives us our best chance to really finish the job off here.”

Speaking to Mike Hosking this morning, Hipkins went further than his prepared lines. He conceded that if he could go back, he would handle the end of the Auckland lockdown differently. He also said he would have pushed harder on the rollout of rapid antigen testing, where there had been a conflict between ministers and the Ministry of Health. “I think not doing some of those things were mistakes”, he said. It was a notable admission, although Hipkins also insisted the report was “pretty fair and balanced” despite what he called its “loaded terms of reference.”

The Spinoff’s Alice Neville made the most cutting point about how the report’s findings are being selectively wielded. She pointed out that government ministers have been spinning the findings well beyond what the report actually says. Act’s press release claimed officials were “ignored by Labour,” when the report itself says the key lockdown decisions were “sufficiently informed.” Neville’s conclusion was bleak: “It didn’t matter what the report said. Why would it? Reports are long. Reports are boring. No one wants to relive the pandemic by reading this one. People in power can say what they want.”

The Advice ministers never saw

Perhaps the most explosive specific finding concerns teenagers and vaccine mandates. The Covid-19 Vaccine Technical Advisory Group twice advised against requiring two doses of the Pfizer vaccine for 12- to 17-year-olds, citing myocarditis risk. That advice never reached ministers. The commission called this failure “significant.”

As the Post’s Harriet Laughton reported, the firmer piece of advice, dated December 9, 2021, and stating that the risks were “insufficient to justify mandating a 2 dose schedule of the Pfizer vaccine” for under-18s, was simply not provided to ministers. An earlier, softer version was seen by then Associate Health Minister Ayesha Verrall, who noted her concern about “insufficient data on safety of second dose.” But the commission found the December advice was “different in substance” from what ministers actually received.

Liam Hehir, writing in The Blue Review, called this “the most damning specific finding.” He argued it revealed that “government mandates continued to reflect outdated advice while updated advice sat somewhere in the system, undelivered.” Whether this was bureaucratic incompetence or something worse, the commission’s findings demand a clearer accounting.

Hipkins called it “a huge oversight by the officials who prepared that advice.” The Ministry of Health acknowledged the failing, saying “the standard was not met.” Those words may be the most understated admission in the entire affair. When advice about myocarditis risks to teenagers never reaches the ministers signing off mandates, that’s not just a bureaucratic slip‑up, it’s a breakdown in democratic accountability

Mandates: valid tool, botched execution

On vaccine mandates more broadly, the commission did not condemn them outright. It found they are “a valid intervention that should be kept in the toolbox for future pandemic responses.” But it was sharply critical of how they were implemented and monitored.

The Government did not track how many workers were affected. Job losses were not tracked. Reinstatements were not tracked. Enforcement activity was not tracked. Advice about whether to continue or remove mandates was therefore flying blind. The Spinoff’s Alice Neville noted the “striking absence of monitoring.”

Research conducted for the inquiry found that by July 2024, almost 25 percent of education workers who declined vaccination were not in employment, compared to 11 percent of those who got vaccinated early. These are “wage scarring” impacts that the commission said were foreseeable but poorly monitored.

Hehir’s verdict was blunt: “A policy affecting an unknown number of New Zealanders’ livelihoods was extended and modified without anyone in the system being able to say with confidence how many people it was affecting.” Cabinet papers did not explicitly discuss whether rights restrictions were proportionate to public health benefit. No real consideration was given to less restrictive alternatives.

That is a remarkable failure of basic accountability. One of the most intrusive uses of state power in recent New Zealand history — affecting people’s livelihoods, careers, incomes and reputations — and the Government did not properly track its own policy consequences.

From a different angle entirely, Te Pāti Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer said the mandates had been “cruel and harsh” on Māori, and that the inquiry treated the role of iwi as “an extra, instead of a critical part of the response.”

The Spending question

The report’s findings on fiscal policy have been fought over too. Around half of the $60 billion Covid Response and Recovery Fund was spent on things not directly related to the pandemic. The “shovel-ready” programme was singled out as “not targeted to costs arising from the pandemic” and by nature not “timely or temporary.” The commission also found that quantitative easing and other unconventional monetary policies “had significant costs,” and that stimulatory measures went too far and for too long.

The Greens’ Ricardo Menéndez March made what Malpass called “a good point”—acknowledging that “an over-reliance on unconventional monetary policy saw one of the largest transfers of wealth that we have ever seen, along with the inflationary environment impacting low-income New Zealanders the most.” That point matters because the fallout was not evenly spread. Lower-income New Zealanders got hit harder, while asset owners often came through far better. The economic fallout was not neutral. It hit lower-income New Zealanders hardest, inflated asset values, and deepened existing divides.

But on the Treasury warnings that Simeon Brown has made so much of, the picture is more nuanced than the political talking points suggest. The commission found that “Treasury advice in 2021 was that the fiscal response associated with lockdowns was prudent.” Treasury was, on more than one occasion, “supportive of the economic measures that were in place.” The shift came in 2022, when the stimulus should have been wound back sooner. The report was clear that “decision-makers followed that advice” during 2021. It was in the transition period that things went off track.

The Gaping hole

Several commentators have pointed to what the inquiry did not cover. Hehir highlighted that the terms of reference excluded the foundational year of pandemic governance (February 2020 to January 2021) when MIQ was built, core Covid legislation was passed, and the country locked down for the first time. He was blunt about why that period was excluded, pointing to NZ First’s role as a coalition partner during that time: “An inquiry that leaves that year largely unscrutinised is, whatever else it is, convenient for the party currently most invested in making the most of performative populist outrage about Covid overreach.”

Hipkins has made a similar point from the other direction, alleging the terms of reference were “deliberately constructed to achieve a particular outcome.” The exclusion of the period when NZ First was in government is a legitimate concern. It leaves a significant gap in the historical record.

And there is the matter of participation. Ardern, Robertson, and Hipkins all declined to appear at public hearings, though they said they cooperated extensively in private interviews. Robertson called the public hearings a “show trial.” That is an awkward look for former leaders of a government that repeatedly invoked transparency and openness during the pandemic itself. If the inquiry was worth having – and Labour established the first phase of it – then its processes deserved full engagement, not selective participation.

Hipkins is, in a sense, the last one left standing. Speaking on Newstalk ZB today, he noted that former colleagues had moved on, and defended their right to do so, pointing out that “it’s pretty unusual for a government to be subjected to the amount of post-office scrutiny that they have been.” It is an understandable position. But it also underscores the accountability gap: the people who made the biggest calls are the least available to explain them.

As Ani O’Brien put it, by declining to appear publicly the former ministers “deprived us all of the opportunity to understand and seek accountability.” When a government exercises extraordinary emergency powers, the public has a right to expect those who wielded that power to account for it in the most open forum available.

The Report nobody will read

The most politically astute take on the whole affair might have been Malpass’ observation about the entire exercise:

“Everyone also has a pet theory about Covid-19. Mine is that just about everyone is a little bit ashamed of how they acted during the pandemic. Maybe you denounced fellow Kiwis a bit too gladly for not following the rules. Maybe you went down an anti-vax rabbit hole… Maybe you dobbed in your neighbour for going to the supermarket too often or inviting some mates over. Maybe you treated your partner or family a bit shabbily. Or irrationally bought a thousand rolls of toilet paper. The point is that most people seem to want to forget the whole episode. The public does not like reading stories about it, politicians do not much like talking about it, and dwelling on it does not appear to be an electoral winner.”

He noted that all political parties were broadly aligned on the rules until late 2021, when the Auckland lockdown dragged on and the public became more receptive to arguments about trade-offs. Labour was sure to remind everyone in the House that the then new National leader Christopher Luxon had been asking why the government was not spending more.

This is a good report, Malpass concluded, “one that will be important for New Zealand in decades to come. But try as the Government might, it is difficult to see it having much impact in the current political climate — or giving anyone much of a political advantage.”

The ODT made a related point today, observing that most New Zealanders already knew the broad outlines of what went wrong. But it pointed out something more immediate: the report was released as New Zealand enters its ninth wave of Covid, with more than 50 people hospitalised and 19 dead in the past week. Covid hasn’t gone away.

What this report is really about

I’ve followed these debates since the early days of the pandemic, and what gnaws at me most is the power dynamics. Emergency rules rushed under urgency. Scant checks on rights or alternatives. Officials gatekeeping advice that ministers say they never received. It’s a warning about how crises concentrate authority — and about how quickly the boring but essential work of monitoring, review, and transparency gets shelved when governments feel they are on a war footing.

The inequality element runs through the whole thing. Mandates hit low-wage sectors hardest. Lockdowns crushed small businesses while larger players adapted. Quantitative easing juiced asset prices and widened the wealth gap. The Auckland-Wellington disconnect — which business leaders and community figures described in vivid terms to the Post — is not just a pandemic gripe. It speaks to a centralised system of power that struggles to accommodate regional realities, even in a crisis.

This is not a whitewash, but nor is it the grand scandal some wanted. What it really is, is a portrait of governance under pressure, warts and all. Transparency gaps — like unshared teen vaccine advice — breed long-term distrust. The absence of tracking on mandate fallout is not just sloppy administration; it is a failure of democratic accountability, hiding the costs of policy from the voters who bore them.

But our willingness to grapple honestly with what happened and who was accountable has not exactly intensified. This report, for all its length and careful analysis, may end up being more important as a document for future policymakers than as a reckoning for the present.

The real lessons are about monitoring, transparency, emergency powers and accountability. And they matter whether anyone in politics wants to hear them right now or not.

With Covid now in its ninth wave, the real question is whether the state has learned enough before the next emergency arrives.

Dr Bryce Edwards
Director of the Democracy Project

Further Reading:

Subscribe now

Read more