Each year Parliament publishes one of the most useful documents in New Zealand politics — and one of the most underused.

“The Register of Pecuniary and Other Specified Interests”, tabled yesterday, tells us what MPs own, who’s bought them dinner, and where their household money sits. It isn’t a full map of political power. But it’s about as close as the public ever gets.

This year’s register doesn’t deliver any spectacular scandals — and that’s the story. The bigger story is less dramatic but probably more important: Parliament is overwhelmingly made up of property owners governing a country where ownership is becoming harder and harder.

That matters because these MPs are voting on housing, rents, social housing, tax, planning, landlord regulation, and the future of state housing. These aren’t detached observers. They are participants in the very economy they regulate.

Therefore the register doesn’t prove corruption or any rule breaking. But it does show the social and economic world our MPs inhabit. And that world is overwhelmingly propertied, asset-rich and heavily insulated from the housing insecurity experienced by hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders.

Parliament’s property class

The headline numbers are stark. Across 121 MPs, there are 271 declared properties. That works out at about 2.24 properties per MP. Almost all MPs declare some form of property interest. Only a handful appear to have no property at all.

This is not representative of New Zealand. It is certainly not representative of renters, younger people, beneficiaries, low-wage workers, or those trying to get into a first home.

The partisan differences are also revealing. National MPs are again the most property-heavy caucus, averaging about 2.82 properties each. More than half of National MPs own three or more properties. Act and NZ First MPs are also well above the one-home norm. Labour MPs are hardly propertyless, but they sit lower than the governing parties. The Greens are the outlier, with less than one property per MP on average and several MPs declaring none.

This doesn’t mean every National MP is a landlord, or that every Green MP is a renter. But the aggregate picture matters. Parliament isn’t just a debating chamber. It is a class composition. And on housing, that composition leans heavily toward ownership.

The biggest property declarations this year include National’s Andrew Bayly and Gerry Brownlee, each with seven properties. Barbara Kuriger has six. Labour’s Adrian Rurawhe also has six. Todd Stephenson, the Act MP and Parliamentary Under-Secretary, declares a six properties in Queenstown, Wellington, Sydney, Geelong and Te Ānau. Louise Upston declares a family home in Cambridge and an apartment in Wellington.

None of this is automatically improper. MPs are allowed to own property. They are allowed to have mortgages, trusts, farms, apartments, holiday houses and investments. No one expects MPs to live like monks. The real question is whether a property-heavy Parliament can judge housing policy fairly when the status quo works so well for them personally.

The awkward timing

The register was published on the same day the Government announced major reforms to social housing and the Accommodation Supplement. That coincidence is almost too perfect.

On one side of the political ledger, the public was shown a Parliament full of property assets. On the other side, the Government announced that social housing tenants will be required to pay more of their income in rent, and that the state will more aggressively push some tenants toward the private rental market.

Housing Minister Chris Bishop argues the changes are about fairness. His case is that people in social housing can end up better off than comparable low-income households renting privately. The Government says social housing should be more tightly targeted to those with severe and persistent needs, while other households should receive support through private-market subsidies.

There is a real argument here. The housing support system is messy, expensive and often irrational. Arguably it’s a system that’s quite broken. Certainly private renters can be treated badly by the current settings. Social housing is scarce, and people in desperate need do sit on waiting lists for too long.

But the Government’s fairness argument has a revealing limitation – it only looks at unfairness between two groups at the bottom of the scale. It asks whether a state-house tenant is getting too much compared with a poor private renter. It is much less interested in whether the entire housing system is tilted toward landlords, property investors, homeowners, and asset holders.

The Government is focused on the bottom end of the system. It is far less curious about the top.

That is where the register becomes politically revealing. It reminds us that the people making these decisions are not, as a group, housing outsiders. They are overwhelmingly on the owning side of the divide.

The Louise Upston problem

The most politically damaging example is Louise Upston. Stuff journalists Emma Ricketts and Jenna Lynch reported today that Upston, the Social Development Minister, claims $1000 a week in parliamentary accommodation allowance while also seeking tougher criteria for ordinary people receiving the Accommodation Supplement.

MPs and ministers who live outside Wellington are entitled to accommodation support when they are in the capital. Upston’s claims reportedly amounted to $52,000 last year, on top of her ministerial salary. As Ricketts and Lynch report, the register shows she jointly owns a Wellington apartment, although no associated mortgage debt appears to be declared.

Again, this doesn’t mean Upston has broken any rule. That is exactly the point. Her case is revealing not because it appears to be illegal, but because it appears to be allowed. There is one housing-support system for MPs, based on entitlement. There is another for low-income New Zealanders, based increasingly on suspicion, conditions and tighter tests.

Upston’s policy change would raise the threshold for some homeowners receiving Accommodation Supplement support. Ordinary households will be expected to contribute more before help is available. But MPs receiving parliamentary accommodation support are not subject to the same sort of test. No one asks whether a politician on a $320,600/year ministerial salary is contributing enough of their own income before receiving taxpayer support for Wellington accommodation.

When Stuff asked whether she would meet the 40% threshold she is imposing on other New Zealanders, she declined to answer. Stuff reports she “suggested we direct our questions to her office”, and that her office “said the minister had nothing to add.”

What matters here is less the individual politician than the institutional culture. It shows how political institutions normalise generosity for insiders and discipline for everyone else.

The paywall now starts at halfway through all Democracy Project newsletters. Please take out a paid sub if you want to support this service and access the full content, including the following sections: “The private rental market is not neutral”, “Trusts and the half-visible Parliament”, “Gifts, hospitality and access”, “Business interests and investment politics”, “A register designed for another era”, “The conflict that hides in plain sight”, “What should change” and “The real story of the register”.

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For most of the past thirty years, immigration has been a remarkably quiet topic at New Zealand elections. Winston Peters has periodically made noise about it. The main parties have treated migration as a technical lever for managing the economy. Turn the tap up when growth flags, ease it back when housing or wages get squeezed. It has not been a defining battleground.

Something has shifted. In the past two weeks all three coalition parties have decided immigration is the issue of the 2026 election. Act first. Then NZ First sharpening its rhetoric. And now, most strikingly, Christopher Luxon himself. The Prime Minister’s address to BusinessNZ on Wednesday was the moment National finally crossed the line into the new politics. Matthew Hooton, no fanboy, called it Luxon’s most substantive prime ministerial speech to date. The immigration section is why.

“My message to the business community,” Luxon told the assembled CEOs, “is that when it comes to immigration, when faced with a choice between social cohesion and stability or your bottom line, I will choose the former every single time.”

You will not find a sentence like that in any previous National PM’s address to BusinessNZ. Three decades of orthodoxy overturned in two lines.

Luxon went further. He warned that “at least some of the political fracturing evident in Europe in recent years is the result of politicians refusing to implement the preference of their voters on immigration.” He pointed to “failed immigration policies in Europe and North America” that had “stoked a politics of division online.” Immigration, he conceded, “now seems to be an emerging political issue in New Zealand, too.” Voters could “expect to see careful policy on immigration from National as we get closer to the election.”

Why now?

Immigration has rarely been a decisive election issue in New Zealand. Political scientist Sam Crawley has done some of the most useful analytical work here. His reading of New Zealand Election Study data shows that a large share of voters — often a majority — have wanted immigration reduced in most election years since the 1990s. But wanting something and voting on it are different things. “Salience” is what matters politically. And on that measure, immigration has almost never cracked the top tier of concerns.

The one exception was 2017, when New Zealand First made immigration central to its campaign and Andrew Little’s Labour briefly chased the same vote. Even then, Crawley notes, immigration sat well below housing, poverty, and the economy in the hierarchy of voter concerns.

Danyl McLauchlan, in a March piece for the Listener, found even starker evidence of the mismatch between political rhetoric and public attitudes. In the 2023 election study, just 0.4% of respondents named immigration as the most important problem facing the country. More striking still, the share of New Zealanders wanting more immigration nearly doubled between 2017 and 2023 — the precise years when New Zealand’s peer democracies were lurching in the opposite direction.

As McLauchlan put it, New Zealand was becoming more pro-immigration just as the Western world was becoming less so. The Covid border closure, he suggested, had made the costs of cutting migration painfully concrete.

None of this means the question is off the table. The latest Ipsos New Zealand Issues Monitor puts immigration as the 12th most pressing issue, named by 8% of respondents. That is still well outside the top ten. But it is climbing, up from 5% a year or two ago. Both Act and NZ First are now trying to push that higher.

Chasing the anti-immigration vote

The political dynamics within the coalition are worth considering, because they help explain why immigration is suddenly everywhere. This isn’t primarily a story about a public groundswell. It is a story about parties chasing votes and responding to each other.

Peters has been talking about social cohesion and migration for thirty years; it is the issue he built his career on. What is different in 2026 is the language. At the party conference in Palmerston North last September, Peters announced NZ First would campaign on requiring all new migrants to sign a “Kiwi values document” covering flag, freedom of religion, democracy and “traditional New Zealand values.” His framing has tilted sharply toward UK and US discourse. He told the Herald late last year that he found Nigel Farage’s Reform UK programme “compelling.” He pointed to Britain, where, in his telling, “careless immigration policies” had transformed cities and produced people who “don’t salute the flag, don’t salute the values of the country.”

More recently, Jones tried to turn the India free trade agreement into an immigration scare story, warning of a “butter-chicken tsunami” of migrants — a comment so crude that Luxon was left publicly disavowing it.

Act then followed early this month with a six-point immigration policy. Tougher enforcement, a dedicated unit to deal with overstayers, higher English-language requirements, a $6-a-day infrastructure surcharge on temporary visa holders, a new citizenship test, and a ban on new residents receiving welfare for five years. Immigration Minister Erica Stanford called it “dog whistling,” “kneejerk,” and “populist.” She conceded, that Act was simply trying to match NZ First.

And then Luxon stepped in with his BusinessNZ speech this week, attempting to occupy the middle ground before his coalition partners defined it for him. The political logic is transparent. If National is going to be dragged into this debate by its coalition partners — and it clearly is — Luxon wants to be the reasonable voice in the room rather than the one still talking about economic inputs and labour demand.

Whether that works is another matter.

The data problem

Liam Dann, writing in the Herald today, makes the point directly, and it’s worth taking seriously. The coalition government is currently presiding over one of the lowest net migration rates in more than a decade. In August 2025, annual net migration dropped to around 10,000 as young New Zealanders departed in large numbers. The current figure sits at about 24,000 — below the long-run average of 31,000 between 2002 and 2025. Migrant arrivals have fallen by 100,000 since November 2023. “If we exclude the bit where our borders were closed because of Covid,” Dann writes, “you have to go back to 2013 before you see net migration as low as we’ve seen in this political cycle.”

Immigration is not rising. If anything, New Zealand is losing the battle to attract the skilled workers it needs.

Paul Spoonley, the Koi Tū demographer who has spent decades studying these flows, was blunter on RNZ. He said: “We are one of the most super-diverse countries in the world… By and large, it works really well. So what is the problem, or what is the issue here that the prime minister thinks we need to address?” His diagnosis: the PM “is beginning to react to his two coalition partners both of whom seem to want to make immigration a central issue for the coming election.”

This is Dann’s central charge too. National and Act “have traditionally favoured a neoliberal approach to immigration, which, if not quite ‘the more the merrier’, did at least assume that more people equalled more growth and more wealth.” Now they have “decided to jump on the populist immigration debate.”

Dann’s diagnosis of the politicians’ motive is sharp: “Perhaps they’ve seen how well the issue is playing for populist politicians in Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom. Perhaps it is because they have noticed that the biggest dent in their own polling seems to be coming from the rise of their coalition partner.”

Yet his sharpest line concerns the “social cohesion” framing that Luxon reached for, and that Act has built into its citizenship test: “It involves projecting international issues that don’t really exist in New Zealand onto a political landscape that is unfortunately vulnerable to culture wars and tribalism.” The appeal to social cohesion, he says, “is a bit sinister.”

That is a strong claim. But it is not baseless. New Zealand is not the UK. There is no crisis of asylum seekers and no Nigel Farage equivalent commanding a third of the vote. Our immigration system is points-based, economically focused, strictly managed. Spoonley points out that 30% of New Zealanders were born overseas — 43% in Auckland — and by and large it works. The Helen Clark Foundation’s recent social cohesion report found that 36% of New Zealanders think immigration levels are too high, and 43% think they are about right. That is not a country convulsing with anti-immigrant sentiment.

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The Commerce Commission’s “State of Competition in New Zealand” report landed on Tuesday. It is arguably the most important economic document of the political year. It names four sectors as the country’s least competitive: electricity, gas, water and waste services; financial and insurance services; information media and telecommunications; and mining.

The night before the report came out, the Minister of Commerce met with executives from five oligopolistic sectors — energy, banking, supermarkets, insurance and telecommunications — all but one of which feature in the regulator’s list. Cameron Brewer marked the moment by posting on LinkedIn a sunny photograph from a roundtable discussion about the broken markets that the executives presided over. The host of the discussion was Lillis Clark, one of Wellington’s most connected lobbying firms.

This is how Wellington works in 2026.

What the Commission actually found

“The State of Competition in New Zealand” is the Commission’s first economy-wide baseline study, drawing on 22 years of Stats NZ firm-level data. Commission Chair Dr John Small chose his words carefully at the launch. He called the picture “nuanced.” The press release used “mixed.” But you should read past the politeness.

“The report finds that while business concentration has reduced on average, competitive pressure has weakened in many parts of the economy,” Small said. “Market conditions are favouring larger incumbent businesses, and it is harder for smaller, newer businesses to displace them.”

That is, for a regulator, an extraordinary admission. The economy is being captured by its incumbents.

The least competitive industries over the full 22-year period are: electricity, gas, water and waste services; financial and insurance services; information media and telecommunications; and mining. Financial and insurance services show the strongest worsening trend across the entire period. The sectors sitting at the bottom of the competition table are the exact sectors sitting at the top of the cost-of-living debate.

Rob Stock, writing in The Post on Wednesday, put it cleanly: “Banks, insurers, power companies, and retailers demonstrate the greatest power to maintain their prices and margins.” He added the line most political coverage glided past: “competitive pressures appeared weakest in some essential industries that households could not avoid.” This is an important point, because these are sectors that the public has no choice but to do business with.

The OECD says the quiet part out loud

David Haugh, who runs the OECD’s New Zealand desk, spoke at the Commission’s “Competition Matters” conference in Auckland yesterday. The OECD is not some leftist pressure group. Its representative could not have been blunter: “In a small, remote economy, competition does not emerge organically. It must be designed.”

For thirty years successive governments have indulged the comforting story that our markets are small but functional and that the answer to high prices is patience. Haugh swept it away in one sentence.

He went further: “A key issue for making the New Zealand economy work better is to reduce the profitability of banks in the country, unfortunately for the banks.” Lending margins, he told the room, sit “at the upper end of the OECD range”. The profits being extracted from this country are not being recycled in it. They are being shipped to Sydney and Melbourne.

On electricity, Haugh was just as direct. New Zealand generates around 96% of its power from renewables, and runs wholesale prices among the highest in the OECD. “We think there’s a market failure here,” he said — drawing unfavourable comparisons to Norway, Sweden and Finland, other renewables-rich economies that have not allowed their energy sectors to capture the system this way.

Cameron Brewer stepped up to the same podium ten minutes later and told delegates to “watch this space” on capital markets reform. That was the Minister’s contribution to the most significant competition diagnostic the regulator has yet produced.

Brewer’s roundtable worth scrutinising

Cameron Brewer has been Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs since 2 April. Five weeks in, the most important document on the structure of New Zealand markets in living memory landed on his desk. He has said next to nothing about it in public.

What he did find time for was a LinkedIn post. His words, lightly punctuated: “A good roundtable discussion on The Terrace in Wellington this evening with leaders in the likes of energy, banking, supermarkets, insurance, and telecommunications. Thanks to host Lillis Clark. This Government is about improving competition so consumers have more choices at better cost.”

Lillis Clark is the boutique public-affairs lobbying firm of Anna Lillis and Kenny Clark, both former senior staffers to National ministers under Key and English. Mentioning them in The Post today, Henry Cooke called Lillis Clark “the go-to firm for this Government”.

Political journalist Richard Harman has reported that Lillis Clark is “said to write much of the Beehive policy” for the current government. Anna Lillis is engaged to the Trade Minister, Todd McClay. And today it was reported that Georgina Campbell, former senior NZ Herald journalist and then head of office for the Lower Hutt Mayor, has just joined the firm. The revolving door between the Beehive and the lobby is now wider than at any point in the post-MMP era.

The firm’s client list, to the limited extent it can be reconstructed in a country with no lobbying register, includes operators in exactly the sectors the new Minister of Commerce was sitting in a room with.

Maybe it’s all perfectly innocent. Wellington is a small place. But this is the point: nobody in the system thinks anything is wrong with it. Brewer isn’t hiding the meeting. He is broadcasting it with a cheerful social media post.

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Yesterday, Shane Jones hosted a meeting at the Beehive. The guest list tells you quite a bit about whose interests his government is serving.

The Resources Minister gathered mining company bosses, a senior US State Department official, and diplomats from Australia, Japan and South Korea in Wellington for what was billed as a “critical minerals roundtable.” The American delegation — led by Michael DeSombre, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs — heard pitches from New Zealand mining companies hoping to tap into US-backed finance for their projects. Jones canvassed the idea of the government setting minimum prices for certain minerals, a kind of public price floor for private extractors.

According to Thomas Coughlan’s account in the Herald, Jones told the room he wanted to create a “narrative” that critical minerals were “a legitimate part of the New Zealand economy.”

What is already legitimate is the money the extraction sector has been putting into coalition party accounts. The Electoral Commission released the 2025 annual donation returns last week, and this column — the third in my current series on who is funding New Zealand politics — goes looking at what the mining, oil, and gas sector has been contributing.

The answer, in outline: roughly $295,000 in declared donations in 2025, spread mainly across NZ First and National. That is a smaller figure than the property and construction sector’s $497,000, which I covered in the previous column. The dollar figure understates the relationship. What the sector received from the coalition in 2025, and what it paid back in early 2026, is the cleanest legislation-to-donation sequence in the current cycle.

The wishlist that was delivered

The 2025 calendar year was a spectacular policy year for the extraction sector.

The Fast-Track Approvals Act 2024 listed eleven mining projects eligible for the government’s streamlined consenting pathway, bypassing the ordinary Environment Court and council process. Among those listed are OceanaGold’s Waihi North and Macraes Phase 4, Santana Minerals’ Bendigo-Ophir gold mine in Central Otago, and Bathurst Resources’ Buller Plateaux Continuation project to extend the Stockton and Escarpment coal mines. The government committed $80 million of its Regional Infrastructure Fund specifically to critical-minerals projects. It allocated $200 million in Budget 2025 to co-invest in new gas field developments. It set a target of doubling New Zealand’s mineral exports to $3 billion by 2035.

Energy Resources Aotearoa chief executive John Carnegie was appointed by Energy Minister Simeon Brown to the EECA board in March 2025 against official advice, as Eloise Gibson reported for RNZ.

And, most consequentially, the Government passed the Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2025.

That legislation changed the very purpose of the Crown Minerals Act, from “manage” New Zealand’s petroleum and mineral resources to “promote” their development. Not a minor revision. The Act also weakened decommissioning liability for petroleum operators, replacing automatic trailing liability with ministerial discretion over who pays for clean-ups. It repealed the 2018 ban on new offshore oil and gas exploration permits. It broadened the operational latitude for new exploration activity.

Labour MP Deborah Russell, during the bill’s third reading debate, named the bill’s hidden constituency. Those consulted on the late-stage Supplementary Order Paper, she said, were “shadowy participants in the oil and gas industry… who we don’t know who they are”, who “much prefer to be able to lobby a minister” than work to a statutory rule.

A name that does some work

There is a postscript to the 2025 donations. On 19 and 20 February 2026, GMP Environmental Limited made three donations: $100,000 to the National Party, $100,000 to Act, and $100,000 to NZ First. Three parties, three identical deposits, the same week — $300,000 in all.

GMP Environmental Limited is a subsidiary of Greymouth Petroleum, one of New Zealand’s largest oil and gas operators. The company is controlled by Mark Dunphy, an NBR Rich Lister with an estimated net worth of over $200 million, who had a documented adversarial public history with the previous Labour government’s Crown Minerals policy — he sued Energy Minister Megan Woods in 2018 over the offshore exploration ban. Greymouth was, by multiple accounts, among the most vocal lobbyists for the decommissioning liability changes the Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2025 delivered.

Donating through a subsidiary is legal and common. But the choice of “GMP Environmental” as the donor of record is worth considering. The name, on a quick scan of the Electoral Commission register without further research, suggests environmental consultancy or environmental services. The corporate website for GMP Environmental describes it as supplying trucks, trailers, mudtanks, generators and portaloos, mostly to oilfield clients. It is, functionally, a logistics subsidiary of a gas exploration company. The “Environmental” branding is doing real work in obscuring that connection.

The blogger No Right Turn, writing in March 2026, called the donations “payment for services rendered” and described the arrangement as “naked corruption. Bribery. Law for sale.” While that’s a fairly sharp way of putting it, the pattern makes it hard to read any other way. After all, when an industry helps lobby for a legislative change that shifts hundreds of millions of dollars of potential liability off its balance sheets and onto taxpayers, and then, seven months after that legislation passes, routes $300,000 to the three governing parties through a subsidiary whose name partly obscures the connection, the appearance of a quid pro quo is so overwhelming that the technical legality of the transaction stops looking like a defence and starts looking like part of the problem.

RNZ’s Kirsty Johnston established, through Official Information Act requests, that officials gave industry bodies — including Energy Resources Aotearoa, OMV, Todd and Methanex — confidential pre-consultation on the Crown Minerals Amendment Bill, sharing draft amendment text for feedback on “workability” and adjusting wording in response.

One company’s feedback led officials to clarify drafting in a direction that “confirm[ed] the guarantee was limited to ‘unmet costs’ or ‘a proportion of those unmet costs’, reducing the scope of potential liability” the company would face. Officials noted internally that the company “intend to convey their thanks” before the legislation was even public. The legislation was, in other words, not just lobbied for through normal submission channels: it was substantially co-authored by the regulated sector. GMP Environmental’s three-party donation arrived into that context.

The backdrop: $293 million of public money

In 2019, Tamarind Taranaki, a Malaysian-owned petroleum company, became insolvent and walked away from its obligations to decommission the Tui oil field off the Taranaki coast. New Zealand taxpayers ended up paying approximately $293 million — drawn from an initial appropriation of $443 million — to clean up a field a private company had profited from but refused to close. The Labour government passed the Crown Minerals (Decommissioning and Other Matters) Amendment Act 2021 specifically to prevent a repeat of that scenario, creating trailing liability provisions that made petroleum operators responsible for decommissioning costs even after selling or offloading assets.

The oil and gas industry opposed those provisions from the moment of their passage. Greymouth Petroleum was among the most persistent advocates for their repeal.

The Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2025 effectively reopened the liability gap the 2021 law had closed. It replaced automatic trailing liability with ministerial discretion, meaning that whether the next Tamarind leaves taxpayers with a $300 million bill now depends on a minister’s judgement call rather than a statutory rule. The minister who controls that discretion is the same minister whose party is the primary recipient of extractive-sector donations.

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On Monday, Mariameno Kapa-Kingi announced publicly she was leaving Te Pāti Māori to form the Te Tai Tokerau Party. The announcement was framed in the language of mana motuhake, regional self-determination, and wahine leadership. It was, she said, the approach she and her team decided was best for them.

Two months earlier, the High Court had ruled her expulsion from TPM unlawful. Justice Paul Radich found that the party had failed to follow its own constitution — her electorate committee excluded from the meeting that decided her fate, no proper opportunity given to respond, tikanga principles not applied in any meaningful way. She was reinstated. And then she left anyway. Because, as she put it, the party’s leadership had failed to meet a single one of her conditions, which included the resignation of party president John Tamihere.

Since then, co-leader Rawiri Waititi has had to publicly hose down speculation about whether Oriini Kaipara or Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke might also drift away. Oriini Kaipara’s office spent yesterday denying she’d told a Stuff reporter she was “considering options”. Glenn McConnell had reported the week before that Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke was being lobbied to head a breakaway party in Tainui.

The split is not what it looks like

The conventional framing in most of the coverage this last year has been one of turmoil, chaos, a party tearing itself apart. But if you want to understand Te Pāti Māori’s split, you have to stop looking for a great ideological struggle and start looking at the machinery of power, money, family, and control.

There is no ideological dispute here — no policy clash, no principled disagreement about what TPM should stand for. As RNZ’s Craig McCulloch noted accurately during the November 2025 expulsions, “from what has dripped out over the past six weeks, it seems the feud is driven more by personality than principle.”

This seems even truer now. And once you see that, a lot of Te Pāti Māori’s recent behaviour makes more sense. The factional war is not an accidental outbreak of bad vibes. It is what happens when a party becomes too personalised, too centralised, and too fused with the ambitions and networks of a small elite circle.

The fight is over jobs, budgets, control of electoral machinery, and — above all — who controls the party president’s role. Kapa-Kingi’s demands were not ideological. They were structural: remove Tamihere, reinstate Ferris, issue an apology. She didn’t present a rival policy platform when she launched her new party on Monday. Not even close. Te Tai Tokerau Party has a name, a founding statement, and about 200 financial members. What it does not yet have is a published policy programme — because this breakaway is not about kaupapa. It’s about power.

As Liam Rātana noted in the Spinoff, the new party’s structure leaves Kapa-Kingi politically fluid, even, in theory, open to supporting a National-led government if it suited Te Tai Tokerau.

Tākuta Ferris has been sitting as an independent MP since his own unlawful expulsion in November 2025. He will announce his path for November in coming weeks. His entire former electorate committee resigned from TPM. The Te Tai Tokerau electorate committee also resigned this week. An organisation whose internal democracy has collapsed produces this kind of symptom. Policy disagreements don’t.

From six seats to here

At the start of 2025, Te Pāti Māori was on the crest of a wave. It held six of the seven Māori seats. The Tōitū Te Tiriti hikoi had generated the largest political protest in New Zealand’s history. Polls had the party above the five per cent threshold. Oriini Kaipara won a decisive by-election victory in Tāmaki Makaurau. A party reset was announced.

Within weeks, the reset was fiction. In October 2025, Kapa-Kingi’s son Eru publicly accused the party’s leadership of running “a dictatorship model” and announced Tōitū Te Tiriti’s independence from any political party. The party retaliated with an email to members alleging financial misconduct by Mariameno and an altercation involving Eru at a parliamentary protest. On 9 November, at a meeting from which Kapa-Kingi’s and Ferris’s electorate committees were excluded, both MPs were expelled. The Iwi Chairs Forum — representing 88 iwi — was in the middle of brokering a peace hui when the expulsion vote happened. Te Pāti Māori held it anyway.

Hone Harawira, watching from the sidelines, described it as “the party tearing itself apart and not an enemy in sight.” He was right. And now he may become TPM’s candidate in Te Tai Tokerau against the woman the party just expelled.

After the High Court’s March ruling, Kapa-Kingi described the silence from the party leadership as “deafening.” Rawiri Waititi sent her a brief text. John Tamihere said nothing at all. “The question remains,” she said, “whether Te Pāti Māori can be trusted by my rohe, while no changes have been made.”

No changes were made. She quit.

If this were really a grand debate over ideas, someone would be able to state the disagreement plainly. They can’t. Because the heart of it is far less noble: self-interest, hierarchy, grievance, and turf.

A family business, not a movement

The most useful analysis of the court documents came from David Farrar, who asked simply: “Is it a party or a family?” The question answered itself. President: John Tamihere. Co-leader: Rawiri Waititi — Tamihere’s son-in-law. General Manager: Kiri Tamihere-Waititi — Tamihere’s daughter. Party Secretary: Lance Norman — employed by Tamihere’s Whānau Ora Commissioning Agency. Waiariki electorate co-chair: Monica Waititi — Rawiri’s sister-in-law. Te Tai Hauāuru electorate chair: Hinemoana Durie-Shedlock — Tamihere’s sister-in-law. Ikaroa-Rāwhiti electorate chair: Te Rina Lemon — described in court documents as Tamihere’s niece.

Farrar put it bluntly: “This would be like the National Party that has Bill English as Leader, Maria English as General Manager, Maria’s husband as a deputy leader, Mary’s sister as a regional chair, Libby English as another regional chair and Jo Coughlan as a third regional chair. It would be unthinkable”

The people walking out are the ones who tried to challenge that axis and lost.

In sworn court documents released during the judicial review, one member of the party’s national council, Robert Whaitiri, stated that “all decisions in the party were being made by a small number of persons” and that the national executive and national council were “asked to simply rubber-stamp any decisions made.”

Tamihere himself once made an almost identical critique — but of others. In a 2018 RNZ interview he argued that “there are effectively two classes of Māori, the iwi elite and everyone else”, and that Māori without tribal connections were being shortchanged by leaders looking after their own. Tamihere is now an emblem of his own diagnosis: the Māori elite that he once said was looking after its own

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Every few days now, a senior commentator floats the idea of a grand coalition. National and Labour, the two old majors, governing together in a centrist marriage of convenience designed to keep the extremists at bay. The fantasy keeps recurring because the current arrangement has produced something resembling a hostage situation. National is bound to NZ First. Labour, on current numbers, will need the Greens and Te Pāti Māori. Both major parties spend much of their time managing partners they would rather not be in business with. The grand coalition idea is a way of imagining out from under that pressure.

There is, however, a quieter and more realistic version of the same instinct. It is called the Opportunity Party.

I talked about Opportunity yesterday on RNZ’s Jesse Mulligan show (What does The Opportunity Party stand for in 2026?), and the more I worked through the material, the more it struck me that this is the underlying story of the party in 2026. The grand coalition daydream and the Opportunity insurgency are two answers to the same problem: how do you break a political system in which Winston Peters has been kingmaker for thirty years?

Opportunity has the more plausible answer. It will still probably fall short. But it has a better chance this year than it has ever had, and the reasons are worth taking seriously.

Something has shifted

Under new leader Qiulae Wong, the party formerly known as The Opportunities Party (or TOP) has rebranded, dropped its old wonk-and-cats baggage, and assembled the strongest campaign apparatus it has put together in four election cycles.

The general manager is Iain Lees-Galloway, the former Labour minister who has actual experience of how parliamentary campaigns are won. The candidate list has grown to twenty-eight, with some recognisable names from the environmental sector. The party has built a war chest of around half a million dollars. Les Mills founder Phillip Mills has now donated $100,000 to Opportunity so far this year, after a second $50,000 contribution last week. Tech entrepreneur Brian Cartmell has put in another $100,000. These are big numbers by the party’s historical standards.

The leader is also the most likeable face the party has put forward. Ben Thomas, the National-aligned commentator, observes that Wong “certainly appears the most likeable of the Top leaders so far”, and notes that Act went from one seat to ten partly on the back of David Seymour learning to look more relatable.

The external conditions are unusually favourable too. National and Labour are together polling at around 64%, well below their typical combined share. And any idea of National being able to attract “blue green” voters has died. Related to this, conservation NGOs boycotted National’s recent Bluegreens forum and turned up to Wong’s state of the nation speech instead. There is a real pool of disaffected, environmentally minded voters looking for somewhere new to go.

Most importantly, the party is finally polling at levels it has rarely touched before. The Newsroom piece by Hanna McCallum today puts Opportunity’s average for the year so far at 2.3%, with the latest 1News Verian poll showing 3.3%. The new Curia-Taxpayers’ Union poll out this afternoon will be worth watching closely. A figure that holds at three per cent or above, across multiple firms, is the threshold of credibility the party needs to break out of the wasted-vote trap.

The conditions are real, and so is the improvement. The harder question is whether any of that converts into actual seats.

The five per cent moat

To win seats in Parliament, Opportunity needs to clear 5% of the party vote, or win an electorate. Wong is standing in Mt Albert but is realistic about her chances there. So the whole campaign rests on getting above 5%.

The threshold is brutal, and it is brutal in a particular way. Peter Dunne, the long-serving United Future leader, captured the dynamic on RNZ’s The Detail. People say they like the party, he explained, but they don’t believe it can win, “therefore can’t waste the vote on you.” He went on: “It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way.”

This is the wasted-vote trap. To reach 5%, the party first has to look like it might reach 5%. Looking like it might requires media coverage. Media coverage follows relevance, and relevance depends on polling close to the threshold. The whole thing is circular. Danyl McLauchlan put it bluntly in a March Listener column: “Opportunity is appealing to an educated and informed demographic, and these people hate wasting their vote. They’d rather give their support to a major party that will make it than a minor party that may not. Opportunity is stuck in a trap: to reach 5% it needs to have already reached 5%.”

There is a further structural difficulty. No new party has entered Parliament in the modern era of MMP without a leader who already had a seat. Richard Prebble had been a Labour minister. Jim Anderton was a sitting MP. Tariana Turia walked out of Cabinet. Winston Peters had been an MP for two decades when he set up NZ First. Wong, by contrast, got the job of leading the party by responding to a recruitment advertisement.

Liam Hehir captures the appropriate response to recent polling movement with characteristic dryness. The February Roy Morgan poll at 4% was the highest the party had ever recorded, and its supporters “treat it as evidence of imminent breakthrough”. But, Hehir writes, “as Colin Craig could tell you, polling at four percent in an election year is about the same as polling at one percent”. Craig’s Conservatives polled nearly four per cent in 2014. Three years later they were on 0.2.

These are the gravitational forces pulling Opportunity back to earth. None of them is new. None of them is decisive. But all of them are present.

Who is the Opportunity Party actually for?

The deeper problem is older and harder, and I have been writing about it since 2017. The party has never managed to answer the most basic question that any new political formation must answer. Who is this party for?

When I first put this argument forward, in the wake of Gareth Morgan’s decision to step down after the 2017 election, I observed that the party had been exuding two very different (and mutually exclusive) messages about its political character. For some, it was a vehicle for Wellington cosmopolitan policy wonks, an urban-elite project for people who liked to read books about public policy and had a strong allegiance to Te Tiriti. For others, it was a more provincial, down-to-earth, straight-talking party of outsiders for those sick of the establishment.

It can’t be both of those things at once. Yet nine years on, the party is still trying.

Liam Hehir has been making the same point from the right of the political spectrum, and his framing remains the most accurate single description of the problem. Hehir’s description of TOP under Gareth Morgan was that it was an anti-establishment party “that was going to rise up against the entrenched way of doing things from its base in, er, bureaucratic Wellington” — one that “railed against personality-driven politics while earning free media on the basis of celebrity”. And, in his most quoted formulation: TOP was “too woke for talkback town, too talkback for woke town”.

The contradiction sits inside Opportunity’s self-presentation in 2026 too. The branding is anti-establishment. The website talks about people who are tired of waiting for change. Verity Johnson’s Stuff piece yesterday paints the launch as “an EDM rave crossed with a powerpoint presentation” — black merino sweaters, ironic knitted tank tops, a snack platter, and a whiteboard for the policy bits. The people in the room, she writes, were “smart, restless, urban, thoroughly pissed off with the status quo.”

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On 20 January 2026, Auckland construction and civil engineering businessman Michael Grant Sullivan donated $200,000 to New Zealand politics. Rather than backing a single party, he covered the entire coalition: $100,000 to National, $50,000 to Act, and $50,000 to NZ First. All three deposits were made the same day.

Sullivan declined to comment when Interest.co.nz asked why. He didn’t need to explain. The logic is self-evident to anyone who understands what a large property and construction company needs from the state: planning law, consenting decisions, and the speed at which councils process applications.

It captures the current state of New Zealand political finance. This column looks closer at that pattern, following on from Friday’s column introducing a series of pieces about the latest donation disclosures – see: Following the money in 2026.

The dominant bloc

The 2025 annual returns released last week confirm what my previous year’s Following the Money in 2025 audit report established: the property, construction and infrastructure sector is the single most powerful donor bloc in New Zealand politics. Donors with clearly identifiable interests in this sector gave at least $497,000 in declared donations across 2025. Almost all of it went to the Coalition Government. The Opposition parties received negligible contributions from this sector. This imbalance isn’t necessarily because developers are ideological conservatives, but because the parties in power hold the planning levers.

This isn’t new. RNZ’s data journalist Farah Hancock, whose investigative mapping of donor patterns has become the essential public record on this subject, has documented more than $2.5 million from property-sector donors to the coalition parties since 2021. Approximately 97% of all property-sector political money has flowed to National, Act, and NZ First across this period.

What the latest disclosures from the Electoral Commission show is that the developer sector’s political investment is growing in scale and sophistication, not retreating. Four property and construction donors gave $50,000 or more in 2025 alone. The cast list is long — Carter Group, Mansons TCLM, James Speedy, Atlas Concrete, Williams Corporation, Buildcorp, Cook Brothers, 3EYES Construction, dozens of smaller firms making deposits in the $5,000–$15,000 range. The long tail of sub-threshold construction companies donating to National in 2025 is striking in its own right: not a single large developer but an entire industry sector, systematically, year after year.

Why property is different

There’s an important distinction that often gets lost in coverage of political donations. Unlike tech firms or banks, property developers depend overwhelmingly on the state: on zoning, consenting speed, capital gains rules, and foreign-investment settings. In other words, property wealth is not merely shaped by politician decisions. It is created by them.

The economist George Stigler’s 1971 formulation of “regulatory capture” — that “as a rule, regulation is acquired by the industry and is designed and operated primarily for its benefit” — was written with American utilities in mind. The same dynamic applies in New Zealand. The planning system is being rewritten by the same parties whose campaigns are bankrolled by the industries the planning system was designed to constrain.

The cast list

The Carter Group is the most revealing case in the 2025 returns. Christchurch-based Carter Group is one of New Zealand’s most significant property companies. Its major projects include the Crossing retail precinct in the CBD, Avonhead Mall, the Crowne Plaza Queenstown, the IPort business park in Rolleston, plus shareholdings in Williams Corporation, Willis Bond, and construction company Southbase.

In 2025, Carter Group donated $81,608 to the National Party — the largest single declared donation to any party from an identifiable property company in that year’s returns. Philip Carter, who leads the group, also donated $59,500 personally to National in 2023. His brother, incidentally, is Sir David Carter, former National Cabinet Minister and Speaker of the House.

This family has three projects approved for consideration under the Fast-Track Approvals Act 2024: residential developments in Rolleston and Ōhoka (a combined 5,000+ residential units), and a 55-hectare industrial development near Christchurch airport. The Ōhoka project was rejected by Waimakariri District Council; the Carter Group appealed to the Environment Court in September 2025. The fast-track route, if successful, provides a ministerial override outside the standard process.

Mansons TCLM is New Zealand’s largest privately held commercial property and construction company. It has more than 40 buildings, and $5 billion in delivered projects across the Auckland skyline. The company gave $42,026 to National in 2025, nearly tripling its 2024 corporate contribution of $15,000.

When Prime Minister Christopher Luxon opened Mansons’ $650 million Fifty Albert development in October 2024, it was a striking display of how close the government sits to its donors. The company’s commercial model — building large commercial assets and selling them to overseas institutional investors, recently including a Singaporean vehicle backed by Asia-Pacific firm PAG — also means it has direct interest in the coalition’s liberalisation of foreign investment settings for property.

In the 2025 New Year Honours Ted Manson received a knighthood. His son Culum had donated $70,000 personally to National in a previous year. The family’s political relationship with the governing party spans well over a decade. The family also runs a foundation that receives state funding for social housing. Commercial interests and government policy sit very close together here.

James Speedy gave $106,331 to National in 2025. This was the third-largest single gift to the party that year, after a deceased donor’s estate and Brian Cartmell’s extraordinary three-party distributions. Speedy is listed at the Companies Office as a director or shareholder of more than seventy entities across hotel, marina, property and aged-care interests. And he has donated over $100,000 to National before.

The Greenlees brothers, Whakamarama-based kiwifruit and avocado industry figures with property interests through Buildcorp Management, escalated their combined declared giving from $20,000 in 2024 to nearly $258,000 in 2025 across Act and National.

The smaller donors arguably tell the bigger story. Breeze Construction, Cypress Construction, Counties Construction, 3EYES Construction, Atlas Concrete, Cook Brothers, Williams Corporation — the list of construction companies writing $5,000–$36,000 cheques to National and Act in 2025 runs to dozens of firms. None individually changes the fundraising picture. Cumulatively, they constitute an industry sector that has decided that putting money into the governing parties is a sensible business decision.

This pattern doesn’t stop at central government. Newsroom’s reporting last December on Auckland mayor Wayne Brown’s donor list found a near-identical cast of names: Williams Corporation, Southside Group, Van Den Brink, Oyster Capital, Bayleys, Precinct. The same firms that bankroll the parties writing the planning law also bankroll the council leadership delivering the consents.

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Maiki Sherman posted her resignation statement on X yesterday afternoon. It was both terse and dignified. The scrutiny had placed “enormous pressure” on her, her role had become “untenable,” she was finishing up with TVNZ that day. The first wahine Māori to lead a major broadcaster’s political team was gone — three weeks from Budget day and six months from the election.

It is tempting to treat this as a story about one journalist who made a bad error and eventually paid for it. That reading isn’t wrong, but it’s a long way short of the whole picture.

What Sherman actually did

The background was covered in an earlier column, but a brief summary is necessary. In May 2025, at pre-Budget drinks hosted by Finance Minister Nicola Willis, Sherman used a homophobic slur towards Stuff journalist Lloyd Burr. She apologised the following morning to both Burr and Willis, and informed her manager. Those apologies were accepted. Burr said he did not want to take the matter further. For eleven months, it sat there.

Sherman’s own account — in her resignation post — added something important. Her comment, she wrote, was made “in response to deeply personal and inappropriate remarks made to me that evening.” Burr has denied directing a slur at Sherman, and Stuff has stood by his account of the events. The factual dispute at the heart of the exchange has never really been resolved in public because it has barely been reported on. What got reported was Sherman’s conduct; what allegedly precipitated it has been treated as secondary.

That asymmetry matters. Not as an excuse — Sherman has said clearly, and more than once, that there is none — but as an observation about how the story was framed.

Two questions, not one

The most useful thing David Farrar wrote about all this was a distinction most commentators have since collapsed. Farrar was clear that the original incident was newsworthy — something serious enough, witnessed by enough people, in enough of a semi-public setting, to cross the line between private embarrassment and legitimate public interest. But he was also clear that reportable is not the same as career-ending: “I don’t think Maiki should lose her job over it”. He added: “People sometimes stuff up and do bad things. We should judge people over their entire contribution, not solely on the basis of the worst thing they have ever done.” And separately, when her resignation came, he said he was saddened. People should not be pushed out of their role because of one bad thing they said.

That’s a careful separation. The first question — was the original incident reportable? — should not have been seriously controversial. The second — did it warrant the end of her career? — is a different question, and one most of the commentary, on all sides, has refused to ask separately.

Stephen Parker, who edited the political team at 3 News from 2002 to 2007, made a similar point in the Spinoff’s roundtable of former TV political editors. “It’s a legitimate story,” Parker said. “I lean towards the opinion that it’s not something that should necessarily just be swept under a carpet or left unexamined. The political editor is a key, high-profile position, and a degree of transparency is important to trust in media organisations.” Parker also acknowledged, as Paddy Gower did more emotionally, that the “ingredients for elevated coverage” do not necessarily justify the temperature to which the story eventually climbed.

The press gallery’s comfortable silence

The gallery knew the story well. That is now not seriously disputed. Liam Hehir noted it on X, pushing back against the pile-on: Sherman “deserves more credit than people on here give her credit for,” he said, insisting she had been “quite willing to piss off left-wing political parties if she thought that was what the job required.” He went further, arguing that the Free Speech Union should defend her — that free speech is a cultural value, not simply a matter of government censorship.

Whatever one thinks of that argument, the gallery’s year-long silence became a genuine problem. Richard Harman was the most prominent defender of the principle involved — in his 55 years as a journalist, he said, these things happen at Parliament and have no political importance. “If I insult somebody at a private party in Parliament, then it’s got nothing to do with my journalism or that person’s political performance.” The press gallery functions in a pressure-cooker environment where social proximity to power is unavoidable, and ethically corrosive.

But Paddy Gower’s contribution to Henry Oliver’s Spinoff roundtable was more honest about what that actually means. “There but for the grace of God go I.” Gower spoke about the intensity of the role — the heat, the late nights, the changed relationship between politicians and media. “There’s a real constituency of people that don’t trust the media, and politicians can exploit that.”

He identified the golden rule: “Always back your political editor.” The implication, applied to this case, is hard to miss: TVNZ — through months of legal letters and institutional silence — has not been backing its political editor in any of the senses Gower describes.

That failure is not a small thing. A state broadcaster that suppresses a story about its own political editor — using lawyers from Russell McVeagh to warn off a commercial rival — is not protecting anyone. It is storing up the damage and ensuring it arrives at the worst possible moment. Mike Hosking described the letter his producer Sam Carran received when investigating the story as a “big broad-based fat letter from the lawyers… It had a chilling effect.” A state-owned broadcaster used a top-shelf commercial firm to discourage a competing newsroom from reporting on its own political editor.

The Free Speech Union, in its statement on Friday, put the institutional failure plainly: “A culture that responds to misconduct with legal threats while it can be hidden, and with a quiet exit once it cannot, rewards suppression and punishes disclosure.” That is exactly right. And it ended with the line that should have been TVNZ’s policy from the morning after the Willis drinks: “A healthy media tells the truth. A healthy society lets people apologise for it.”

Sherman apologised, promptly, to the people involved. But it appears that TVNZ then made that apology impossible to stand behind publicly by hiding it — and ultimately made it meaningless by letting Sherman go once hiding it became untenable.

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The Electoral Commission released the 2025 annual donation returns yesterday, and the topline figure is the kind of number that should make any New Zealander pause. Registered political parties together declared $14.7 million in donations across the 2025 calendar year. That’s up 40% on the previous year. It’s the biggest non-election-year haul on record under the new disclosure regime.

That last line matters. We are not yet in election year. We are in the warm-up.

Last year I produced an audit report for the Democracy Project, “Following the Money in 2025”, which examined the patterns of giving across the 2024 returns. The conclusion then was that wealthy vested interests were buying access and influence in ways the existing rules barely contained. If anything, the new numbers sharpen that picture.

Over the coming week I’ll work through the new returns and publish some further columns on what they reveal. This is the first — an overview, a pointer to the bigger questions to come.

The headlines

National declared $6.28 million in donations — more than the entire opposition combined. Act raised $2.45 million, narrowly overtaking Labour. NZ First nearly doubled its take. The three coalition parties between them pulled in just over $10 million; Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori trailed on $4.4 million between them.

That works out to a government-to-opposition ratio of 2.29 to one in 2025, up from 2.18 to one in 2024. The funding gap between the two halves of New Zealand parliamentary politics widened by roughly $1.85 million in a single non-election year.

National’s dominance is no surprise. Governing parties always attract donor attention, and National has been the bigger fundraiser for years. What the 2025 numbers show is that the gap between the centre-right ecosystem and everyone else is now structural, not just a quirk of incumbency.

Julia Gabel put the gap simply in her Herald lead: National received “almost $4 million more than the Labour Party”.

Act slips past Labour

The most striking single shift in the 2025 numbers is the Act Party overtaking Labour as the country’s second-best-funded political party. The gap is small in dollar terms — barely $42,000 — but the symbolism is significant.

Act raised less than a third of National’s haul as recently as 2024. In 2025 it pulled in 67% more money than the year before. Once again, Act has become a serious fundraising operation.

Act’s donor list is dominated by ultra-wealthy individuals and corporate vehicles — average named donations of around $39,000 each, more than three times Labour’s average of $13,500. Forty per cent of Act’s named-donor money came from just its top ten donors: the most concentrated donor base of any major party. The party most aggressively committed to deregulation is also the party most reliant on concentrated wealth. The alignment is not accidental.

The $50,000 club

In last year’s audit I identified eleven donors who had given $50,000 or more in 2024, contributing about $1.18 million between them — around 11% of all declared money for that year.

The 2025 club has more than doubled. In the latest figures, 28 donors gave $50,000 or more, contributing roughly $3.1 million between them — over 20% of all declared political donations for the year.

These are big numbers. The very top of the table is dominated by individuals giving simultaneously to multiple coalition parties. It is worth pausing on what those names tell you about who has the money in New Zealand politics now: tech investors, property developers, manufacturers, agribusiness magnates, finance bosses, with a handful of estates and one party president scattered among them. The $50,000+ club is now where the action is.

Not every large donor is a villain, of course. Some are ideological. Plenty are loyal. Quite a few probably just think politics matters enough to pay for it. The question for democratic equality isn’t really their motive — it’s their weight. And the weight of a $200,000 donor is not in the same universe as the rest of us.

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The announcement was brief: a ministerial press release, mid-afternoon, a few paragraphs. The Broadcasting Standards Authority, a body that has existed since 1989, is to be abolished. Paul Goldsmith described it as a logical response to a changed media landscape. Sean Plunket called it a birthday present. Winston Peters, who had spent the preceding weeks denouncing the BSA as a “Soviet-era Stasi” that “bordered on fascist,” was presumably more measured in private.

And that was more or less that. A regulator gone, legislation to follow, the New Zealand Media Council to pick up whatever it can carry. No public consultation. No white paper. No select committee. Just a press release and a handwave at self-regulation.

The decision is probably the right one. But the way it was done, why it was done, and what replaces it should disturb anyone who takes democratic accountability seriously.

The regulator that time left behind

Let’s be honest about what the BSA had become. Established under the Broadcasting Act 1989 — legislation written when New Zealand had three TV channels and Video Ezy was a thriving business — it was always going to struggle with a 2026 media ecosystem. The BSA itself had been pleading for legislative reform for fifteen years or more. Nobody in Parliament listened.

The Authority itself had stopped pretending otherwise. Its own 2025 annual report described the legislative model as “obsolete and out of step” with the contemporary media environment. So, here was a regulator publicly conceding that the law it was asked to enforce had been overtaken by reality.

By the time the end came, the Authority was processing fewer than 100 formal complaints a year (the lowest figure since 1990–91). It had eight staff. It spent roughly $1.67 million annually. Meanwhile, New Zealanders were spending most of their media time on platforms the BSA had no jurisdiction over whatsoever. Netflix, YouTube, Spotify, TikTok, all sitting beyond the perimeter of a regulator designed for linear broadcasting. The regime had become, as Goldsmith observed, arbitrary. A panel discussion on RNZ: regulated. The same conversation on a podcast: not.

David Seymour called the BSA “a creature of 1989, before the internet existed.” He’s not wrong about the date. That’s about as far as it goes.

The fight it picked, and lost

What finally killed the BSA, though, wasn’t the anachronism of its founding legislation. It was the Authority’s decision, in March 2026, to assert jurisdiction over Sean Plunket’s The Platform.

The complaint itself related to Plunket describing tikanga Māori as “mumbo jumbo.” Someone lodged it. The BSA — having quietly opened the door to digital complaints in 2020 — determined that The Platform’s live online talkback fell within its remit under the Broadcasting Act. Online content that resembled traditional broadcasting, it said, was broadcasting. The Platform, meet the BSA.

The legal argument was not completely without merit. Steven Price, who knows media law more than anyone in New Zealand, has argued the decision was a defensible purposive reading of the 1989 Act. The Authority wasn’t trying to police the entire internet — it was trying to cover a specific category of live, New Zealand-produced, advertising-funded broadcast content that happened to be online rather than over the airwaves.

But, even granting all of that: the political judgment was indefensible. The BSA chose, for its precedent-setting foray into digital jurisdiction, the loudest, best-funded, most politically connected antagonist available. Sean Plunket had Caniwi Capital money, Free Speech Union air cover, and the active sympathy of two of the three coalition parties. The BSA walked into a culture-war ambush and seemed not to notice.

Gavin Ellis, former editor-in-chief of the New Zealand Herald and the most authoritative independent voice on media regulation in this country, called the Platform decision “an attempt to ram a round peg into a mouldy square hole.” The BSA, he wrote, “was forced to squeeze every last morsel of possible meaning out of its empowering legislation.” David Harvey, who spent eighteen years teaching media law at Auckland Law School, described the decision as “self-serving and naïve,” and argued the BSA had made itself “judge in its own cause” by ruling on its own jurisdiction.

Plunket’s verdict was characteristically blunt: “I find it amazing that the BSA decided to pick a fight which ended up in its own demise.”

He’s right. The BSA brought some of this on itself. As du Plessis-Allan put it, the new rules “just happened to net the subject of the complaint that had landed before them.” If Plunket recorded the show and released it as a podcast, she pointed out, he was fine; if he did it live, he was caught.

Chris Trotter described the BSA’s approach as “a naked power-grab by a statutory authority with a strong aversion to untrammelled political expression.” When critics come from both left and right, you’ve usually got a problem.

But the BSA didn’t bring this on the rest of us

Here’s where the official narrative deserves scrutiny. Because the Government’s line — that the BSA was an outdated regulator the market no longer needed — slides past a more inconvenient truth. This was not the conclusion of a principled regulatory review. It was the output of coalition politics. Act had a member’s bill ready. NZ First had been denouncing the BSA as fascist. National, which has spent three years trying to avoid culture-war fights, eventually caved.

Follow the money, then follow the lobbying. Last October, after the BSA’s provisional ruling, businessman Troy Bowker told the New Zealand Herald’s Shayne Currie that he was prepared to bankroll a legal fight, and that BSA chair Susie Staley and her board “should all be sacked by Minister [Paul] Goldsmith for stupidity immediately.” Bowker is not an outraged citizen; he is a wealthy man with a friend at the microphone. An Act MP lodged a private member’s bill. An Act MP lodged a private member’s bill, while Winston Peters supplied the rhetoric. It was coming from a small, well-connected, well-funded group of operators with a direct material interest in lighter rules.

Goldsmith’s own evolution tracked that pressure rather than any independent ministerial reasoning. He moved from “tempted” on Ryan Bridge’s morning show, to “leaning towards” abolition at a Waikanae public meeting, to firm confirmation in May. The Post’s Henry Cooke has reported that Goldsmith’s office quietly delayed an OIA request about the BSA’s future by an additional month.

Earlier in April, after the BSA’s final jurisdictional ruling, Plunket had told his audience that Luxon assured him personally a year ago, “Don’t worry mate, we’ve got your back on this.” Luxon denied saying it. “I don’t recall every conversation I have with everybody, but I can’t imagine that’s something I’ve said,” the Prime Minister told reporters. The decision in May was then briefed to Plunket before being announced publicly.

No public consultation was held. Chris Hipkins described the decision as “marching headlong into abolishing basically a consumer protection without any clear sense of what’s going to replace it.” That framing is, on the facts, largely accurate. Goldsmith’s reasoning — that different platforms are currently subject to “inconsistencies and unfair outcomes” — is correct, but it’s an argument for reform, not abolition. And as the Ministry for Culture and Heritage’s 2025 reform package demonstrated, the problem had already been mapped. Solutions had been proposed. A decision was being worked toward. That is the appearance of regulation, not regulation itself.” Or just delete; the surrounding paragraph already makes the point.

The decision also came without any signal about what specifically replaces the broadcasting-specific functions the BSA performed. Not just complaints about accuracy, fairness, privacy, or taste and decency. Or the ability to appeal a decision to the High Court. All of that vanishes under the new model, and no one in Government has explained what fills the gap.

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Local government needs reform. No serious person can look at 78 councils, collapsing infrastructure, rates blowouts and anaemic voter turnout and say the system is working well. It isn’t. But that is precisely why the Government’s new plan should worry us.

Yesterday, RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop and Local Government Minister Simon Watts announced what they’re calling the “Head Start Pathway”: councils have until August 9 (just 90 days) to submit proposals to amalgamate into larger unitary authorities, or the Government will design a structure for them. The ultimatum was blunt: “Lead your own reform, or we will do it for you.” Bishop said it at the press conference. He said it again on Hosking. He hasn’t really stopped saying it. And it’s an astonishing ultimatum that will be galling to many local authorities who are genuinely engaging in the reform process.

The brass neck of it

Henry Cooke, writing for The Post, put the problem with characteristic precision: “There is a strong case for local government simplification. It’s being undermined by the way the Government is going about it.”

That’s the crux of this column. Not whether amalgamation is a good idea. It might be, in many cases. The question is whether this is a sensible way to do something this consequential.

Consider what Bishop had to say when pressed on the Government’s mandate. He admitted that National had not campaigned on local government reform but insisted that didn’t matter, because the Government could do it anyway.

Cooke also notes today, that this was hard to reconcile with the comments of the Government’s Local Government spokesman in 2021 (“one Christopher Luxon”) who said of Labour’s council review: “This review cannot become a byword for centralisation or an opportunity for power to be taken away from ratepayers. It’s crucial that outcomes are led by communities, not by central government.”

Luxon campaigned explicitly in favour of “localism” and against “centralisation”. National attacked Labour’s centralising impulse in health, tertiary education, water services, and promised to put local communities back in the driving seat. Now they are doing the same thing, only faster and with less process.

Cooke gives the Government one fair defence. Opposition is easy. Government is harder. Once ministers discover how many councils, boards, iwi, officials, planners, lawyers and local egos are involved, “localism” can start to look less like a principle and more like a blockage.

Fair enough. Governments do discover constraints. But the NZ Initiative, the business think tank that has championed localism for years, must be watching this with something approaching horror. The localism agenda is not merely being set aside; it is being actively reversed. And there has been no serious attempt to reconcile this with what the Government actually promised.

Reform by ultimatum

The blogger No Right Turn puts the democratic objection more bluntly: “National’s attempt to dictate the merger of councils, abolish regional government, and reduce local representation is the very opposite of localism. There is an established process for this. Councils can use it if they want to, after consulting their electorates. The fact that so many have chosen not to speaks for itself about what they want.”

The existing Local Government Commission process is slow. Sometimes painfully slow. But that is partly the point. Amalgamation is not a new bus route or a procurement tweak. It changes who governs whom.

Auckland’s super city did not arrive after a 90-day homework exercise. It followed years of argument and a Royal Commission. Even then, plenty of Aucklanders still think it produced a larger, more remote machine.

Bishop, when asked whether the country had enough consultants to ready every council’s proposal in three months, told reporters councils had the resources themselves and would have no trouble consulting their communities quickly. Furthermore, he stated: ‘‘Honestly, local government spends its life consulting people.’’ That’s rather glib.

Economist Michael Reddell put it bluntly on social media: “3mths is absurdly short.” He’s not wrong. Reddell also pointed to the Government’s own recent track record of large-scale public sector reorganisations. He said that it “would be more reassuring if the govt could show us the last large scale public sector reorganisation that really worked for the public. Health NZ, the mega-polytech?” Both of those are still unravelling.

Reddell makes another good point: if the Government genuinely thinks amalgamation is desirable, let it make the case, and “let voters in [individual] council areas decide.” He argues there should be mandatory referendums on amalgamations. It’s a reasonable position. If the Government believes the public agrees with it, why not find out?

The Gore District mayor’s reaction, in today’s Otago Daily Times, was telling: “These are once in a generation conversations that we’ve got to pack into three months — so yeah, they will be complicated.” Upper Hutt mayor Peri Zee described the timeframe to The Post as “extremely tight” and said she was “highly sceptical” that the benefits of amalgamation outweighed the costs. Buller mayor Chris Russell: “This is not something to be rushed if we want to get it right.” These are not anti-reform voices. They are people being asked to redesign their democratic structures before their annual plans are even finished.

Bishop has one practical reason for moving fast. His RMA reforms need councils that can actually operate the new planning system. He does not want to rebuild planning law only to leave it in the hands of the same fragmented local structure.

Fair point. But it is still an assumption, not evidence. Bigger councils do not automatically mean better planning. Sometimes they just mean bigger planning departments.

The paywall now starts at halfway through all Democracy Project newsletters. Please take out a paid sub if you want to support this service and access the full content, including the following sections: “The magic savings machine”, “Does NZ even have too many councils?”, “What about the bigger questions?”, “The political calculation”, “Confusion at the centre” and “What reform should look like”.

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Craig Stobo is gone as chair of the Financial Markets Authority. Not because of the rumours that swirled around him for months. Not because of the Estonia trip. Not even, formally, because he sat on the board of a mortgage-broking company that was using his FMA title in its marketing.

He went because he could not do the most basic thing required of a Crown entity chair: stop behaving like a political commentator.

Wendy Aldred KC cleared him on some of the more sensational allegations. But on political neutrality, she was blunt. Stobo’s public commentary was too partisan, too frequent, and incompatible with chairing the Financial Markets Authority.

So yes, there is a tidy version of this story. A complaint was made. An investigation followed. The report came out. The chair resigned. Cameron Brewer said the required words about confidence in the regulator.

But that version is too generous. The resignation is not the end of the scandal. It is the least interesting part of it.

The chair who kept talking

Aldred’s 45-page report, released yesterday, paints a picture of a Crown entity board chair who simply refused to recognise the constraints of his office and the obligations of a senior state appointee. His repeated public praise of Christopher Luxon was all on the record. So were the warm noises about Simeon Brown, Erica Stanford and Winston Peters. To one audience Stobo declared the coalition was delivering “The Great Unwind” of “atrocious policy settings of the last government.” To another, he claimed the Greens were “losing the climate debate as unrealistic economic reality of transition costs.”

Then there was the personal submission to the Justice Select Committee supporting David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill, in which Stobo argued that the bill would “ensure that we can prosper as a modern representative democracy.” That submission contradicted the FMA’s own board-approved Māori strategy, Matangirua. Stobo had sat through a presentation on it weeks earlier.

Aldred’s verdict was unsparing. Stobo’s commentary was “laudatory” of the National-led government and “critical” of the previous Labour-led government. It fell well below the expectations of a Crown entity board chair. It was not protected by the fig leaf that he had been speaking in some other capacity. As Aldred put it: “It is not realistic to think that this will avoid the risks identified … Mr Stobo is not simply a member of the board, but is its chair, and those members of the public with an interest in the FMA … will not cease to identify Mr Stobo with the FMA simply because comments may be attributed to him in another capacity.”

The flaw at the heart of the New Zealand elite’s standard defence — “I was wearing a different hat” — has rarely been demolished so plainly.

The “different hats” delusion

The FMA’s general counsel Liam Mason had warned Stobo about exactly this kind of behaviour. The report makes clear those warnings went unheeded. On 12 July 2025, Mason wrote to Stobo about comments the chair had made at an NZ Initiative event, where Stobo had questioned whether the climate-related disclosure regime — a regime the FMA is statutorily responsible for monitoring — should be voluntary.

Stobo’s defence to Aldred was telling. The Minister of Commerce, who was also at the event, had asked him “what hat he was wearing” before posing the question. Stobo did not clarify.

Of course he didn’t. Everyone in the room knew exactly which hat he was wearing.

Mason said that board members “needed to be very careful about making comments about matters for which the FMA has responsibility. We’re a regulator but we also have a law reform role.” Internal policy existed precisely to prevent the kind of confusion Stobo seemed determined to create. FMA board member Prasanna Gai had also raised concerns, in his case about Stobo’s commentary on monetary policy, given the FMA’s relationship with the Reserve Bank.

Three FMA board members ultimately met with then-Minister Scott Simpson to escalate the concerns. Three board members going to their Minister is not a minor act of internal governance — it is what happens when a chair has lost the confidence of his own board.

The Indi business is worse than the report says

Aldred concluded that Stobo’s Indi directorship did not, on its own, justify removing him from the FMA. He had disclosed the interest properly when he took it up in August 2024 and acted reasonably when concerns were raised. At an FMA board meeting on 16 September 2025 he agreed to resign.

However, he did not actually resign until 12 December, around the time MBIE’s investigation was announced. The report calls the three-month delay “unacceptably long.”

What is harder to pass over is what The Independent Mortgage Company (“Indi”) was doing while Stobo remained on its board. Indi is not some harmless hobby board. It is a digital mortgage broker trying to take business off the banks. The FMA has a role in bank conduct. And here was Indi, marketing itself with the chair of the FMA on its board.

So, a new market entrant, competing in a sector the FMA polices, was using the FMA chair’s name and title in its commercial pitch. As economist Michael Reddell put it on X, “it is almost beyond belief that the chair of the FMA was director of a mortgage company, which was using his name and FMA title in their marketing.”

FMA chief executive Samantha Barrass clearly thought it was beyond belief too. She told Aldred the role was “heavily conflicted,” adding: “We need to be beyond reproach because the inappropriate management of conflicts is not just a matter of regulatory requirements, we take enforcement action when conflicts are not managed appropriately.”

The chief executive of the FMA was, in effect, telling a King’s Counsel that the chair had failed the very standard the agency she runs imposes on the firms it polices.

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: “This public sector problem keeps happening”, “The appointment that should never have happened”, “Stobo has gone quiet, and so has everyone else”, “Why the FMA cannot look captured”, and “The system limps on”.

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The most useful thing the release of the Luxon-Peters emails on Iran has done is end an argument. For two months the question of where Christopher Luxon’s foreign policy instincts actually sat had been a guessing game. Stumbled press conferences. A curiously elastic distinction between “supporting” and “acknowledging” the US-Israeli strikes. It has felt like a PM and Government that would not say what it actually thought.

Last week’s emails settled it. They show that in the days after the United States and Israel attacked Iran, the Prime Minister wanted New Zealand standing publicly with Washington. He was talked out of it, on the documentary record, by his Foreign Minister, by senior MFAT officials, and by his own department.

The public record now contains all of this, and it ought to change how the Government is read on foreign policy for the rest of the year.

The Pagani indictment

Of the columns published this week, Josie Pagani’s in the Post on Saturday is the one that has cut deepest. Pagani is not really a National-baiter. She has, on her own account, wanted Luxon to succeed. The opening line of her piece summarises the column, and everything that follows is evidence: “Christopher Luxon is not capable of leading New Zealand in dangerous times.”

Her column has two arguments. The first is that Luxon either started off wanting to provide more “explicit public support” for Trump’s war and lost his nerve, or actually meant it. “Both options find Luxon woefully inadequate for this fractured moment.” There is no charitable reading. Lack of clarity, she writes, comes from a lack of conviction, and his support for the war was “skin deep”.

The second argument is the more substantive, and the one National’s caucus should be reading carefully. Luxon, Pagani argues, “actively wanted the wrong choice against advice.” Not a misjudgement under uncertainty. An instinct, exercised against the unanimous view of the people paid to give him advice. Pagani itemises the case: “No imminent attack coming from Iran, so no recall to ‘self-defence’ under international law. No attempt to build a coalition with other countries. Negotiations were ongoing when Trump decided to wage this war of choice.”

Pagani’s verdict on the war itself is unsparing. She calls it “geopolitically infantile, growth-destroying, security-smashing”, a war of choice started by “the malignant narcissist in the White House, who continues to actively undermine the world order we in New Zealand depend on.”

Her closing line is the one National should worry about most: this incident shows that “they should know by now they can’t win with Luxon at the top.”

The American patrimony problem

The Post’s senior political reporter Anneke Smith got to the same place differently. Smith locates the source of the problem in Luxon’s biography: “Luxon spent much of his adult life in the United States and seems to identify, at least instinctively, with US patrimony more than New Zealand’s.”

It is not a sentence that could have been written about any of his predecessors as National Party leader since at least Don Brash. Even Brash, who wanted us back inside ANZUS, didn’t give the impression of a man whose first instinct, in a crisis, was to check what Washington thought. Luxon, on the evidence of the past two months, does.

Smith’s verdict on the emails was, if anything, blunter than Pagani’s: “This situation could reflect two things; either a complete relationship breakdown between Luxon and Peters or a staggering lack of political judgment on Luxon’s part. It could be both.”

Read alongside Pagani, this is the heart of the foreign policy problem. Luxon’s instinct, on this evidence, was American first. It wasn’t the instinct of a New Zealand prime minister facing a clearly illegal use of force, considering New Zealand’s own legal commitments and tradition of independent judgement. It was the reflex of a man checking what Albanese and Carney had said and assuming we should be there too.

The “challenging advice” defence falls over

The Prime Minister’s office has tried, repeatedly, to spin the Luxon-Peters emails as routine. The PM was just doing his job, challenging the advice he received. Matthew Hooton, in his paywalled Patreon column, took that defence apart with characteristic vigour.

Hooton explains that by the time the emails were written, the careful joint position drafted by DPMC chief executive Ben King had already been agreed by Luxon and Peters and issued to the world. The drafting choices, including the now-famous “acknowledge” rather than “support”, had been made and signed off. To then start changing the position after his shocking Monday performance, says Hooton, served no diplomatic purpose. He says that “any offence the Americans would have taken from the first statement had already occurred”. Pivoting to “support” later in the week would just have made New Zealand look “flakey” as well as have damaged National’s standing with its own voters at the same time.

Hooton’s conclusion: “Forget the bullshit about him just doing his job. He had done his job, for better or worse, on the Sunday. After that, he was just being the complete clown that he is.”

You can take Hooton’s tone or leave it. The substantive point is hard to dispute. The “I was just challenging advice” line only works if you ignore when the challenges were happening and what diplomatic damage they would have done.

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: “On the wrong side of 87%”, “Peters as accidental realist”, “The independent foreign policy Luxon nearly threw away”, “Patman’s harder line”, and “What’s coming next”.

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For two and a half years it has been just about possible to argue that the National–NZ First–Act coalition was outperforming the predictions of its critics. Stable, if not exactly harmonious. As Winston Peters likes to put it, the coalition is as stable as a “three-legged stool”. That argument is over.

Over the past fortnight the coalition has stopped pretending. The Prime Minister has publicly accused his own Foreign Minister of putting “politics ahead of the national interest”. The Foreign Minister has gone on Newstalk ZB to call the Prime Minister “imprudent”, a pointed contrast given Peters’ 40+ years in Parliament. The Finance Minister, who is also National’s deputy leader, has gone on the record describing the 81-year-old leader of NZ First as “very, very confused”. The Prime Minister has marched down two floors of the Beehive, in defiance of normal protocol, to give his Foreign Minister a dressing-down. None of this is normal coalition behaviour, and the people covering it are not pretending otherwise.

The proximate trigger was the Iran emails. On Thursday morning last week, Thomas Coughlan at the Herald revealed that Peters’ office had released, under the Official Information Act, internal correspondence showing that in the days after the US-Israeli strikes on Iran on 28 February the Prime Minister wanted to shift New Zealand’s official position from one of “acknowledgement” to one of “explicit public support”. The emails show that he was talked out of it by Peters and his staff. The substantive foreign policy issue here, whether Luxon’s instincts on the war were the right ones, what they say about his world-view, and how badly all of this is now hurting National’s election prospects, has been chewed over especially well by Josie Pagani and by Coughlan himself. I intend to write about that in a separate column. This one is about the coalition.

The release has detonated the polite fiction that this coalition operates on the basis of collective responsibility and “no surprises”. It has also exposed something more fundamental: that National and NZ First are now competing for the same voters, harder and more openly than the standard pre-election differentiation you expect under MMP.

“Feasting on each other”

Helen Clark’s line that the coalition partners are “feasting on each other” has been the most quoted phrase of the week, and deservedly so. She has been one of the most active commentators on the affair, with her remarks running across RNZ, 1News, the Spinoff and the Herald in the space of forty-eight hours, and she does not think the Government will run all the way to 7 November. “Right now,” she told the Herald, “I couldn’t look you in the eye and say I thought that the … Government would last till the 7th of November. They may stagger on, but it’s going to be increasingly fractious with less and less agreement internally.” On 1News Breakfast she put it more starkly still: the question, she said, is whether the coalition “can last much beyond the Budget”.

A “process mistake”?

The first question every gallery commentator has tried to answer is the obvious one: was the release of those emails the “process mistake” Peters has at points claimed it was, or a deliberate political attack?

Peters himself has cycled through several positions in the space of a day. Toby Manhire’s line on the Spinoff captured it best: “Peters was reported as saying he had been mistaken in saying it was a mistake, though by the afternoon he seemed to suggest it was a mistake to say he was mistaken to say it was a mistake.” He eventually settled on a kind of partial contrition: he made an “assumption”, he should have “checked”, a couple of his staff would now be attending an afternoon “training session”.

He has at no point retracted any of the substance of what was released.

Almost no one in the press gallery believes the staff-training-session story. Matthew Hooton put it bluntly in the Herald: “Don’t for one minute think Peters or his staff made some sort of mistake. This was another calculated attempt to undermine a Prime Minister for whom Peters acts like he has no respect.”

Phil Goff – sacked by Peters last year as High Commissioner to London – was even sharper on RNZ’s Midday Report: “There was no mistake about Winston Peters’ comments at all. He knew that exposing Luxon’s view would be damaging to Luxon and he wanted it to be.” On Luxon’s failure to sack him for it, Goff added, “shows his weakness in relation to his coalition partner”.

Stuff political editor Jenna Lynch did the most forensic work on the OIA mechanics. She got hold of both the request and the release, and her conclusion is hard to argue with: “It defies belief that these were the only two emails sent between offices on those dates which did not meet the test of prejudicing the security, defence of international relations of New Zealand.” Her sign-off line was characteristically blunt: “make no mistake; the damage has been done and it looks mighty intentional.”

David Farrar lands at the same place from the right. On Kiwiblog he allows that the OIA release was “clearly deliberate, and designed to make the Prime Minister look bad”, though he can’t decide whether it was tit-for-tat for Willis’ earlier attacks or a deliberate setting-up of an exit from the coalition.

Heather du Plessis-Allan offers a more contrarian reading, and even she calls Peters’ behaviour “out-and-out bad behaviour”, though she reads it as “a warning shot to National to pull its head in” rather than a genuine break.

The constitutional claim no one is dwelling on

Lost amid the coverage of the spat itself was the genuinely extraordinary moment in the House on Thursday afternoon. Asked by Labour’s Vanushi Walters about the Prime Minister’s experience to handle the Iran war, Peters skipped the question and instead claimed something more far-reaching: “I’ll say it slowly, the person in charge of foreign policy is the Foreign Minister. That’s me, not the Prime Minister.”

Helen Clark called the statement “extraordinary”, and Politik’s Richard Harman has been the most precise on why. Foreign policy in a Westminster system is not set by the Foreign Minister alone. It is set by Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister. The Foreign Minister implements it. Harman’s wording is restrained but unambiguous: “Constitutional experts would argue that he is ultimately responsible not for determining New Zealand’s foreign policy, but for implementing it, just as any Minister must implement policy formulated by the Government in Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister.”

Peters is asserting an authority he does not actually have. And he is so far getting away with it, because the Prime Minister cannot afford to push back hard enough to remove him.

Luke Malpass, in the Post, draws the awkward conclusion the National Party would prefer not to be drawn: “in this Government, foreign policy is being driven by the foreign minister more than the Prime Minister.” That is not partisan colour; it is a working description of how the Government is actually being run.

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The latest Beehive-media scandal about journalists fighting amongst themselves is grubby, personal and, in parts, overblown. But it should not be dismissed as gossip. It tells us something about the small world inside Parliament, and why that world is starting to look unhealthy.

I’m going to write a few Democracy Briefings on the general subject of political media in New Zealand, because there are a number of important stories around this topic at the moment. But I want to start with the messiest of the recent stories: the year-long silence over an ugly row between two press gallery journalists in a finance minister’s office, and the strange way that silence finally broke. On the face of it the episode is about one bad row at a drinks party. It is also a glimpse into the Parliament village.

The Drinks party that became a scandal

Government ministers regularly host press gallery journalists in their offices. Nothing unusual about that. Nicola Willis invited the gallery to hers ahead of the May 2025 Budget. The drinks went long. Tempers flared. According to the Substack writer Ani O’Brien, who broke the story on Tuesday, Stuff political journalist Lloyd Burr said something personally provocative to TVNZ political editor Maiki Sherman, and Sherman responded by repeatedly calling him a homophobic slur. There is also a contested claim that a racial slur was used in the exchange, which Burr and Stuff firmly deny.

Willis has confirmed she “returned to hear offensive language being used” and ended the event “at that point”. She says she checked on Burr the following day and respected his wish not to take it further. Stuff’s response is to back Burr’s account in full. TVNZ’s response, repeated daily and verbatim, is that it “does not comment on employment matters”.

Until O’Brien’s piece, the press gallery and the major newsrooms had largely sat on an allegation that one of the country’s most senior political journalists used a homophobic slur against a colleague in a minister’s office.

Lawyers from a state broadcaster

The most revealing admission about the silence came from Mike Hosking on his Newstalk ZB Breakfast show. Hosking’s producer Sam Carran had been quietly chasing the story for months. They thought they had it. Then, Hosking says, TVNZ’s lawyers arrived. “We got the big, broad-based fat letter from the lawyers… It had a chilling effect.”

The legal letter was reportedly from Russell McVeagh, one of the country’s largest commercial firms. A state-owned broadcaster used a major corporate firm to discourage another newsroom from reporting on its political editor. Hosking was blunt about what it meant: “The political editor of the state broadcaster allegedly saying what she did is unacceptable, I think in most people’s minds.”

Heather du Plessis-Allan, on her Newstalk ZB Drive show yesterday, was sharper still. She knew the story. She had been involved in editorial conversations about whether to run it. She conceded that the public’s perception that the New Zealand media had been “protecting one of their own” was not imagined. “I can tell you that perception is true. It’s not imagined — it is true.”

Du Plessis-Allan also said members of the press gallery had pushed back against ZB running anything because, she said, they were worried it would breach a “long-held convention” about reporting what happens at ministerial drinks. They feared losing the access to such ministerial drinks. Her own view was unsparing: “That crossed the line, in my opinion. That was actively trying to stop media outside Wellington from reporting on what happened in Wellington, involving one of their own.”

For a state broadcaster to have its lawyers warning off another newsroom from a story about its own staff conduct would in most countries be a scandal in itself. Massey University’s journalism programme leader James Hollings put it mildly: “It’s not a good look, really, when you’re a public broadcaster, to be telling another news outlet not to run a story about something.”

The Government’s wider campaign against TVNZ

The timing of a year-old Sherman story suddenly arriving in public is suspicious. The political context matters.

In early March, broadcasting minister Paul Goldsmith confirmed that TVNZ board chair Andrew Barclay, a National-affiliated appointee and a former Goldman Sachs boss, had phoned him at the weekend to raise a 1News story by Sherman’s gallery colleague Benedict Collins, on rising gang numbers. Police minister Mark Mitchell had publicly trashed the same story on Facebook as “absolutely unbelievable”. Marian Hobbs, Labour’s former broadcasting minister, told RNZ she found Barclay’s call “dangerous”. The TVNZ Act 2003 explicitly prohibits ministerial interference in news, and board members are not supposed to be ringing ministers about which stories irritated the Beehive.

Then Thomas Coughlan’s Herald piece landed: a detailed account of internal National caucus dissent, three sources, with reports that Christopher Luxon had been ghosting his own chief whip, Stuart Smith, over wavering caucus support. Luxon survived a confidence vote and emerged spitting tacks at the press gallery, declaring it had whipped up a “media soap opera” he would no longer engage with.

Days later, Simeon Brown, National’s newly appointed campaign chair, took to social media to complain that TVNZ reporters, Sherman among them, had broken parliamentary rules pursuing Smith for comment late at night.

A few days after that, Luxon cancelled his weekly Breakfast slot with the show’s new co-host Tova O’Brien, after a couple of bumpy interviews went viral.

And then, on Tuesday morning, came O’Brien’s Substack piece. A former National Party press secretary, suddenly publishing a year-old slur story.

O’Brien insists her source was not a politician or a staffer. Maybe so. But it is worth knowing who O’Brien is: she works for Jordan Williams’s Campaign Company, runs in tight National-aligned circles, and used to be on Judith Collins’s parliamentary staff. The story did not appear out of nowhere by itself.

Her story was genuinely newsworthy. It is also, conveniently, a missile aimed at a state broadcaster the Government has decided is the enemy. That does not prove the Beehive planted the story. It doesn’t need to. The point is that the story now sits inside a wider campaign of pressure on TVNZ.

The paywall now starts at halfway through all Democracy Project newsletters. Please take out a paid sub if you want to support this service and access the full content, including the following sections: “The Year of silence”, “The Press gallery as a club”, “The Chilling effect from inside the house”, and “A Small ecosystem turning on itself”

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A new report on social cohesion was released on Thursday. The survey results in it are far from boring or inconsequential. Amongst screeds of important data, two big numbers stand out: 28% of New Zealanders are now in what the report calls the “alienated” camp of politics, and 44% of New Zealanders think the political system needs major change or should just be replaced.

This is all in the Helen Clark Foundation’s second annual “Social Cohesion in New Zealand” report. And this is not just a social cohesion story about loneliness, neighbourliness, or whether people feel warm about one another. It is a story about a political system losing legitimacy with a huge chunk of the country.

And not just any chunk. The people most alienated from the status quo are not the comfortable and the well-connected. They are disproportionately those under financial pressure — the poor, the struggling, the people who have been told for years that New Zealand is a ‘fair go’ society while living in a version of the country that feels anything but fair.

That matters because too much of the commentary on political distrust and disengagement gets the moral order backwards. The usual script goes like this: people are disconnecting, this is dangerous, watch out for fringe politics, misinformation, and demagogues. There is some truth in that. But it is also evasive. It treats the alienated people as the problem, rather than asking what kind of political and economic order produces this alienation in the first place.

A different reading is more useful. Instead of seeing the alienated 28% as being wrong, it makes more sense to understand that they are actually very rationally concluding that the political system isn’t working for them.

The Three New Zealands

The report surveyed 2,882 people in late 2025 — the second year of what will be an annual exercise — and found that social cohesion has declined across every dimension it measures: belonging, worth, participation, justice, acceptance. Every one. The country’s social fabric is, as the authors put it, “fraying on almost every measure.”

But the headline numbers aren’t even the important part. The report’s most significant contribution is a clustering exercise: using two full years of data across 5,513 survey responses, the researchers identified three distinct groups within New Zealand society.

Thirty percent are “Connected”: they feel they belong, trust institutions, and are broadly accepting of other New Zealanders. Forty-one percent are “Ambivalent”: the largest group, with middling belonging, middling trust, and limited community participation. They tend to be older homeowners, retirees, centre-right voters. Comfortable, but not deeply rooted.

Then there are the Alienated. Twenty-eight percent. Almost half of Māori and Pasifika respondents fall into this group. So do nearly half of Green voters and seven in ten New Zealand First voters: people who agree on almost nothing else, but share the same structural position at the outside edge of the country’s promise. As report co-author Shamubeel Eaqub put it: “We have three very different New Zealands living alongside each other.”

Former Prime Minister Helen Clark was more direct: “The size of the alienated group in the survey is quite staggering. It’s over a quarter and moving towards a third of the population. That’s a huge worry, because with alienation comes anger, comes despair. It can lash out in ways you can’t predict. It’s particularly fertile territory for populism to stir.” And she’s right about the danger. Of course, the danger isn’t that these people have lost their minds. They’ve lost faith in a system that has given them legitimate reasons to.

A “Broken NZ” report in think-tank language

The Helen Clark Foundation has essentially published a “Broken NZ” report dressed in the polite language of social science.

The authors’ headline explanation is that “financial stress is the dominant driver” of collapsing cohesion. Translated from think-tank prose: being poor in a country that presents itself as fair is eating away at the social fabric. The report’s own regression analysis confirms this — financial circumstances dominate every other variable when predicting social cohesion. Compared to someone who considers themselves prosperous, a person “just getting along” scores 6.5 points lower on the cohesion index. Someone struggling to pay bills scores 9 points lower. Someone who describes themselves as poor scores 14.4 points lower.

That is an enormous gap. And it is not a story about individual attitude problems.

The “fair go” — the national myth on which market liberalism was sold to New Zealanders from the mid-1980s onwards — is now believed by fewer than half the country. Only 45% agree that “in the long run, hard work brings a better life.” That is down seven points in a single year. Only 31% think everyone has a fair chance at getting the jobs they seek — down eight points. Only 45% think New Zealand is a land of opportunity — down six points.

Damien Venuto wrote in Stuff this week: “A generation of working New Zealanders is losing faith in the country’s core promise: that hard work leads to stability and a better life.” Venuto is describing people looking honestly at their own circumstances.

Two democracies inside one country

The report separates “prosperous respondents” from “struggling respondents,” and what it finds should be on the front page of every newspaper in the country.

The prosperous and the struggling are experiencing different political systems. They have different views on whether basic institutions of democracy are legitimate, and the gaps are staggering.

On whether elections in New Zealand are fair:
Overall: 51% agree — Prosperous: 62% — Struggling: 35%

On whether government leaders abuse their power most or all of the time:
Overall: 34% say they do — Prosperous: 27% — Struggling: 54%

On whether governments can be trusted to do the right thing:
Overall: 39% trust them — Prosperous: 56% — Struggling: 22% (A gap of 34 percentage points between rich and poor)

On whether New Zealand is a land of opportunity:
Overall: 45% agree — Prosperous: 63% — Struggling: 29%

On whether the courts make fair and impartial decisions:
Overall: 45% — Prosperous: 60% — Struggling: 33%

On whether they feel happy or very happy:
Overall: 56% — Prosperous: 79% — Struggling: 27%

On whether they feel treated with respect most or all of the time:
Overall: 75% — Prosperous: 87% — Struggling: 56%

On whether neighbours would help them:
Overall: 63% — Prosperous: 70% — Struggling: 53%

The picture is not subtle. If you are financially comfortable in this country, you mostly still believe New Zealand institutions work. Elections are fair. Courts are basically impartial. Government, on the whole, is trustworthy. Neighbours would lend you a hand if you needed it. You’re happy enough. You feel respected. You believe the deal is, in the main, upheld.

But if you are struggling, you see a very different country — one in which power is abused, courts are not impartial, and successive governments serve interests that are not yours. New Zealand as a land of opportunity is a country other people live in. Respect, happiness, a fair go — all of that is for someone else.

It is a class divide expressing itself as a legitimacy divide.

Poverty is a democratic issue, not just a welfare one. When your financial position determines whether you believe elections are fair, then the gap between the prosperous and the struggling is a gap in democratic citizenship.

Incidentally: only 12% of New Zealanders now think New Zealand’s system of government “works fine as it is,” down from 17% a year ago. One wonders which 12% think the political system is fine, but appears to be roughly the people who make it into the Koru Lounge. Meanwhile, 44% want major change or outright replacement of the political system — up six points in a year. That is a democratic legitimacy finding of the first order. The political and media class has missed this entirely.

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: “Not quiet, and not apathetic”, “The Numbers on institutional collapse”, “The Class map and the inside/outside split”, and “Who is speaking to them?”, “The silence of the left”, “Community collapse and the Australian comparison”, and “Taking them seriously”.

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Christopher Luxon survived. Yesterday he walked into a National caucus meeting and called an unexpected confidence vote on his own leadership. He won it. The doubters didn’t put up. So for now, they’ve been told to shut up.

It’s the framing Luxon wants us to take away. And it’s not entirely wrong. It was a bold move. He called his detractors’ bluff, and they blinked. Stuff’s political editor Jenna Lynch put it best: “His doubters were told to put up or shut up. They didn’t put up anything. So for now they have to shut up.”

But the interesting question isn’t about Luxon surviving yesterday. It’s how long he goes before he has to do something like this again.

A Vote won, not a problem solved

The most useful line from the day is Luke Malpass’ in The Post: “A vote won, not a problem solved.” And every serious political editor has said some version of that. Coughlan in the Herald: “if the polling continues to suffer, then unity will, too”, and “Luxon is far from being out of the woods”. Sam Sachdeva at Newsroom: “silencing internal dissent will not magically reverse” a party’s “sagging popularity and the parlous state of the economy.” Thomas Manch at BusinessDesk: “confirming the caucus’ confidence only solves the immediate problem. What he really needs is the country’s confidence.” The Otago Daily Times editorial today was even more blunt, saying: “this matter is far from closed.”

None of this should be comforting for Luxon.

The caucus vote only measures where support is on a given morning. It doesn’t measure the deeper problem, which is that Luxon’s personal polling is heading towards what Coughlan calls the “death zone,” that National is tracking somewhere around 29% in the poll of polls, and that nobody seriously expects either number to improve by accident.

Malpass is right that no caucus has yet decided 29% is the line for getting rid of a leader. But a line exists. If National drops another two or three points, as Heather du Plessis-Allan warned, “all of this is just going to start up again. MPs will see themselves at risk of losing their jobs, they’ll freak out and the chatter will resume.” Hard to argue with.

The Rebels weren’t beaten, just silenced

A confidence vote doesn’t turn enemies into friends. All it does is put them on the back foot for a while. Every political editor who has written about the vote accepts that the underlying dissent has not gone away. Coughlan puts the arithmetic plainly: “Forty-nine MPs is a lot of people to keep in line, particularly when National’s polling continues to suffer. Someone, probably multiple people, are likely to break ranks again.”

Richard Harman at Politik, who is possibly better connected with the National caucus than anyone writing today, says the Hosking-named five are not the whole story: “as far as POLITIK understands, there may be at least another three or four.” Coughlan agrees: “Luxon is likely to know those names only scratch the surface of dissent.”

Matthew Hooton (writing in his Patreon newsletter) has gone further, arguing that the five who were named are likely fronting for a larger group – MPs who hold safe seats and can afford to be visible, acting on behalf of list MPs and those in marginal electorates who can’t afford the same exposure: “That also suggests to me that they have been put up to make complaints to the whips about the Prime Minister’s incompetence on behalf of a bigger group which includes MPs from the list and with smaller majorities who are not so politically safe personally”.

Van de Molen, for what it’s worth, was asked directly whether he had written a letter of no confidence for Stuart Smith to pass on. He did not respond. That’s not quite a denial.

Coughlan’s line on this is the one to remember: “What is being said in public is not the same as what is being said in private. Can the National Party continue to sustain this kind of double life?”

The Stuart Smith mystery

Why wasn’t Stuart Smith at the caucus meeting yesterday?

The official explanation of a “longstanding personal appointment” began to strain credibility almost immediately. As Coughlan noted, Smith had told The Post on Monday night that he’d been trying to fly to Wellington but had been delayed by weather, and intended to arrive on Tuesday morning. By Tuesday morning, he hadn’t arrived on any flights.

Henry Cooke at The Post asked the right question: “What on earth was going on with chief whip Stuart Smith?” Smith had spent days neither confirming nor denying the original Herald story — the story, sourced to four people including multiple MPs, that he had sought a meeting with Luxon to convey flagging caucus support, and that Luxon had ignored the request. Then, on Tuesday, after days of silence, the Prime Minister’s office released a statement in Smith’s name offering a more emphatic denial: “I did not contact the Prime Minister or his office seeking a meeting.”

Cooke again: “If the Prime Minister had a statement like that in his back pocket, why not use it to douse the fire on Friday?”

Jo Moir at RNZ noted that “Smith’s statement and denials needed to have landed on Friday if he and Luxon wanted them to be believed. It’s not credible to wait four days to put out that statement.” She also observed that when Simeon Brown was asked whether Luxon or his office had pressured Smith into making the statement, Brown refused to answer multiple times.

The Herald, for its part, says it stands by its original reporting and has not been asked to issue a correction. Neither, apparently, have any of the other outlets that confirmed the story with their own caucus sources.

Moir has speculated that Smith’s days as Chief Whip could be numbered: “The next caucus vote could end up being for a replacement senior whip.” The fact that Smith was absent from yesterday’s meeting meant he was also absent from the count — the scrutineers were party president Sylvia Wood and junior whip Suze Redmayne, not Smith, who would normally have played that role. In a meeting that was specifically about Luxon’s leadership.

At the very least, it doesn’t pass the smell test.

Was the Vote Really Unanimous?

Luxon, in the House, declared after the vote that he had the “absolutely” unanimous support of his caucus. Finance Minister Nicola Willis reiterated the National Party convention that only the scrutineers know the actual numbers. The two claims don’t really fit.

The Herald has said plainly that it has “good reason to believe” the vote was not unanimous. Malpass notes that “Luxon described the result as ‘clear and decisive’ but the convention of the National Party is that the caucus only find out the end result — only the scrutineers know the numerical result of the vote. No one outside them should know.” The Otago Daily Times editorial made the same point: the very fact that a vote was necessary at all tells you that unanimity was never the reality.

If the numbers weren’t as clean as claimed — and there’s good reason to think they weren’t — this will matter to the dissenters. Lynch: “If there’s any indication it was a close vote, that could kick off another round.”

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: “Naming names on Newstalk ZB”, “The Polls are Luxon’s real problem”, “Attacking the media is another tell”, and “When does it bubble up again?”.

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Winston Peters has smartly read the room for a second time this month. Just weeks after announcing NZ First would campaign to break up the big four electricity gentailers, he has turned his sights on the supermarket duopoly: announcing that a future NZ First government would legislate to split Foodstuffs into two nationwide cooperatives based on brand: one for New World and Four Square, and another for Pak’n Save. Both, Peters says, would then compete directly with Woolworths.

It is, on the surface, the boldest thing any political party has said about the grocery market in years. And it will be very popular. And it should be. Nearly everyone who pushes a trolley around a New Zealand supermarket already suspects they’re being ripped off.

The Commerce Commission confirmed as much when it found the duopoly was earning around $1 million a day in excess profits. A Phoenix Research survey back in 2021 found 70% of New Zealanders supported splitting up the two existing supermarket groups to create more competition. That mandate has never gone away. If anything, it has hardened.

So yes, give Peters credit for reading the room. He has moved the Overton window on supermarket reform further this week than Labour managed across six years. The structural breakup of oligopolies is the political Zeitgeist of our moment, and NZ First has surfed it twice in as many months.

But there is a gap between surfing the wave and actually changing the market. And when you look at what NZ First is actually proposing, the gap is significant.

The Policy, and what it leaves out

The announcement has three planks. There’s the structural separation of Foodstuffs into two cooperatives. There’s a set of tougher Commerce Commission penalties — fines of up to $10 million, three times the commercial gain, or 10% of turnover, matching Australian enforcement standards. And there’s a beefed-up Grocery Commissioner with binding decision-making powers, plus a new framework to address shelf access for local producers.

These are not nothing. Consumer NZ’s Gemma Rasmussen has said she supports NZ First’s push for stronger Commerce Commission and Grocery Commissioner powers, noting that since the 2022 Commerce Commission report “there has been a lot of tinkering around the edges of what was required.” Rasmussen is clear-eyed about why we are here: “It feels like National put all its chips on an overseas third party entering the market, but that has failed dismally with the likes of Aldi, Lidl and other international players saying, no thank you.”

RNZ’s Susan Edmunds reported that Professor Tim Hazledine from the University of Auckland also supports the breakup idea, agreeing that the Commerce Commission’s track record so far “had not made a difference.” Hazledine was characteristically blunt about the Commission’s timidity: “They said, please don’t, we’re not very brave here, so please don’t send us into battle. We don’t want any weapons. Thank you very much.”

So, the NZ First supermarket breakup policy is getting some expert support. But look at what the policy does not address, and the picture shifts considerably.

The Woolworths problem

The most glaring omission is Woolworths. The Australian-owned giant, which controls roughly 42% of the market, is entirely untouched by the NZ First proposal. Breaking up Foodstuffs while leaving Woolworths intact does not create a competitive grocery market. It creates a reshuffled duopoly, possibly a lopsided one.

Grocery Action Group chair Sue Chetwin was direct about this, telling NBR’s Brent Edwards that the policy “left open the fate of Woolworths” and whether concrete measures would be introduced at the wholesale level to foster true competition. This is the central problem. The broken supermarket sector is broken because it is a duopoly, not a monopoly. Any reform that treats it as the latter is starting in the wrong place.

The silence on Woolworths is not purely a matter of political cowardice, to be fair. Woolworths NZ is a subsidiary of an Australian corporate, and forcing its divestment raises complexities under overseas investment rules that do not apply to Foodstuffs. But the NZ First announcement contains no acknowledgement of this problem, let alone a proposed solution. The policy simply ignores half the duopoly.

The Distribution centre blind spot

Even the proposed Foodstuffs split has a deeper structural flaw. And it’s one that gets far less attention than it deserves.

Monopoly Watch’s research director Tex Edwards responded to the NZ First announcement with a critique that goes to the heart of why brand-level breakups can miss the point entirely. As he told NBR’s Brent Edwards: “The problem was never the number of stores. It is the distribution centre monopoly and the underlying market architecture. A Pak’n Save breakout that leaves those both intact is not competition. It is the same system with different signage.”

There are currently only two major distribution networks controlling grocery supply in New Zealand. Any new entity spun out of Foodstuffs would still be dependent on the same wholesale infrastructure. Edwards has argued for years that a genuine solution requires the divestment of distribution centres to an independent operator. Without that, competitors are permanently disadvantaged before they stock a single shelf.

This dimension of the debate should be front and centre. The Grocery Action Group’s Chetwin has also stressed it: only reform targeting both retail and wholesale will deliver genuine relief to consumers at the checkout. Yet NZ First’s announcement is essentially silent on wholesale reform.

The Wrong split

Even on its own terms, the chosen split may be the wrong one. Hazledine, as reported by RNZ’s Edmunds, thinks NZ First has chosen the wrong split. His argument is that the economically effective breakup would be New World on one side and Pak’n Save with Four Square on the other — so that the two new entities would be competing against each other in every market from the outset. A brand-based split, by contrast, could easily result in two players who occupy different geographic territories or different price segments without ever genuinely competing head-to-head in the same town.

University of Sydney retail academic Lisa Asher adds a structural complication that has barely featured in the coverage. As reported today by Brent Edwards in the NBR, Asher points out that NZ First’s policy assumes Foodstuffs is a single entity that can simply be divided in two — but it cannot. Foodstuffs South Island (FSSI) is a genuine cooperative. Foodstuffs North Island (FSNI) is not: it operates as a franchise model, and the two are legally separate entities.

According to the NBR, she says that “politicians and the news media mistook Foodstuffs as a single company, but FSSI and FSNI were separate entities,” and raises an uncomfortable question: why do the two entities never enter each other’s island for growth? “Is there an agreement in place, whether verbal or understood, not to enter the other island?”

Asher’s proposed fix, as reported by Brent Edwards, is therefore quite different from NZ First’s. Rather than a brand-based split, she argues the 2013 merger that created Foodstuffs North Island should be reversed. That could result in two nationwide supermarket chains plus three regional ones. This would be a far more genuinely competitive architecture than what NZ First is describing.

These are not pedantic objections. They go to whether the policy can actually work.

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: “Thin on detail”, “Peters is running against his own coalition”, “The Revolving door and the captured reform process”, “What genuine reform might look like” and “Why this NZ First moment still matters”.

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Prime Minister Christopher Luxon goes into his weekly National Party Caucus meeting tomorrow to try to put an end to the insurgent rebellion against his leadership. He will walk out either still leader, or not. There is no longer a third option where everyone pretends nothing is happening.

It’s become clearer that there is now a rebel group of National MPs pushing for a change of leadership, and they’re clearly willing to keep leaking to the media about Luxon. It’s therefore ceased being credible for Luxon and his supporters to pretend the caucus is rock solidly behind him or that leadership speculation is a media invention.

Hence Luxon has shifted his message today. In his various Monday morning media interviews he conceded the existence of the rebel MPs. He told Newstalk ZB’s Mike Hosking: “There’s probably five people that are, you know, moaning and frustrated”. On TVNZ’s Breakfast he also conceded there would be a “very small handful of understandably disgruntled backbench MPs,” treating this as an normal feature of any large caucus.

The National Party Rebels

Luxon won’t say who the five are. He doesn’t have to. The names circulating around National and Parliament are by now familiar: Barbara Kuriger, Sam Uffindell, Andrew Bayly, Tim van de Molen, and tellingly, the Chief Whip Stuart Smith. James Meager’s name keeps drifting in and out of the same sentence.

Richard Harman noted in Politik today that “the same small group of MPs who were thought to be behind the leadership speculation last November are under suspicion again,” singling out Meager and Uffindell. Both deny any involvement. They would.

The backbench mutterers are not the real danger. Backbenchers in marginal seats or bad list spots always grumble when their future is in doubt. The danger is above them.

The name that keeps surfacing, as it has for months, is Chris Bishop. Whether or not he is the actual source of Thomas Coughlan’s Herald scoop on Friday that lit the latest fire, National insiders assume he is (and in this kind of exercise assumption is almost as damaging as proof).

Heather du Plessis-Allan, who is very well connected with National Party insiders, has now more or less convicted him in print. In her Herald column yesterday she said that through his disloyalty Bishop has killed off his chances to become the new leader if there is a vacancy: “Bishop is out of the running. He most likely won’t be rewarded by the caucus for the destabilising they will blame him for.” Others under quiet suspicion include Nicola Willis and Erica Stanford, though nobody is yet willing to put their name to that.

Luxon helped build this

Commentators on the right are tempted to treat the rebels as the whole problem. Hosking went full throat this morning: “Worse than the media, though, are the stirrers inside his own party. The selfishness and bare knuckle self preservation on display is disgraceful… Right now, we have a few people who appear willing to put themselves and their own survival ahead of the collective.” It’s a useful column for Luxon. It is not a complete account.

Du Plessis-Allan, who is also sympathetic to Luxon, puts the other half of it plainly: “Some of it is Luxon’s own doing: he punished Chris Bishop too harshly and has added revenge into the mix.” The Easter reshuffle stripped Bishop of Leader of the House, the campaign chair role, and an associate sport portfolio. Rather than quieting him, it made him angry. And an angry senior minister with gallery contacts is a dangerous thing inside a caucus

The 1News poll as accelerant

The latest fuel for the leadership instability is last night’s 1News Verian poll that put National at 29.7% (rounded up to 30%), down four points. Labour jumped five to 37%. It is the worst 1News National result since Luxon took the leadership in late 2021; Judith Collins’ final poll before she was rolled was 28%. Luxon’s own preferred-PM rating fell to 16%, below Chris Hipkins. On those numbers, as Justin Hu reported, “National would lose 12 seats in November.”

That projected loss of twelve seats is not an abstraction to the caucus — it translates directly into twelve MPs who can see their own survival on the line. Maiki Sherman, writing on 1News, put the human mechanics bluntly: the poll “will embolden parts of the caucus to act — either those who hold a grudge or those who believe their personal ambition is at risk due to Luxon’s weak support among voters. That is when the knives come out, or, to put it more politely, that is when the ultimatums are made and a select few start running the numbers.”

Maiki Sherman has also reported tonight on another element of the Verian poll result: the public’s approval rating of Luxon’s performance. The poll showed that 33% approved and 56% disapproved, giving a net score of -23%, a new low.

Should he go?

The most interesting argument of the week is Du Plessis-Allan’s, interesting because it’s reluctant. She likes Luxon personally, says so repeatedly, and still concludes that he is finished. Her reasoning is close to actuarial: the polling is sub-30 in multiple polls, not a rogue; the economy won’t rescue him before November; the leaks will keep flowing; therefore the rollover happens anyway, and the only question is whether it happens now, in daylight, or in the depths of winter with three months to go.

“Moving Luxon on is a huge risk,” she writes. “But leaving him in the job is a definite spanking waiting to happen. All options are less than ideal. It’s a case of picking the least bad.” Her preferred sequence is brutal: replace him, then call an early election while the new leader is still in honeymoon and before the Iran-related fuel shock and a hard winter bite any deeper.

The counter-case is put by Liam Hehir, and is worth quoting at some length, because nobody else has said it so cleanly: “Nobody seriously believes that elevating any of the names in circulation would constitute a renewal. Nobody is making that case because the case cannot be made. Leadership changes tend to succeed only when the replacement is already demonstrably more popular than the incumbent, or when the incumbent has become so irreparably toxic that almost anyone would do. Neither condition applies here.”

Hehir’s analogy is Liz Truss, not Jacinda Ardern. And his warning is that “a caucus that talked itself into believing that a change of personnel was a change of fortune, installed someone who had not been tested at the top and discovered very quickly that the problems did not leave with the old leader.”

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: “Who, then?”, “The Funders pushing Luxon must go”, “Backlash from the loyalists”, “What Tuesday looks like”.

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Winston Peters has just promised to break up the supermarket duopoly. It’s the latest economic populist policy he’s thrown into the 2026 election campaign. Also today, the Greens used their State of the Planet speech to urge the Government to electrify the economy.

If you had to bet which one cuts through, it’s Peters’ supermarket breakup line. That’s the kind of thing voters instantly understand. The Greens’ electrification pitch, by contrast, barely registers.

That contrast captures the whole campaign so far. NZ First is the only party effectively tapping into public discontent

The latest two published polls have put the party on 15% and 13.6% - increases that clearly relate to NZ First’s recent policy announcement that it will break up the “Big Four” electricity gentailers that are widely seen as making mega profits in an uncompetitive market involving fast rising prices for consumers.

Also, Peters’ preferred-prime-minister score is now 12.1%, almost three times David Seymour’s 4.6%. Commentators are increasingly forecasting that NZ First might hit the high teens or even 20% by November and that Peters could demand the top job as the price of any post-election deal. Matthew Hooton, unusually well plugged into NZ First’s strategists, has been explicit about the ambition: build the party into “medium-sized” status, then leverage that to make Peters the next Prime Minister.

Peters’ audacity is nothing new. What’s remarkable is that none of the other party leaders seems to have a plan to stop him

Why only Peters is reading the mood

For the last year I have been writing about what I call “Broken New Zealand”, based on the idea that our economy and polity have been captured by incumbents. We’ve ended up with markets dominated by a handful of players (supermarkets, banks, power companies) where everyone knows the game is rigged, even if they can’t quite explain how. Prices go up, service doesn’t improve, and yet nothing really changes. As a result, everything from the public service through to infrastructure seems to be in decline, while elites profit.

We keep seeing further evidence of this. Opinion polls keep showing that more New Zealanders think the country is going in the “wrong direction” than think it’s headed in the “right direction”. The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer found only 17% of New Zealanders believe the next generation will be better off, one of the lowest scores in the OECD and down nine points in a year. Net citizen departures have hit record highs. Consumer NZ keeps finding the same thing on groceries. The Commerce Commission keeps issuing report after report on structural market failure.

NZ First is surging in support, because Peters is the only party leader to have noticed this discontent and is responding with big populist policies. It does not actually matter that NZ First is itself deeply embedded in the Establishment, sits inside the current Government, takes corporate money, and has delivered almost nothing on any of this during the parliamentary term. The “feeling” is what matters. He is the one naming the villains and promising to swing a hammer at them.

He’s winning because the field is empty. The 15% poll result says less about him than it does about everyone else’s failure to show up and fight for the votes of those that are discontented with the state of life in New Zealand.

The Tribes the political class forgot

Danyl McLauchlan’s recent Listener cover story on the five voter “tribes” is the sharpest political analysis published this election year, and I’ve written about it in a previous Democracy Briefing. The bit that matters most for this election is simple.

Two of McLauchlan’s five tribes account for roughly 35% of the electorate. This is the Precarious Left (around 18%, younger, disproportionately female, Māori and Pasifika, mostly renters working in aged care, early childhood education, community health) and the Alienated Conservatives (around 17%, older, predominantly male, often a tradie or self-employed, home ownership among his cohort collapsed from 78% in 1990 to 30% today).

McLauchlan says that these two forgotten tribes have a lot of similarities. Ideologically they disagree on almost everything — redistribution, immigration, the Treaty. But they share a conviction that cuts through all of that: the system isn’t built for people like them

Between them, these two discontented tribes are larger than the centrist Middle New Zealand tribe that both major parties build their campaigns around. Neither of the discontented tribes are properly represented in the current Parliament.

Labour and the Greens have drifted, across the last two decades, into what Thomas Piketty calls the “Brahmin Left” (or what McLauchlan calls the “Educated Progressives”) — the party of university-educated public-sector professionals whose interests and ideals conveniently align. National and Act speak for the “Establishment Right” (or what Piketty calls “the Merchant Right”).

This means that the 35% at the bottom end of the economic ladder, who don’t trust any of them, are politically orphaned. And Peters is increasingly positioning himself to adopt them.

Labour: timidity dressed as pragmatism

Labour is the party most exposed to this. Peters is hunting its traditional vote, and catching a lot of it.

Chris Hipkins can at least see the mood. He has talked about the “supermarket duopoly,” the “big four Australian-owned banks,” the electricity and insurance oligopolies. He’s willing to name the villains, but then he pulls his punches. Structural break-ups are “a big step to take.” The answer, in his telling, is “better regulation” and “opening up space for new players.” A code of conduct. A working group.

The two big policy announcements of the past year tell the story. Labour’s capital gains tax, leaked quietly over a long weekend late last year, carves out the family home, farms, KiwiSaver, business assets and inheritances. The projected revenue is triangulated into three free GP visits a year under a so-called Medicard. It’s a pale shadow of the David Parker tax overhaul Labour once considered.

Then there is the Future Fund. Rob Campbell dismissed it in public as “at best a derivative concept” that “does not suddenly find any new money but takes from one place to put it in another.” Finance spokesperson Barbara Edmonds has locked Labour into the same debt and surplus tramlines as Nicola Willis, and publicly dismissed the Greens’ alternative budget as a “huge spend-up” that she conceded she hadn’t read.

Labour is not, on current evidence, a party preparing to break anything up.

To outflank Peters, Labour would actually have to take risks. It would mean backing supermarket divestment instead of another code of conduct, structural separation of the gentailers, a real capital-income tax rather than a CGT written by the exemption lobby, a serious intervention in the housing market. And it would mean abandoning the “small target” strategy that is slowly strangling them. If Labour wants to blunt NZ First’s rise, it has to be much clearer and much bolder. It needs to abandon its centre-left managerialism.

If Labour doesn’t do any of this, NZ First will keep eating its base. A big chunk of the Alienated Conservatives are already gone to NZ First. Without a change of tack, the Precarious Left will follow.

The paywall now starts at halfway through all Democracy Project newsletters. Please take out a paid sub if you want to support this service and access the full content, including the following sections: “The Greens: stuck in the wrong fight”, “National: a CEO in a reformer’s moment”, “Act: from market freedom to donor protection”, “Te Pāti Māori”, “The one card Peters can never play”.

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