News Briefing Top 10 for 1 November 2026
1. Henry Cooke (Sunday Star Times): David Seymour demanded Don Brash’s vote-splitting campaign exempt two electorates before approving it (paywalled)
Act’s first answer to Don Brash’s vote-splitting advertisement was no. David Seymour told Henry Cooke he approved it only after Brash agreed to run a separate endorsement of Act’s candidates in Epsom and Tāmaki, an ad placed by Brash personally that cuts against the overhang strategy of having National win as many electorates as possible. Because the main ad endorses Act and NZ First, what it cost comes out of their election spending limits of about $3.2 million.
2. Vernon Small (Sunday Star Times): Overhang overhangs National’s campaign (paywalled)
National is having to fight a second front against its own side, as Act and NZ First all but endorse the overhang strategy. Vernon Small, a former Labour government adviser, suspects what really alarmed Christopher Luxon about Thursday’s RNZ-Reid Research poll, with National on 25%, was what it implied about the strategy catching on. The minor parties would gain a bigger claim on Cabinet seats. National could end up an electorate rump, owning overhang seats it never asked for and much of any backlash.
3. Andrea Vance (Sunday Star Times): Pay equity ‒ There’s a word for this. Starts with C... (paywalled)
Hospices asked Health New Zealand to let them interview three groups of its male-dominated staff so that 750 palliative care nurses could make their pay equity case. Health NZ said no, and under the coalition’s rewritten law a claim without suitable comparators is automatically discontinued. Andrea Vance calls it a trap engineered by Brooke van Velden and Nicola Willis, and Plunket and Bupa aged care nurses face the same dead end. Across three press conferences, neither Simeon Brown nor Christopher Luxon would say whether they will tell Health NZ to co-operate.
4. Grant McLachlan: Will Jordan Williams be the biggest loser this election?
Grant McLachlan spent two days at the Hawke’s Bay A&P Show watching the crowd walk around Jordan Williams and the Taxpayers’ Union’s Debt Clock, and argues the Union’s tactics are putting voters off. He questions the political use of its Curia poll of Tukituki, released at the Union’s own debate, and asks who is paying for the wider overhang campaign. In 2024 Reality Check Radio was begging listeners for $480,000 to stay on air; now, registered as a third-party promoter, it can spend up to $424,000 and is buying full-page Herald ads. McLachlan records the denials, including Williams rejecting Nicky Hager’s allegations and Harry Mowbray saying a joint fundraising plan was abandoned. His worry is that voters are getting heavily promoted tactical advice without knowing, until after the election, who paid for it or whose interests it serves.
5. Dita De Boni (Sunday Star Times): NZ’s public health dollars are bankrolling private dividends (paywalled)
Ten years ago Jonathan Coleman insisted the Compass meal served at Dunedin Hospital was delicious. Since then the reach of private profit into health has only grown, and a Public Futures Aotearoa report says private providers took 80% of the increase in public health spending over the past three years. Dita De Boni picks through who benefits, from New Zealand Health Group’s $32.56m dividend in 2025 to Green Cross Health, owner of 320 pharmacies and majority-owned by a major Act sponsor. Act recently released a policy to give pharmacies more of the health budget.
6. Matthew Hooton (Sunday Star Times): Christopher Luxon or Chris Hipkins? Now it’s your choice (paywalled)
Ask Christopher Luxon for his vision and you get “growth and prosperity”, which Matthew Hooton, the Post’s editor-in-chief, thinks a bit sterile. Per capita, he points out, there has been no economic growth at all in three years. Chris Hipkins seemed to struggle even more to describe his plan, and Hooton thinks he is setting himself up to fail by promising something that sounds like utopia.
7. Heather du Plessis-Allan (Herald): National’s attacks on Chlöe Swarbrick have gone too far (paywalled)
A mock Halloween trailer has Chlöe Swarbrick emerging from the floorboards to rob a till. It’s one of a run of posts about her on National’s Instagram, seven in one day this week, alongside repeated warnings about her becoming finance minister. Heather du Plessis-Allan thinks National is right to criticise the Greens’ fiscal policies, but says it has crossed into sustained personal attacks that make a party claiming to be the sensible adults look juvenile and desperate. Even if the attacks are freaking out undecided voters, she argues, fear doesn’t necessarily give them a reason to choose National. The statesmanlike ground now belongs to David Seymour.
8. Thomas Coughlan (Herald): National pounces on Green suggestion wealth tax could be extended to less rich as celebrated economist backs tax report
Chlöe Swarbrick told The Kaka podcast that if a wealth tax starting at $10 million was shown to work, there could be arguments for lowering the threshold. National’s Simeon Brown promptly called the threshold a “Trojan horse”, Thomas Coughlan reports. The Greens answered with a report, carrying a foreword by Thomas Piketty, that puts the effective tax rate of the very wealthy at roughly 47% of a median-wealth adult’s.
9. Andrew Ketels (Herald): I introduced the phrase ‘cost of living crisis’ in 2023 and Labour has learned a lesson from it (paywalled)
Andrew Ketels coined ‘cost of living crisis’ in December 2021 as Act’s chief of staff, and the phrase helped National and Act tear down Labour’s record. Prices are now 9% higher, and voters blame the coalition instead. Ketels, now in government relations at Sherson Willis, says no government can bring prices down in a single term, and thinks Labour has learned from this by keeping its promises measured.
10. Damien Grant (Stuff): Electorate candidates deserve your vote on merit, not tactical gaming
Damien Grant has spent the campaign hosting electorate debates for the Taxpayers’ Union, and thinks candidates who work that hard deserve to be judged on merit. He’ll vote for Act’s Simon Court in Kaipara, despite Court having little chance of winning. An overhang government would be seen as illegitimate, Grant warns. He blames Te Pāti Māori for starting the game, and wonders whether the 1986 Royal Commission was right to want the Māori seats scrapped.
Below the paywall are 46 more summaries. They cover Winston Peters telling a 78-year-old critic she has memory problems, Jacinda Ardern’s tearful warning to Chris Hipkins that she was 90% sure she would quit, a day on the road with Christopher Luxon in Taupō, why Kerrin Leoni is still legally Labour’s candidate in Tāmaki Makaurau, the hunt for New Zealand’s median voter, the Science Minister who skipped a science panel and won’t say why, four financial experts on KiwiSaver at 20, the Entrust chair who says elections are how beneficiaries judge her performance, the $256m acid mine drainage bill behind Bathurst’s Stockton bid, whether National or Labour is better for the sharemarket, who will represent New Zealand at Apec in Shenzhen, the top 1% of households owning $183 billion, a GP network boss scoring the parties’ health policies, two-thirds of aged care facilities running at a loss, the disease-free Auckland Island pigs that could supply kidney transplants, 199 schools of concern, and the Solicitor-General who ordered a union official out of a Crown Law meeting. Plus today’s cartoons.
————-
