News Briefing Top 10 for 13 November 2026
1. Danyl McLauchlan (Listener): Did voters mean to say they prefer NZ to be governed by the likes of Michael Laws and Paul Henry? (paywalled)
Danyl McLauchlan has written the sharpest column of the week. Voters in 2026 seem to dislike National yet want it in power, he observes in the Listener, and may be returning a government in which a weakened National is constrained by bigger Act and NZ First partners and stripped of urban liberals like Nicola Willis, Chris Bishop and Paul Goldsmith. Is that a coherent public choice, or the accidental product of competing overhang strategies? In his telling, John Tamihere’s strategy in the Māori seats provoked a right-wing counter-scheme that had no ceiling. McLauchlan is scathing about Luxon, saying his repeated campaign rule-out of Opportunity “may qualify as the most egregious lie in our modern political history”. Opportunity risks losing its voters to the Greens if it props up a more radical coalition, he thinks, and might be more comfortable on the crossbenches. Labour gets little sympathy either. Hipkins’ complaints about manipulation look like a distraction from his own campaign failures, and both major parties ignored the Electoral Commission’s 2012 warning about exactly this.
2. Bryce Edwards (Democracy Project): Could New Zealand be voting again?
A second election remains unlikely, but in today’s Democracy Briefing I argue that fear of one is already shaping the coalition talks. The right bloc has 67 seats, just one more than it needs, and I look at three routes back to the polls: no government being formed after the official count on 27 November, a government that forms and later loses its majority, or a prime minister going early for a stronger mandate. Act and NZ First have the least to fear, and the likeliest outcome is a prime minister who keeps making concessions to avoid an election he can’t be confident of winning.
For paid subscribers, the Further Analysis column looks at who would gain and lose from a rerun, why National and Opportunity face particular risks, and the constitutional rules that would constrain an early election.
3. Nik Dirga (RNZ): Explainer: What is a hung Parliament and could it actually lead to a new election?
What happens if nobody can agree who should govern? Nik Dirga’s explainer for RNZ walks through the hung Parliament scenario, noting that RNZ’s tally of the preliminary vote has a 131-seat House, and that an even number of MPs would make a tie considerably more likely. The caretaker convention would keep the current government in place in the meantime. Dean Knight says the Governor-General won’t accept a request for a fresh election unless the prime minister shows a majority of MPs in the new Parliament support it.
4. Shanti Mathias (Spinoff): Everything we learned from a deep dive into digital advertising at the 2026 election
Labour spent $532,800 on Google advertising during the regulated period, and every other party between $70,000 and $90,000. Shanti Mathias’s deep dive for the Spinoff finds Labour massively outspent the other parties on Meta too, though the picture reverses for candidates’ own pages, where National’s candidates had more to spend and Act put nearly $39,000 into David Seymour’s. Most high-spending third-party advertisers were associated with the right, among them Family First, Hobson’s Pledge and the Taxpayers’ Union. Split Your Vote had no spending registered in the Meta data at all. With party returns not due until April, this is one of the few windows into campaign money, though Mathias points out it can’t show how much of the spending turned into votes.
5. Stewart Sowman-Lund and Amelia Wade (Post): Former RNZ board member says she raised concerns about unlawful $5m loan but it was left off the official record (paywalled)
Jane Wrightson, who chaired RNZ’s audit and risk committee until June, says she told the board on 9 June that ministers would have to approve the $5 million loan facility, but her comment never made it into the minutes. “I don’t know why approval was not sought. It should have been,” she told Stewart Sowman-Lund and Amelia Wade of the Post. The minutes don’t record it. Her account conflicts with the line from RNZ and chair Brent Impey that the need for approval only became apparent during this year’s audit. Impey now says a director queried it in writing with the then chief financial officer, Hilary Parker, and was assured approval wasn’t required.
6. Shayne Currie (Herald): ‘Completely asleep at the wheel’ – inside RNZ’s financial fiasco as a new legal battle brews with ex-host (paywalled)
Shayne Currie’s Herald investigation reveals that EY’s auditors raised “substantive issues” with RNZ’s chief financial officer, Hilary Parker, on 29 September, three days before she abruptly resigned. That’s earlier than RNZ had indicated. Currie reports that baseline funding jumped from $42.69m to $66.6m in 2023/24 and that RNZ then struggled with a 7% cut. RNZ disputes a source’s claim that it was relying on land sales. Yet the number of staff earning more than $100,000 rose from 178 to 207. One source questions why nobody was asking questions of the chief people officer or the CFO. Separately, former Saturday Morning host Susie Ferguson is understood to be eyeing legal action after losing her role to Patrick Gower.
7. Jonathan Milne (Newsroom): Auckland Transport chair donates $120k to National and NZ First
Newsroom’s Jonathan Milne has the most important integrity story of the day. Andrew Ritchie was confirmed as Auckland Transport chair in September, then gave $59,425 to National through his company, a similar amount to NZ First and a small sum to Labour’s Phil Twyford, late enough that none of it had to be disclosed before election day. Milne sets the donations alongside Ritchie’s earlier giving, including the biggest personal donation to Wayne Brown’s 2022 mayoral campaign and $55,000 to NZ First and Shane Jones ahead of a fast-track bid to expand a quarry he jointly owns. His family also once owned the bus company Ritchie Transport. Ritchie is unrepentant: “I’m a citizen. I’m allowed to. It’s democracy.” His priority at AT, he says, is getting as much money for public transport as he can from whichever government forms. Auckland Council says board dealings with the government of the day must not be party-political.
8. Ethan Manera (Herald): Bottom trawling: Why the Opportunity Party’s ‘healthy oceans’ bottom line could prove a negotiation sticking point (paywalled)
About 68% of New Zealand’s fish supply by volume is caught by trawling on or near the seabed, which helps explain why Opportunity’s bottom line on bottom trawling could be the hardest to negotiate. Ethan Manera reports in the Herald that only the Greens back a full ban, Hipkins has raised its “very real economic cost”, and NZ First is directly opposed. Opportunity’s own incoming caucus includes Jodie Kuntzsch, a former lobbyist for the commercial seafood industry. Wong says the immediate ban would cover only the most sensitive areas, and her party concedes she misspoke on election night in claiming only seven countries still bottom trawl.
9. Audrey Young (Herald): Does National’s ‘young fogey’ deserve to be Finance Minister? (paywalled)
The Herald’s Audrey Young has done the maths on how much leverage Act and NZ First have gained. National now holds 63% of the coalition’s seats, Act 19% and NZ First 18%, against 72%, 16% and 12% in 2023. Young works through what that means for Cabinet, suggesting Simeon Brown is Luxon’s logical pick for Finance despite having “more of a sledgehammer approach to communication”. Young is sharp about Harry Mowbray’s views on emotional women voters, and faults Hipkins for accusing National of manipulating the system.
10. Brent Edwards (NBR): Major parties should focus on their performances, not overhangs (paywalled)
Chris Hipkins’ claim that National is only in contention because it manipulated the electoral system is wrong, says NBR’s political editor Brent Edwards. The coalition parties won 49.91% of the party vote and Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori 43.23%, so National would be in pole position even without the overhangs, which largely cancelled each other out. Edwards does think the gap between National’s 992,331 electorate votes and 706,680 party votes suggests the Mowbray campaign had some effect. His advice to both major parties is to stop blaming overhangs and ask why neither reached 30%.
Below the paywall are 50 more summaries and then 39 further links. They cover Seymour on a coalition that barely survived, Prebble’s call for both major party leaders to go, Luxon’s campaign KPIs, each party’s wins and regrets, how accurate the final polls were, Hipkins’ election night lei, how to overcome the overhang, what preferential voting would have changed, billionaires putting the knife into MMP, how the Atlas Network recruited New Zealand’s free-market think tanks, Harry Mowbray’s ‘emotional women voters’, the Greens’ surge in the Māori seats, three new MPs from one hapū, RNZ’s chief getting a 5.6% pay rise as staff got 1.8%, the incoming RNZ boss who knew nothing of the blowout, a damning review of the Justice Ministry, the FMA’s missing emails of support, a mayor advising an oil company, a $713,000 rates cut for one Wellington tower, the rates-cap trap, private cardiac procedures costing almost double, and the NCEA exam meltdown. Plus today’s cartoons.
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