News Briefing Top 10 for 14 November 2026
1. Isaac Davison (Stuff): Voters sour on MMP - and Luxon’s U-turn - in wake of election controversy (paywalled)
Only 21% of New Zealanders want MMP kept as it is. That’s from a Stuff Pulse of the Nation survey of 533 people taken after the election, which Isaac Davison reports on. About a third want a new system altogether and 26% want the rules changed. On overhangs the public is split, 38% to 34%, within the margin of error. There’s bad news for Christopher Luxon too, with 45% saying his U-turn on Opportunity makes them less likely to trust him to keep his word, and 8% more likely. Just 22% are open to a grand coalition.
2. Thomas Coughlan (Herald): Christopher Luxon is behaving like he’s won the election. Has he? (paywalled)
Christopher Luxon took nearly two days to talk to Qiulae Wong after the election. He has more bargaining strength than National’s poor result suggests, Thomas Coughlan argues, and his confidence is largely justified. Even if the specials hand the left plus Opportunity a one- or two-seat majority, a four-party deal relying on an unstable Te Pāti Māori would be “risky to the point of being implausible”, so Opportunity has little choice but to go right. Wong still has cards to play. The coalition’s majority is fragile and vulnerable to dissent, and in Coughlan’s view the overhang has produced an FPP Parliament in which every National electorate becomes an Epsom. NZ First may also need to waka-jump Michael Laws. Propping up a more right-wing coalition could alienate Opportunity’s voters, who are concentrated in urban Wellington seats that elected Labour or Green MPs, so Coughlan expects Wong to charge a high price for the security Luxon may need.
3. Henry Cooke (Post): The election that solved nothing, but opened Pandora’s Box (paywalled)
The three right-bloc parties are just 17,000 party votes ahead of the rest of Parliament. In 2023 the gap was 256,000. Henry Cooke sees an election that has settled little, either about who should govern or about what mandate they would have. Its more lasting consequence may be both sides’ acceptance of deliberate overhang strategies, which could push Parliament towards its theoretical limit of 191 seats. Tactical voting does seem to have helped National in close electorates. In six of the 10 closest seats it won, its candidate would have lost had Act and NZ First voters split their votes at 2023 rates. Cooke cautions against putting it all down to organised campaigns, though, since voters didn’t appear to follow the instructions all that well, and the overhang only worked because both major parties were so weak. If they stay weak, and with the “good chaps” convention that Te Pāti Māori blew up unlikely to be restored, future elections could become contests in manipulating the rules.
4. Nikki Macdonald (Post): Is MMP stuffed? (paywalled)
Each overhang MP costs about $2.1 million over a three-year term, and this Parliament would have 11 of them, well above the six that a 2012 review of MMP thought the public would find unacceptable. Nikki Macdonald’s explainer for the Post looks at Germany, which first gave other parties compensating seats and then, once the Bundestag hit 736 members, capped it at 630 and dropped surplus electorate MPs. Andrew Geddis calls the situation “something of an existential threat to our electoral system”, and floats letting overhang MPs sit while their party votes only to its party-vote entitlement. It’s a useful explainer to keep handy as the reform debate gets going.
5. Bryce Edwards (Democracy Project): RNZ’s staff are paying for failures at the top
RNZ’s executives and board presided over an $11.8 million deficit, against a budgeted loss of $470,000, yet it’s the staff who are paying, with the equivalent of 58 full-time jobs to go by March. In today’s Democracy Briefing I argue this is another case of Broken New Zealand. Chief executive Paul Thompson’s salary rose 5.6% to $528,000 while staff got 1.8%, and the departures being counted as accountability were mostly scheduled before the scandal broke, which I call “accountability by calendar”. Funding cuts explain some of RNZ’s problems, but not a $3.2 million overspend on staff. Nor does anything in this scandal justify weakening its editorial independence. Thompson should hand over to Mark Stevens now, and the review must examine the board as well as the executives.
In the Further Analysis section for paid subscribers, I look at what the board and ministers knew before voters went to the polls. The auditors signed off the accounts on 30 October, eight days before the election, but the public found out two days after it, and NZ On Air wasn’t told until 3.45pm on the Monday. I set out what a credible review must publish, including a dated record of what each minister was told and who approved the unlawful facility, and turn to the $51 million Henderson land-sale decision facing the next Cabinet.
6. David Fisher (Herald): Tony Davies investigation: Nine-page complaint drafted in 2005 detailed RNZAF affair allegations (paywalled)
The most important accountability story of the day is David Fisher’s latest for the Herald. A former RNZAF aviator drafted a nine-page complaint in 2005 about Tony Davies’ relationship with a junior airwoman in 40 Squadron, but never submitted it after two internal inquiries failed to substantiate the relationship. Fisher describes a divided squadron and a commander known as the “Golden Boy”, whom many believed complaints could never touch. The wing commander who ran the second inquiry later told the aviator she believed the women but had no proof. Davies rose to Chief of Defence Force in 2024 and resigned last month after admitting an inappropriate relationship while in command.
7. Dita De Boni (Post): Is political neutrality still a thing – or nah? (paywalled)
Auckland Transport’s new chair, Andrew Ritchie, gave National $59,425 so late in the campaign that it didn’t have to be announced, a similar amount to NZ First, and $5000 to Labour’s Phil Twyford. Dita De Boni asks whether political neutrality rules still mean anything. Rob Campbell was sacked over a LinkedIn post in 2023 and Craig Stobo was allowed to resign as FMA chair in May, yet the body that would have to discipline Ritchie is Auckland Council, led by Wayne Brown, whose mayoral campaigns Ritchie helped fund.
8. Tom Pullar-Strecker (Post): The big four bank profits are soaring: Are Kiwis getting a fair deal? (paywalled)
ASB, ANZ, BNZ and Westpac made a combined net profit of more than $6.6 billion in 2024-25, more than the $6 billion earned by all the firms in the Deloitte Top 200 index. Tom Pullar-Strecker opens a Post series on bank competition by setting out the evidence: net interest margins of about 2.3% in recent years (2.16% in June), compared with 0.9% in Denmark and about 1.2% in Sweden, and 64% of lending going to housing. A one percentage point cut in margins, if passed on, would be worth about $3000 a year to the average family.
9. Josie Pagani (Post): Nevermind the overhang, we could be going back to the polls (paywalled)
Don’t rule out another election soon, says Josie Pagani. With NZ First possibly down a seat and National at risk in Wairarapa and Hamilton East, she sketches a scenario in which a weakened Luxon goes, forcing a Botany by-election, and Prime Minister Erica Stanford calls a fresh election to double down on vote-splitting. Pagani has little patience with Chris Hipkins and Chlöe Swarbrick’s efforts to delegitimise a result achieved within the rules, though she accepts MMP will need changing because an overhang arms race is coming. She expects Labour, after a lacklustre campaign to restore the Ardern government, to change its leader too. Back in August she warned that Willis, Bishop and Brownlee could lose their seats. “Told you so.”
10. Rob Kidd (ODT): Crown solicitor ‘demeaning, sarcastic and aggressive’ dealing with domestic violence victim (paywalled)
An independent investigation has found Invercargill Crown solicitor Mary-Jane Thomas was “demeaning, sarcastic and aggressive” towards a victim of severe domestic violence. Rob Kidd reports that, against the woman’s wishes, Thomas agreed mid-trial to a plea deal that cut 41 charges against Mark Robin Deans, including six of strangulation, to eight. Katie Hogan KC found the allegations proven, though she said Thomas acted in good faith, found no fault with her prosecutorial decisions and made no recommendations about her. Deputy Solicitor-General Madeleine Laracy is due to decide on 11 December how to deal with Thomas, who has headed the office for 21 years.
Below the paywall are 32 more summaries and then 24 further links. They cover lawyers on whether RNZ’s loan breach could turn criminal, the board member who says she warned about it, the Taxpayers’ Union wanting RNZ directors to pay, Simon Wilson’s case for Chris and Chris to resign, whether coalition talks have actually started, Qiulae Wong’s bottom-trawling slip, Act and NZ First taking the wheel on fast-track, Sir Geoffrey Palmer’s plutocracy warning, Max Rashbrooke on big money and secret donors, David Farrar’s change of heart on the overhang, the 16 MPs voted out, the 35 new ones, the left’s dominance of the Māori seats’ party vote, Michael Reddell’s verdict on Nicola Willis, Adrian Orr’s new Chinese wealth fund role, Wellington’s homeless in crisis, a domestic violence victim “obliterated” by a plea deal, and a deputy solicitor-general taking legal action against her boss. Plus today’s cartoons.