News Briefing Top 10 for 15 November 2026
1. Kate MacNamara (Herald): Nursing Council audit finds procurement and payment control failures, Auditor-General notified (paywalled)
PwC rated the Nursing Council’s procurement controls “generally undocumented” and informal, the lowest grade on its scale, and the regulator has now formally notified the Office of the Auditor-General. The Ministry of Health released the audit under the OIA, and the Herald’s Kate MacNamara picks out the detail. Of the year’s invoices, 590 (22%) had the approver field left blank, potential duplicates totalled $1.29 million, and travel spending jumped from a little over $100,000 to $676,000. She reports irregularities in the contract for the Christchurch testing centre for overseas nurses, and an education review whose authors’ conflicts went undisclosed despite its claim of independence. The council’s annual report is now delayed until early 2027.
2. Andrea Vance (Sunday Star Times): Why are we letting rich hobbyists buy a parallel election? (paywalled)
A registered third-party promoter can spend up to $424,000 on an election campaign without telling the public who paid for it. Andrea Vance has fun with Harry Mowbray and the “rich hobbyists” of the Coatesville set, but her real target is the network around the Taxpayers’ Union, Free Speech Union, Hobson’s Pledge and Sensible Sentencing Trust. Its five aligned outfits could in theory spend $2.12 million between them, more than half a major party’s $4.06 million cap. She wants promoters spending more than $17,000 to disclose donors above $6000, as parties must, and groups that share staff and resources to have their caps combined. And she’d ban foreign money.
3. Jonathan Milne (Newsroom): Constitutional experts draft letter calling for select committee inquiry into MMP (paywalled)
Some of MMP’s longstanding defenders are drafting an open letter calling for a select committee inquiry into how to preserve proportionality, and Jonathan Milne reports they plan to publish it next week. Their slogan is “Keep the P in MMP”. Harry Mowbray told Milne the right only felt free to campaign on vote-splitting after Te Pāti Māori made it overt in August. Milne talks to Jonathan Boston, who would expand Parliament to 180-200 MPs by adding list seats, then tests the opposite proposition: keep 120 MPs and cut the number of electorates. That could leave one member trying to serve an electorate stretching from Tākaka to Wānaka. He warns that scrapping MMP altogether would be enormously destabilising.
4. Chris Lynch: RNZ staff blame HR for the crisis. Now HR is in charge of the job cuts
Current and former RNZ staff tell Chris Lynch that senior hiring and spending on corporate programmes went largely unchallenged while the newsroom lost experienced journalists. Sources blame a “power hungry, toxic” human resources department, the same one that will now run the redundancies, and several question its influence over the restructure, as well as acting chief executive Mark Stevens’ hiring of former Stuff colleagues. The annual report shows 207 staff paid more than $100,000, up from 178, and 22 departing staff sharing $1.374 million, against four who shared $181,000 the year before. Chief people officer Sarah Neilson didn’t respond to a request for comment.
5. Dita De Boni (Sunday Star Times): Low wages and austerity have put the NZ economy in the clearance bin (paywalled)
About 44% to 45% of New Zealand workers, roughly 1.27 million to 1.3 million people, received no pay rise at all in the past year, and wage growth of 2% is well behind inflation of 3.7%. For Dita de Boni, the closure of David Jones’ last New Zealand store and the hype around Black Friday are two sides of the same coin: most Kiwis just don’t earn enough to buy nice things. Drawing on Keynes, she makes the case against austerity and for pay equity and public works, which she thinks would lift demand faster than a productivity push. She credits Nicola Willis with softening her austerity tendencies in a slump, and suspects her replacement may not.
6. Andrew Ketels (Herald): An insider’s view of coalition negotiations from a former Act chief of staff (paywalled)
When Andrew Ketels, then Act’s chief of staff, was negotiating in 2023, only National knew what both prospective partners had asked for and what each had conceded. Ketels, now in government relations at corporate affairs firm Sherson Willis, explains why David Seymour wants everyone at one table this time, and why securing a portfolio can be worth more than a promise on paper. Act and NZ First have more MPs, but in his view neither can credibly threaten to walk away, and Act’s share of the Government has only edged up, to about 19%. He expects them to ask for one or two more ministerial or under-secretary roles. He thinks Seymour has a strong claim to finance, though NZ First and Opportunity may not want him there either.
7. Vernon Small (Sunday Star Times): Did National lose the election or something? (paywalled)
National has shed about a quarter of its vote, half its front-bench ministers and all its list seats, yet it is still odds-on to govern, Vernon Small points out. His sharper question is who takes finance now Willis, Bishop and Goldsmith are gone. Simeon Brown “buggered up the campaign” but is probably the front-runner. Small weighs Louise Upston, Erica Stanford and Simon Watts, among others, and then, in a sentence he never expected to type, concludes that the case for David Seymour has grown. He recalls that in 1996 Winston Peters got the senior finance role and the title of treasurer.
8. Heather du Plessis-Allan (Herald): I can’t see Christopher Luxon stepping down as leader any time soon (paywalled)
Heather du Plessis-Allan sees plenty in National’s campaign to warrant a leadership challenge, including its 29%, the party’s third-lowest result of the century, and an election-night speech that misread the room. But the surviving MPs have little incentive to mount one. They have kept their seats and are preoccupied with forming a government, and with 2029 a long way off only a seismic gaffe would spark a coup. Her prediction changes if the specials or the coalition talks cost Christopher Luxon the prime minister’s job. She calls that “gone-burger territory”.
9. Liam Hehir (The Blue Review): A little bit of election undermining, as a treat
Liam Hehir takes issue with Chlöe Swarbrick’s accusation of deliberate voter suppression. He has no quarrel with anyone who thinks the new enrolment deadline was unwise, but points to the Electoral Commission’s warning that it wasn’t confident of finishing the count within 20 days without one, and to the $18.1 million allocated to enrolment (against $10.8 million in 2023). The Greens committed to accepting the certified result, and Swarbrick says she has no intention of challenging it. Hehir nevertheless thinks her language invites people to doubt the election’s legitimacy, and comes uncomfortably close in substance, if not style, to Trump’s in 2020. Worth reading even if you disagree with him.
10. Shamubeel Eaqub (Sunday Star Times): If I were PM: Restoring trust in democracy (paywalled)
If he were prime minister, Simplicity’s chief economist Shamubeel Eaqub would start with an independent process to upgrade the election system, then fix how policy gets made. He complains that too many regulatory impact statements have been “barely disguised political leaflets”, and that select committees and consultations too often ignore what they hear. He’d have every minister list what to keep, stop and start.
Below the paywall are 29 more summaries and then 18 further links. They cover how Atlas’s founder courted a beer baron to start a New Zealand think tank, the nursing watchdog’s reserves sliding from $12 million to $4 million, the director who asked whether RNZ’s overdraft needed ministerial approval, whether this was the election that broke MMP, a plan for MMP2.0, 702,174 “wasted” National party votes, choosing Parliament by lot, the 139 votes between National and Labour in Wairarapa, Rodney Hide’s case for one coalition agreement, John Key telling Paul Goldsmith to “shut up”, the 16 MPs voted out, the Yellow Brick Road to recovery, Westpac’s flood-risk lending, an empty home tax for Queenstown, the Waitangi Tribunal on te Tiriti in schools, a 111 system that is “solid” and “fragile” at once, why your chicken is still making people sick, and the British High Commissioner’s top-five trade bet. Plus today’s cartoons.
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