News Briefing Top 10 for 31 October 2026
1. Adam Pearse (Herald): Act, NZ First approved Don Brash’s ads warning against giving National the party vote
National’s coalition partners signed off on ads telling National voters not to party vote National. The Herald’s Adam Pearse reports that Act and NZ First both approved Don Brash’s ads, while insisting they had no hand in making them. Christopher Luxon, who once called vote-splitting “insanely stupid”, wouldn’t address it. Harry Mowbray, a monthly Act donor, tells Pearse his own Split Your Vote website came down after an Electoral Commission inquiry, and National has since confirmed it made the referral.
2. Andrea Vance (Post): Dirty Politics’ strategist Simon Lusk hired to retail crime advisory group (paywalled)
Simon Lusk, the strategist at the centre of Nicky Hager’s Dirty Politics, was a policy adviser to the Government’s ministerial advisory group on retail crime, the Post’s Andrea Vance has found. Nobody will say who hired him, what he did or what he was paid. The Ministry of Justice says the group’s chair, Sunny Kaushal, made the contracting decisions; Kaushal says recruitment went through the ministry. The group spent $971,000 on contractors across 2024 and 2025 before it was wound up five months early, in May, after resignations and complaints about its direction. Lusk, who markets himself as a specialist in removing politicians who obstruct commercial interests, was unavailable for comment “due to fishing commitments”.
3. Henry Cooke (Post): ACT signed off on vote-splitting overhang ad (paywalled)
Act has confirmed to the Post’s Henry Cooke that it gave permission for the Reality Check Radio ad carrying Don Brash’s letter, and that the ad will count towards its $3.2m election advertising limit. The ad explicitly asks voters to party vote Act or NZ First. If the overhang plan worked, National would have no list MPs. Nicola Willis, who would be out of Parliament, calls it a “risk for us”.
4. Jonathan Milne (Newsroom): Middle NZ wage-earners now paying twice the tax rate of wealthiest NZers – report
The wealthiest New Zealanders pay an effective tax rate of just 8.1% on their comprehensive income, less than half the 17.4% paid by middle New Zealand, according to a new report by political economist Tayla Forward. Had the top 1% paid the same share as the middle, it would have raised another $7 billion a year from 2021 to 2024. Newsroom’s Jonathan Milne explains how the wealthiest sidestepped the 39 cent rate by taking loans from their companies rather than salaries and dividends, and how the Government blocked an Inland Revenue plan to tax those loans as dividends. Chlöe Swarbrick says the report shows a rigged system, and Simeon Brown warns a wealth tax threshold would only come down. Forward favours a wealth tax, while tax consultant Terry Baucher would start with a comprehensive capital gains tax. The report was commissioned by lobby group Better Taxes for a Better Future.
5. Giles Dexter (RNZ): ‘Pretty strong correlation’ between enrolment changes and lower enrolment rate - electoral law expert
Provisional enrolment is 93.6%, against 94.7% in 2023, and Otago University law professor Andrew Geddis tells RNZ’s Giles Dexter there’s no reason to think anything other than the Government’s law change is responsible. The gap is about 40,000 people. His verdict: “That means that 40,000 people’s rights have been removed, without there being any good enough justification to do so.” If the election is decided by 10,000 or 15,000 votes, he says, the change may well have affected who governs. And because nobody is counting people turned away at polling places, any review will be working from scattered evidence.
6. Henry Cooke (Post): Why Christopher Luxon ripped off the safety blanket (paywalled)
Christopher Luxon called the election tight or close ten times in one press conference, and broke his rule on polls to post about the RNZ-Reid result that had National on 24.8%. The Post’s Henry Cooke thinks that’s smart. This is now a turnout election, he argues, and with some on the right convinced the overhang makes defeat impossible, Luxon can’t afford complacent voters. Some in National now expect an overhang, which would mean no list MPs, no Nicola Willis as finance minister, and the job possibly going to Chris Bishop or Simeon Brown.
7. Thomas Coughlan (Herald): You have no idea what’s going to happen this election and nor do I (paywalled)
The Herald’s Thomas Coughlan admits he hasn’t “the faintest idea” how this election will go. Shifts small enough to sit inside polling margins of error could produce very different governments, he argues, depending on whether Opportunity clears 5% and how big any National and Te Pāti Māori overhangs turn out to be. If Opportunity misses and National gets a decent overhang, the right wins comfortably. The left’s main path needs Opportunity to get in and then choose Labour, while the coalition has more routes, which is why most forecasts still favour it. If it’s close, special votes could leave us waiting three weeks for an answer.
8. Derek Cheng (Herald): The key difference between 2023 Hipkins that was rejected and Hipkins today (paywalled)
Chris Hipkins won’t promise lower grocery prices. Nor will he give a date for closing the cancer drug gap with Australia, or commit to support for student nurses on unpaid placements. Following him around Dunedin, the Herald’s Derek Cheng argues this caution, learned from KiwiBuild and Auckland light rail, is the key difference from the Hipkins voters rejected in 2023. “I have no promise or guarantee to make you but it’s totally on our radar,” Hipkins told the nurses.
9. Simon Wilson: Why hasn’t health minister Simeon Brown been sacked?
A patient died in a Waikato Hospital ED toilet after waiting nine hours. At Starship, children with cancer were left in agony because no qualified nurse was available to refill their pain pumps. Simon Wilson asks why health minister Simeon Brown hasn’t been sacked, and says 80% of the coalition’s new health spending has gone directly to the private sector. That, he argues, is what National means by sticking to the plan. He ties privatisation to what he calls “crony corruption”, in a country whose lobbying rules are almost non-existent.
10. Josie Pagani (Post): Politics is one place we don’t need more unity (paywalled)
Opportunity’s billboards promise neither left nor right, but the Post’s Josie Pagani argues that talk of unity and consensus hides the hard choices democracy exists to settle. Expert panels, citizens’ juries and long-term cross-party plans are no substitute for parties putting up competing policies and answering for them at elections, she writes. Consensus comes after open argument about priorities and trade-offs, as it did on same-sex marriage, not from taking the conflict out of politics. She warns that this could be Opportunity’s price for forming a government, and has little more time for National’s tax scare or Labour’s offers, which she sums up as “vote Labour, get a free microwave”.
Below the paywall are 48 more summaries and then 70 further links. They cover the poll showing National losing support to almost every other party, Harry Mowbray’s $200,000 climate change wager with a Green MP, Paul Goldsmith admitting voters are sick of gangs, Sir John Key’s return to the campaign, a possible manipulation attempt on Polymarket, a former National MP joining Opportunity’s board, Oliver Hartwich’s report card on the coalition’s first term, Bill English and David Cunliffe on fixing the books, Roger Douglas’s case for compulsory savings to replace tax-funded super and health care, up to 6800 residence visa holders wrongly quizzed about their immigration status, the FMA’s payout to its departed chief executive, the Russian ambassador who walked into Parliament uninvited, 12,200 young people homeless or close to it, Brian Easton on the history of Māori gangs, two Pak’nSave supermarkets fined $580,500 for misleading pricing, a Waitangi Tribunal call for an apology over school boards’ Treaty duties, and the rejected Denniston Plateau mine back in the fast-track process. Plus today’s cartoons.
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