The problem is that New Zealand has changed who owns, manages, and reports on its state’s homes. Which means that keeping up, or following or even wanting to compare simple figures by government is a nightmare. Nobody can tell you, term by term, how many state houses a government built, owned, leased, or needs. It’s like asking four successive flats how many spoons they own, when one of them counted teaspoons, one counted tablespoons currently in the drawer, one renamed them “cutlery units,” and nobody can find the 2003 spoon register that was made. Sigh.

Since 1937, when the first state house opened in Miramar^[1], New Zealand has argued about whose responsibility it is to house and support people who are homeless or struggle to rent or even own a home. That deep-seated political debate is still going. So in a nutshell, there is no one institution whose record answers any questions related to this topic. The maze you must go into is not for the faint-hearted. Housing is now delivered by a mix of government agencies and charities, and no single set of numbers tells you how it is going or who is doing what.

For the Clark years I could find new-build figures for one year out of nine^[2]. The rest sit in annual reports that were never made public. For the John Key years, the figures were never published at all. They are public only because somebody asked for them under the Official Information Act (OIA) in 2022, and the first year of the term came back saying “data unavailable”.^[3]

The waiting list cannot be compared across 2014, when it moved from Housing New Zealand to the Ministry of Social Development and was cut back to two priority categories^[4]. The stock figures count different things depending on the decade: owned homes, then owned-and-leased homes, then “funded social housing places”.^[5] Three names for the landlord, three names for the measure, and two breaks in the queue. Every party campaigned on this. None of them can be checked. Double sigh.

The Landlord

In December 2017, the incoming Labour government announced that it was stopping the programme of selling state houses^[6] to community housing providers, set in motion under the John Key government from 2010. Labour had campaigned against those sales. Housing New Zealand’s next annual report records the decision: “The Government announced that the stock transfer programme would stop in December 2017 and we would only continue with appropriate business-as-usual, small-scale sale.”^[7]

Over the six years that followed, the share of New Zealand’s public housing held by community providers roughly doubled. Labour stopped the transfers. The community housing share more than doubled anyway. Working out how both of those things happened is the rabbit hole I went down so you don’t have to.

This matters because housing is a major election issue, and every party claims to have an answer to the crisis. But as more public housing has moved into the community-housing sector, it has become harder to see who owns, manages and is ultimately responsible for the homes those parties are promising.

When the landlord is a Crown entity, responsibility is comparatively visible: Parliament, ministerial oversight, official-information processes, complaints mechanisms and public audit all leave recognisable traces. When provision sits with a community housing provider, accountability still exists, but it is distributed across contracts, regulators, charitable governance, and funding arrangements. That makes it harder for an ordinary observer to see who is responsible for what.

Then the two institutions that came and went. The two institutions built to run all this have come and gone. The Ministry of Housing and Urban Development was created in 2018, and Kāinga Ora – Homes and Communities followed in 2019^[8], both under Phil Twyford. Kāinga Ora has since been through an independent review, with a proposal to cut more than 600 roles^[9]. The housing ministry no longer exists as a housing ministry, it now has been sucked into the new Ministry for Cities, Environment, Regions, and Transport. Eight years, two institutions, and the only thing that has proved durable is the change in who owns the houses and how hard it is to find any information on the data.

This is not an argument for or against one type of landlord or another. It is simply something worth understanding as we head towards an election and hear competing claims about the housing crisis. I have already written about how we have no way of knowing how many private landlords New Zealand has. When that problem is combined with state owned homes with unclear definitions, changing ownership arrangements and inconsistent reporting, it becomes difficult to judge whether a party’s housing claims are accurate, or even understand what they mean.

Recognising that might help us have more mature political debates about housing.

The Numbers and the Money

The shift is visible in the state ownership figures. In June 2017, community housing providers held about 7 percent of New Zealand’s social housing. Kāinga Ora held the rest. By June 2026, community providers held about 17 percent, or roughly one in six^[10].

The change was not simply a matter of Kāinga Ora handing over existing state houses. Between 2018 and June 2023 the total system grew by 12,174 homes. Community providers accounted for 6,936 of those additions, more than half of the growth.

And the shift continued after the change of government. In the year to June 2026 Kāinga Ora’s stock grew by 178 homes, while community providers added 1,448. So the question is threefold: who owns the, who is providing them, and who is paying for them.

Community housing providers are not independently funded charities. Their tenants pay an income-related rent, generally 25 per cent of net income, and the government pays the provider the difference between that and the market rent. It is the same subsidy Kāinga Ora tenants receive, extended to registered community providers in 2014, and it is the main mechanism behind all of the growth above^[11]. The subsidy bill has gone from $890 million in 2017/18 to $2.07 billion in 2025/26.

None of this changed anyone’s rent. A tenant who moved from a state landlord to a community one paid the same 25 per cent of their income the following week, assessed by the same ministry. What changed was everything behind the rent: who owned the house, who you complained to, and who had to tell the public about it.

So the state did not stop paying for social housing. It stopped being the landlord in a growing share of it while continuing to fund the rent. And the dashboard that publishes that $2.07 billion does not break it down by provider. You can see what the country spends. You cannot see how much of it goes to Kāinga Ora and how much to everyone else. Or at least, I couldn’t find it.

The Mess

Take a single date: 30 June 2017. The housing dashboard says there were 66,146 social homes in New Zealand. Housing New Zealand’s annual report, for the same day, says its managed stock was 63,276. The Ministry of Social Development’s report on the same system says 64,416^[12]. None of them is wrong. They are counting owned homes, owned-and-leased homes, and occupied homes. No document tells you that. You have to work it out.

Now try to follow the houses themselves. In 2016, 2,800 state houses left Housing New Zealand’s books and went to the Tāmaki Regeneration Company. The only place I could find that stated is a letter written to a member of the public in 2022, answering an OIA request. The Tauranga transfer of 1,138 homes is in the annual report, dated 2017, and in that same OIA letter, dated 1 April 2017^[13]. One of them is wrong, and I can’t tell you which.

The measure keeps moving too. In 2023 the government counted “public homes”. In 2024, “social homes”. By 2025 it was counting “funded social housing places”, which is not a number of houses at all. It is a number of funded placements^[14]. It’s so confusing!

Kāinga Ora’s stock is public in remarkable detail: every quarter, by region, by district, and by number of bedrooms, the fastest-growing part of public housing is the part we can see least of. The downside of community housing providers is that they are accountable to different institutional forces and have less capacity to provide the reporting and transparency an agency like Kāinga Ora can provide. They are institutions that were not designed to be publicly accountable. ^[15]Community housing providers, now one in six of the entire system and the part that has grown fastest, appear as a single number per quarter.

Meanwhile, the reporting is being wound back. The Public Housing Quarterly Report stopped after December 2023^[16]. The best-documented period in the history of New Zealand state housing may turn out to have lasted about six years. Came and went. Anyway, back to swimming in the 7,078 policy corpus. Send help!

^[1] https://www.treasury.govt.nz/sites/default/files/2019-06/home-housed-hsag-report-april-2010.pdf

^[2] https://www.beehive.govt.nz/sites/default/files/HNZC%20annual%20report.pdf

^[3] https://fyi.org.nz/request/20087-number-of-state-houses-built-between-2008-2017-and-2017-2022

^[4] https://www.msd.govt.nz/documents/about-msd-and-our-work/work-programmes/social-housing/social-housing-quarterly-report-june-2017.pdf and https://www.msd.govt.nz/about-msd-and-our-work/publications-resources/statistics/housing/archive/index.html

^[5] https://fyi.org.nz/request/20087-number-of-state-houses-built-between-2008-2017-and-2017-2022) https://www.hud.govt.nz/assets/Uploads/Documents/Corporate-publications/annual-report/Annual-report-for-the-Ministry-of-Housing-and-Urban-Development-202425.pdf

^[6] A note on semantics. I use state housing for homes owned by the Crown and rented to tenants, and community housing for homes provided by registered Community Housing Providers. Public housing is the broader category: homes owned or leased by Kāinga Ora and CHPs for people eligible for public housing. Social housing is often used interchangeably with public housing, although government terminology has shifted between “public homes,” “social homes” and “funded social housing places.” I retain each source’s original terminology when quoting it but use my own terms consistently for readability.

^[7] https://kaingaora.govt.nz/assets/Publications/Annual-report/HNZ16172-Annual-Report-2018-v23.pdf

^[8] https://www.hud.govt.nz/our-work/kainga-ora-homes-and-communities-act-2019

^[9] https://www.beehive.govt.nz/sites/default/files/2024-05/Independent%20Review%20of%20Kainga%20Ora.pdf

^[10] https://www.hud.govt.nz/stats-and-insights/the-government-housing-dashboard/further-information

^[11] https://www.hud.govt.nz/stats-and-insights/the-government-housing-dashboard/further-information

^[12] https://kaingaora.govt.nz/assets/Publications/Annual-report/HNZ16117-Annual-Report-2016-2017.pdf and https://www.msd.govt.nz/documents/about-msd-and-our-work/publications-resources/evaluation/annual-report-on-the-public-housing-system-as-at-30-june-2017.pdf

^[13] https://fyi.org.nz/request/20087-number-of-state-houses-built-between-2008-2017-and-2017-2022

^[14] https://fyi.org.nz/request/20087-number-of-state-houses-built-between-2008-2017-and-2017-2022

^[15] https://kaingaora.govt.nz/en_NZ/publications/oia-and-proactive-releases/housing-statistics/

^[16] https://www.hud.govt.nz/stats-and-insights/public-housing-quarterly-reports

I have been an immigrant for a very long time. Since I was four, when my mom was posted to the Consulate General in Vancouver and I left Mexico City, my hometown. We left Vancouver when I was eight, back to Mexico. Then Chicago at thirteen. Back to Mexico at fifteen. Back to Vancouver at eighteen. So when I say I am a Mexican-born New Zealand citizen, understand that I am not coming at this topic as a novice. I am coming at it as a Black Belt migrant, one who has done her time across several countries over the past forty years. That is my lived experience. I have also been studying this topic closely, formally and academically, in New Zealand for thirteen years and working on government-related matters for more than eight. Which will explain my passion but also my bias.

The first time I heard Winston Peters say something racist was to my fellow Mexican, Ricardo Menéndez March^[1]. In early 2025, Ricardo had the audacity to say the word “Aotearoa” in the House. Winston reminded the chamber that Ricardo “came here in 2006,” and that this, apparently, settled it. The name of the country is New Zealand, he said, and this person who arrived in 2006 was not going to change it. “You just arrived, so your opinion counts for less than mine.” It is the same play he ran on Xu-Nan. The move every migrant learns to recognise: the procedural reminder that you are a guest here, and guests do not get to rearrange the furniture. Citizenship be damned.

When Winston Peters told Lawrence Xu-Nan to “go back to your own country,” he knew exactly what he was doing. He always does. The Race Relations Commissioner said it, Simeon Brown said it, and eventually even Luxon had to say it. So I’ll skip the part of the column where I perform my outrage for you.

Back in January, I wrote that immigration was about to become the most contested terrain of this election and that the left had already lost the social license to defend it. I called the piece Performing Sovereignty. I stand by every word, and I take no pleasure in it.

New Zealand needs migrants more than it ever has. The boomers are retiring, the birthrate is falling, and by 2048 roughly a third of us will be Asian New Zealanders. And yet we have never trusted immigration less. That gap, between the country we are demographically becoming and the country a chunk of voters feel they miss, is a gap Winston found sitting unattended and is now moving into.

Winstons message is resonating because important questions about immigration, how much, how fast, who pays for the housing and the GPs, got reclassified as things only a racist would ask. And when you tell a large chunk of the public that their concern is a moral failing, you create a massive gap in the public debate. And it got gift-wrapped, to the one man willing to pick it up and add the bigotry back in himself.

Immigration is a product of globalization and capitalism

The toxic marriage neoliberalism handed us in the 1980s, when Reagan and Thatcher threw the borders open to capital and gave the market more power than it knew what to do with. I know this one in my bones, because the reason I moved so much between Mexico, the United States, and Canada as a kid was NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), the most consequential trade agreement of a lifetime, the one that reshaped the social, political, and economic landscape of not just my hometown but a whole continent. I am a NAFTA baby, thoroughly indoctrinated into the gospel of globalization and open markets. I learned how to say NAFTA before I could walk. And here is what the gospel left out: we did too much, too fast, and we skipped some fairly important questions about tax, about infrastructure, and about social cohesion. Such as, for instance, what happens when a country ends up speaking more languages than its government can handle.

It is fundamentally hard to coexist with this level of diversity, and harder still to govern it.

We should have known that, and at some level we did. We just romanticized the whole project from the start. The diversity management literature was minted in the United States in the early 1990s, in the cusp of the continent being reorganized around free trade. And the definition of social cohesion we use here today also came from the cusp of NAFTA being signed in Canada. As a preventive measure for all the immigration that was about to reshape three major countries. Our foundational framework, written by Paul Spoonley and colleagues in 2005, was built directly on the Canadian model, right down to consulting Canadian immigration officials on how they had done it. So, the intellectual apparatus we use to manage diversity was manufactured in North America, by two of the economies busiest dissolving their own borders, at the very moment they were doing it. We imported the vocabulary. We did not import the funding, the infrastructure, or the patience. We romanticized the consequences and told ourselves that more is more and faster is better.

So why have we lost social license for immigration?

Social license is permission to operate. It is not a formal policy. It is the informal consent that sits underneath government permission to operate. Every agency needs it for different things: Stats NZ to hold our data, MBIE to permit mining on the West Coast, and Inland Revenue to collect our taxes. It is the quiet, renewable consent a public gives to a thing it has agreed is worth the trouble. And like any permission, it can be withdrawn. Ours was, and we did it to ourselves, in three moves.

First, we built the licence on sand. Globalization sold us diversity as a self-evident good and never made us pay for the plumbing. Forty years of opening the flows and romanticising the results, while ducking the boring, expensive questions: housing, infrastructure, credential recognition, and what holds a society together when it speaks more than 150 languages. Read that again. More than 150, according to the last Census. That alone is enough to strain our social cohesion, without Winston Peters needing to be racist about it.

New Zealand then adds a layer of complexity most countries never have to reckon with: Te Tiriti o Waitangi, which makes immigration an even hotter button. I have written about this at length, but in a nutshell, the Treaty is a formal agreement between Māori and the Crown. Not Māori, the Crown, and migrants^[2]. Migrants arrive into a relationship they can’t influence, and that creates tensions between groups that cannot be resolved. It is a polarity, not a problem: something you manage rather than solve, and New Zealand manages it poorly.

Second, cities changed faster than the people living in them had agreed to. Rents climbed, the GP waitlist grew, and a surgeon from Delhi ended up driving the Uber while we complained about the doctor shortage. It is what happens when you import the people and forget to build the country around them. We keep banging on about talent shortfall, when we have it here, we just refuse to hire them and promote them in the roles we don’t trust them in, even though we need them in those roles desperately.

Third, we told the people noticing the problem that they were bigots and racist for wanting to know more about it.

We have lost our social license for immigration by forbidding people to name the problems without first pleading guilty to racism. Woke liberalism made this worst.

That is the unattended gap Winston walks into every single time. He has never offered real sustainable solutions to these issues. He is offering permission to say you are unhappy about the level of diversity in New Zealand. Then, being Winston, he laces that permission with poison, so a legitimate worry about planning and a genuinely racist sneer at a Chinese-born MP arrive in the same breath, impossible to prise apart. That is the con. He bundles the reasonable and the vile together and dares the left to reject both at once, which it obligingly does, proving his point for him.

And you may ask: if the anxieties are real, then isn’t Winston just the man brave enough to name them? Aren’t you conceding he has a point? No. The distinction might seem subtle, if you agree with Winston, but it is not. Explaining why something happens is not the same as endorsing it. The concern about social cohesion, enough housing, and infrastructure is legitimate. Winston’s answer to it is racist. The question is fair, his answer is not, and holding both of those in your head at once is needed for a more mature debate about a very real issue. What we need is a population strategy, but that is a topic for another week.

^[1] I appreciate this might not be his first time.

^[2] I do not say this lightly. I have studied this relationship for more than ten years, specialized in it across my undergraduate degree and my master’s, read most of the books, and taken every workshop this country offers on it. In 2022, developing the social cohesion policy as a public servant, I spoke with many New Zealanders, Māori as Tangata Whenua and Mana Whenua, about exactly these tensions. I have also had my own reckoning with it as a migrant. There are several names for what I am supposed to be in this arrangement: tangata tiriti, tauiwi, and a migrant of color. I hate all of them. What matters is not the label but that I understand the tension and the many ways New Zealanders argue about it. This is just how I see it.

Christopher Luxon has formally ruled out working with the Opportunity Party. “We’re a party of low tax,” he said, “we don’t think we want to do business with them.”

That’s not the point, Prime Minister. God, please!

You can negotiate with them over which policies actually make it through. The point is the political principle of it. As Prime Minster, making sure this is a stable liberal democracy is one of your main responsibilities. And MMP allows you and us to do that. To create a coalition that helps built consensus so we can start to loosen the grip of the far right and the far left before they erode our social cohesion further, to a point where we cannot come back from it. Because let me promise you this PM, our social cohesion is earned and once its lost, once it cracks enough, the results are dire for everyone. Prime Minister, you can impact this today. Now!

Chris Hipkins wasn’t any better. Labour won’t touch The Opportunity Party tax policy, and on their own thinking he was blunt: “We’ve got one simple tax policy which is a simple targeted capital gains tax, that’s as far as we’re going to go.”

These two political leaders are the most irresponsible politicians I have experienced in the 15 years that I have been following politics in NZ. And I don’t much care whether they are being cynical, incompetent or careless, the damage is exactly the same either way and its infuriating!

I said something similar in 2024 …

I wrote it in the 2023 election book Back on Track, where I closed my chapter like this1:

And to reiterate what I said above. Again.

I ran for TOP in 2023 because I thought they were the only party that could disrupt our polarised status quo. Not the other way around. That distinction matters. I backed them because of what I believe, I did not come to believe it because I backed them.

I am not a member now. I donate across parties, I follow all of them, and my electorate vote swings. So, when I defend the Opportunity Party’s right to be in this race, it is someone who wants to disrupt the political status quo in order to mature and strengthen the centre which has been hallowed out.

Coalition-building is the job

What Luxon proved with his comment earlier this week was that he has decided to show zero understating for how an MMP government should and could work. How he, as Prime Minster and leader of one of the two biggest parties in this country influence the current status quo. Which is about the one skill MMP actually asks of a leader, and neither Luxon nor Hipkins have shown they have it.

We choose MMP to force our politicians to build more diverse governments across difference: to negotiate, to bring people who do not agree into the same room, and to make something workable out of it. In that system, the mark of a serious leader is not wanting all the votes for their party. That’s narrow minded at best and irresponsible at worst.

The last leader who got it

The last time a New Zealand leader got close to what MMP is meant to do was John Key, in 2008. National did not need the Māori Party. Key had the numbers with ACT, and United Future on top. He brought the Māori Party in anyway, gave Tariana Turia and Pita Sharples ministerial roles, and governed with a partner he could have ignored. Say what you like about that government, that was a leader who understood that a broader coalition is a stronger, calmer, more legitimate one.

I understand that in Keys case, the Māori Party was already in Parliament in 2008, five electorate seats, a mandate voter had handed them. The Opportunity Party is not there yet. That is a real difference, and I am not going to pretend it away. But it cuts the other way. The Opportunity Party is sitting right on the line, and the honest thing to do with a party on the line is to let voters decide, not to stand up and call the result for them before a single vote is cast just because you don’t understand what your role is.

Also, when I said in 2023 that National should have backed Raf Manji in Ilam, it was because TOP ran an electorate campaign, and the coattail was the only lever the rules left them. I would happily see that lever gone, the 2012 review of MMP recommended exactly that. This year The Opportunity Party is running for the party vote, so there is no deal to do in that same way. I am not asking Luxon to game an electorate. I am asking him to think more strategically, to think about what is politically responsible not just politically convenient.

What we have instead

Now look at what we have. Both Hipkins and Luxon have ruled out a legitimate party that is legitimately close before the campaign has even warmed up. Both have mistaken risk management for leadership, and both are quietly telling New Zealanders that the hard, generous, creative work of coalition-building is beneath them. Fuck that!

That is the cost. Every pre-emptive rule-out shrinks our politics back to the same status quo, hollows out the centre, and leaves the far left and the far right to do what they do best, pull us apart. A leader who cannot build across difference, in a system designed for exactly that, is not being principled. And that is politically and morally irresponsible. The role of a liberal democracy is to provide an environment that is stable for as many folks as possible. Its not hoarding all the votes for an election gain.

• National to India: Come, work, study, and staff our hospitals; we’ll light up the Sky Tower for your Prime Minister.

• NZ First to permanent residents (many of them the very people that welcome is courting): we’re moving to take away your vote.

It could be a total coincidence or a strategic stab from one coalition partner to another. What matters is that the outcome will land on the fastest-growing, most diverse population New Zealand has ever had. Signals about who belongs here and who only gets to work here. It’s very confusing, and the timing of it is hard to ignore.

Kia Ora Modi

On 11 July, a Saturday night, Narendra Modi walked into Spark Arena to a noise Christopher Luxon physically could not talk over. The Prime Minister got to “make some noise for…” and never reached the name, because the arena was on fire. Modi was received in full pomp and ceremony.

This was, by most accounts, the most significant state visit New Zealand has hosted in a generation. It was the first visit by an Indian Prime Minister in four decades. The last one came when Muldoon was in charge. This is not trivial or inconsequential. This is New Zealand rolling out the full carpet for the leader of what is now the world’s most populous country, three months after signing a free trade agreement with it. Modi coming is a huge diplomatic win. Great!

And it was a celebration. For the Indian community in New Zealand, now the third-largest ethnic group in the country, behind Pākehā and Māori, having quietly overtaken the Chinese population at the 2023 census, it was a night that said, “You are a political force; we see you.” Which is lovely. Hold onto that feeling for about ninety seconds.

What happened outside Spark Arena

Outside Spark Arena, more than a hundred protesters gathered, anti-immigration activists among them, chanting “send them back” and holding signs reading “remigration now.” And inside, at the official welcome at Government House, only National Party ministers sat at the table for New Zealand. NZ First’s leader and Foreign Minister, Winston Peters, whose party had spent months trashing this very trade deal, was conveniently out of the country that weekend.

The timeline that could or could not be a coincidence

• 27 April 2026: New Zealand signs its free trade agreement with India. Todd McClay and Piyush Goyal shake hands in New Delhi, the most significant political achievement of Luxon’s career. The deal opens up a capped stream of skilled work visas, better post-study work rights for Indian graduates, and a working holiday scheme. The whole architecture screams come here and contribute.

• 5 July 2026: Winston Peters, standing in Warkworth, announces that New Zealand First will campaign to strip the vote from anyone who isn’t a citizen. Permanent residents would lose the franchise they’ve had since 1975. Voting, he said, should belong to those who’ve “sworn allegiance.” Everyone else can live here, work here, and pay income tax here. Just not have a say.

• 10 July 2026: Modi lands in Auckland.

Peters announced his policy five days before the guest of honour arrived.

The claim I’m not making

Let me be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying NZ First timed this policy to coincide with Modi’s arrival, deliberately, as a dog whistle at the fastest-growing migrant community in the country. That’s too easy: a villain with a motive. But I don’t need that claim. Whether or not anyone planned this, the effect is the same, and it’s worth wrestling with.

Why is this problematic?

Because of our hyper-diverse growing population. Because it is a real threat to our social cohesion.

Social cohesion isn’t a feel-good vibe. It’s not whether we all get along at the barbecue or can hold hands and sing kumbaya. It is a complex social phenomenon, and when it’s disturbed, violence creeps through the cracks faster than you can comment on this post.

National-level social cohesion is paramount: not just for everyone’s safety and wellbeing, but also as the foundation of national security for any country. And NZ First’s direction of travel directly threatens it. And by national level social cohesion, I mean our capacity to coexist with competing and diverse views.

So, think about what these two policies do to a permanent resident, especially one from India, in this case. Message one, from the trade deal and the Sky Tower and the Prime Minister of your birth country being feted at Spark Arena: you matter, you’re wanted, you’re a force. Message two, from a speech in Warkworth: But you don’t get to vote on how any of this is run, and a party in this very government thinks your presence here is a problem to be managed.

So why is NZ First policy a problem for our Indian community specifically?

Because many of them can’t just become citizens to keep their vote, even if they wanted to. India doesn’t allow dual citizenship; it’s written into their constitution. Take New Zealand citizenship and you surrender your Indian passport outright. No going back, just an “Overseas Citizen of India” card that isn’t the real thing. For someone with aging parents, property, or family still in India, that’s a very hard trade-off. It’s choosing between two lives. So, NZ First’s policy catches people whose birth country makes them choose and punishes them for a barrier they didn’t build. If you are not an immigrant or have never ever had to wrestle with deep identity issues, this might seem minor, but believe me, it is not!

This coalition government is essentially saying it wants your labour, your GST, your nurse’s registration but not your vote. Come do the work. Just don’t expect a say in the conditions of the work.

This is exactly what starts to crack our capacity to coexist across many diverse, sometimes competing views. The kind of disagreement a liberal democracy should be able to handle, just not the way NZ First is going about it. For social cohesion to hold at a national level, people need to believe they belong as influencing members, not as a useful workforce. Strip the vote from permanent residents, and you are formally, legally redrawing the line between the people who count and the people who merely contribute. And you’re drawing it, whether you mean to or not, right through the middle of the community you just signed a trade deal to bring here while asking those same people to come and work and live here. It’s just too much, honestly. WTAF!?

This touches a nerve

So, I still think the policy is xenophobic. I said so last week. What’s changed is that I can now see it sitting inside a pattern: the India deal NZ First opposed as “neither free nor fair,” the migrant “values statement,” the bill to entrench English, and now citizens-only voting. What I see is a clear and problematic direction of travel.

I also know it touches a nerve because last week’s Less Certain ran on my Substack and was reposted on interest.co.nz, and between the two platforms, it drew 116 comments: 76 in one place, 40 in the other. I replied to nearly all of them. The views were passionate and all over the show.

What struck me wasn’t how many people disagreed with me; that’s fine, encouraged, and welcomed. It’s that they didn’t even agree with each other about what the argument was. One crowd said New Zealand is a global outlier on this topic, and we’re just catching up to Australia and the US, who don’t let permanent residents vote either. So that makes it ok because? Another said the whole framing misses Māori sovereignty and that the citizenship oath is sworn to a foreign monarch. Sorry, what? Some wanted to weight votes by tax paid. I’d said permanent residents pay taxes, and that’s reason enough for the vote; a commenter rightly pushed me to be precise (income tax, GST). Fine. Noted. But that’s the point: even the corrections came from completely different directions. Some argued about the definition of mass immigration. Some wanted to talk about infrastructure. There was no shared premise. None.1

And that’s a small snapshot of the state of play: New Zealand has no settled, agreed answer to the most basic question a democracy can ask: who gets to decide? We just have a lot of people who feel very strongly about their version of the answer and a government making consequential moves, mixed and contradictory ones, as though they were separate political moves with no real consequences for folks.

So

I don’t think NZ First drew up this policy as a targeted strike on the Indian community. But I don’t think that matters. What is true is that this government has decided, across a dozen separate decisions that nobody’s bothered to connect, that some people are here to contribute but not influence and some people are here to influence and therefore belong and that you can tell which is which by whether you’ll let them vote.

The trade deal moves through Parliament. The voting policy waits for an election. And a few hundred thousand people who got told they mattered on Saturday are left to work out what it means that, five days earlier, a party in the same government told them they didn’t.

I don’t have a tidy ending for you. I just think that when a country sends two signals this loud in opposite directions, it threatens our capacity to coexist peacefully, and that is worth debating, flagging, and noting, at the very least.

This is an incredibly xenophobic political move as well as a super impractical one, it’s a total waste of time. Identity politics aside, it’s an inefficient way for politicians to spend their time and money, especially a party that holds serious portfolios and has priorities far more pressing to our day to day lives than whether permanent residents can vote or not. Send help!

Also, I am an overseas born New Zealand citizen, so I have some skin in the game here, and a chip on my shoulder about how migrants, especially Brown and Black folk from non-English speaking countries, are treated in New Zealand. Because let’s drop the pretence that we are inclusive and kind. New Zealand is categorically not an easy country to live in if you’re not White or White Passing, and that stands as fact, I’m not here to debate it. If you’re Brown, Black, or Middle Eastern looking and sounding, you will face more barriers to find work, get a promotion, and build social capital than White Passing folk. A fact.

So back to this stupid policy.

What are the current rules?

Right now, you don’t need to be a New Zealand citizen to vote here. You need to be 18 or older, have lived in the country continuously for 12 months or more at some point in your life, and be “a resident for electoral purposes.” That last bit covers anyone lawfully in New Zealand who isn’t required to leave by a set date, which includes permanent residents and some longer-term visa holders.

This is law since 1975, when the law was widened from “British subjects” to include permanent residents regardless of citizenship. Fifty-one years of precedent, not some woke oversight nobody’s noticed. Roll eye!

Now, what is NZ First suggesting

Peters announced the policy on 5 July at a public meeting in Warkworth: NZ First would campaign to restrict voting in general and local elections to citizens only. His framing was that voting “should be a privilege of those who have sworn allegiance to New Zealand, and who have made the commitment to make New Zealand their home and their future.” His follow up line does is the real gem: “If you haven’t made that commitment or sworn that allegiance, we are happy to let you live here permanently, but why should you get a say in how this country is run or governed?” – Because they pay taxes Winston! Simple as that. Will you except permanent residents from paying taxes? Didn’t think so.

His speech questioning why a permanent resident should be able to vote “after a couple of years,” and asking whether letting non-citizens vote in referendums that “fundamentally change the social fabric of our society” is really what we mean by democracy. It’s not, it’s actually the opposite.

This is one line in a run of NZ First moves this year: trashing the India NZ trade deal over immigration numbers, a “values statement” for migrants, a member’s bill to entrench English as an official language. Whatever you think of the individual merits of each, the pattern is consistent, and this policy sits comfortably inside it. And they are all a waste of time and totally immaterial to our day to day lives.

Permanent resident’s vs citizenship

This is where the policy falls apart on its own terms, because it treats “hasn’t become a citizen” as a proxy for “hasn’t committed to New Zealand.” That’s just not true, for a long list of very ordinary reasons.

Start with the big structural one: dual citizenship. New Zealand allows it. Plenty of the countries our permanent residents come from don’t. China, India, Japan, Singapore, and Indonesia are the obvious examples, roughly fifty countries in total restrict it. If you’re Indian and you take New Zealand citizenship, you surrender your Indian passport outright, full stop, and can only fall back on an Overseas Citizen of India card, which isn’t real citizenship. For someone with ageing parents, property, or family still in the country of origin, that’s not a paperwork inconvenience. It’s a genuinely hard trade-off between two lives, not a failure of allegiance to either. This is a big deal. I have New Zealand citizenship became I didn’t have to surrender my Mexican one, but if Mexio didn’t allow it, I would have not taken the leap.

Then there’s the oath. Citizenship ceremonies require swearing or affirming allegiance to the monarch. For plenty of migrants, particularly from countries with their own complicated colonial history, that’s a real sticking point, not administrative friction. And they are entitled to not choose that. They still pay taxes Winston!

Then there’s simple bureaucratic inertia. People who arrived decades ago, when the distinction barely mattered because permanent residents could already vote, work, and build a life here, and who just never saw the need to formalise it. Older migrants especially. There’s no democratic deficit in someone who’s paid tax and voted here for forty years suddenly being told the bit of paper they never needed now disqualifies them.

And there’s cost and process. Naturalisation requires five years of residence, 240 days physically in the country each of those years, English language proof, a character check, and as of November last year, a $560 application fee for an adult, up 19% in a single hike after 22 years untouched. None of that is unreasonable as a bar to citizenship on its own. But it means “hasn’t become a citizen yet” captures people mid process, people who can’t clear the physical presence test because of work travel or caring for family overseas, and people for whom the cost is a genuine barrier, all lumped in with Peters’ implied category of people who simply refuse to commit.

Permanent residence already means someone has been through character checks, health checks, and often years of temporary visas before qualifying. It’s not a lesser or looser status than citizenship, it’s a different one, with different legal weight. Peters’ own framing concedes this when he says PRs get to “live, work, study, and build a life” here, then argues that’s somehow not commitment enough to have a say in how that life is governed.

The politics of voting restrictions

Restricting who gets to vote has never been about principle. It’s about who gets to keep control of outcomes. And it’s a political issue that goes back forever, and it happens in all post-colonial democracies. Franchise rules are drawn by whoever currently holds power, and they tend to move in whichever direction protects that power. Expansion happens when letting more people in defuses a bigger threat. Restriction happens when the reverse calculation kicks in, when there’s a fear of losing control over outcomes.

New Zealand loves telling the 1893 story, first country in the world to give women the vote. What gets left out of the primary school version is what happened to Māori voters in the same democracy. Māori didn’t get a secret ballot until 1938, forty-five years after women’s suffrage. They voted on a separate day from everyone else until 1951. And there were no electoral rolls at all for the Māori seats until 1949, because officials argued, in so many words, that compiling them was too difficult given “language, literacy and proof of identity.” Not a lack of political will. A framing of the people in question as too complicated to properly count. This is still a case for giving prisoners voting rights and under 16s. Same thing.

None of that is ancient history. And Peters is carrying on this shitty legacy, just aimed at a different group: define a category of resident as not quite ready, not quite trustworthy, not quite committed enough, and dress the restriction up as protecting the integrity of the system rather than narrowing who’s allowed to shape it. Restricting a franchise has never once in this country’s history been about principle in the abstract. It’s been about which group currently holds power deciding who else gets to have a say in keeping it. So when Peters says he wants to “restore” a democratic principle, he doesn’t.

Now, why it’s such a waste of time, ignoring the incredibly loud xenophobic tones it has

Set the xenophobia aside for a second, though we’ll come back to it, and look at this as pure political triage. NZ First holds real portfolios right now. Peters is Foreign Minister, Racing Minister, and Rail Minister. Deputy leader Shane Jones runs Oceans and Fisheries, Regional Development, and Resources. These aren’t quiet backwaters, and there’s no shortage of pressing work sitting on those desks.

None of that is what’s getting the airtime. Instead, we get a policy that, if you listen to the framing, sounds like a constitutional crusade against an entrenched provision needing 75% of Parliament or a national referendum to shift. Here’s the thing: it might not need either. The Supreme Court has already read down the entrenchment clause covering electoral qualifications, finding it locks in only the voting age of 18, not the citizen or permanent resident test sitting right next to it in the same section. Legal academics still call the whole doctrine’s enforceability unsettled. But the practical read is that this could pass on a bare majority, no referendum, no supermajority theatre required.

Which makes the “restoring democratic principle” framing even flimsier, not more solid. This isn’t a lonely stand against an immovable constitutional wall. It’s a policy that’s genuinely achievable, wrapped in language that makes it sound like a heroic uphill fight, aimed at a group of voters nobody, including NZ First, appears to have actually sized up. There’s no public breakdown anywhere of how many permanent residents are even on the roll. They’re picking a fight over a category of voter whose scale they haven’t bothered to establish.

So, what’s it actually for? It’s a policy that costs nothing to promise and buys a very specific kind of attention. Electoral law barrister Graeme Edgeler has made the useful point that New Zealand does sit at the open end of a global spectrum on this, Australia and the US are citizens only, the UK lets some Commonwealth citizens vote, and Europe splits access between national and EU elections. There’s a real conversation available about where New Zealand should sit on that spectrum. That is not the conversation NZ First is having. The conversation NZ First is having uses the word “allegiance” a lot, and points, not especially subtly, at exactly which permanent residents it thinks haven’t earned a say.

That’s the waste. Not the hours spent on a bill that might actually pass. The opportunity cost of a party with genuine levers over foreign policy, resources, and regional development choosing to spend its political capital re-litigating who gets to belong here, instead of using it on literally any of the portfolios it already holds.

In 2023 I stood for the Opportunity Party in Wellington Central. No funding, no profile, fourteen years of formal political science behind me, and none of it bought me a minute of media attention. I worked harder for less coverage than I’ve ever worked for anything in my life and still walked away with 5.5% of the party vote in my electorate, a result I wear as a badge of honour, by the way. Nationally, TOP got 2.22%. No seats. Three years on, under new leader Qiulae Wong, the Opportunity Party is polling higher than it ever has. What the Opportunity Party is trying to do is the hardest thing in politics. That’s the story, not whether they deserve the media they are getting. Which is an incredibly narrow way of debating this moment.

The Opportunities Party decade of learning the hard way

This is the Opportunity Party’s fourth go at this, and the current strategy is working better than anybody thought it would. New board, new constitution, more candidates, a focus on party votes and an effective fundraising strategy.

When Gareth Morgan launched the party in 2016, he threw an estimated $2–4 million of his own money into it, which is a shit tonne of money. They ran a campaign built almost entirely around his own profile and his controversy, the “lipstick on a pig” comment about Jacinda Ardern and, of course, the cats. For that amount of money, the result was appalling, hitting narrowly 2.4% in 2017, with immediate relevance but nothing to show for it. Then Morgan resigned the leadership three months later, pulled his funding entirely within two years, and publicly trashed the people left running the party on his way out. The Opportunities Party nearly deregistered. It limped into 2020 with 1.5%, its worst result ever. The whole operation had been built around one man’s money and shitty political strategy.

Less Certain.

Biggest Threat to Politics in 2026: Oversimplification

Less Certain is back, properly back, with eyes squarely on 2026. An election year. Where everything that’s been simmering chaotically starts to bubble over chaotically whether we’re ready or not. And I fear we are not ready at all. So below, I unpack what I think is the biggest threat to politics in 2026 and how it relates to population, new global worl…

Read more

7 months ago · 32 likes · 46 comments · Natalia Albert

The Conservative Party under Colin Craig lived a similar version of this story on a compressed timeline. Self-funded, high-profile, controversial from day one. In 2014, it hit 3.97% of the party vote, the closest any minor party without an electorate seat has come to the threshold in the MMP era. Then it collapsed. Craig resigned within a year, and the party never cracked 1.5% again.

The Opportunity Party and the Conservative Party are, in effect, two versions of the same story: a minor party built around one wealthy, combative figure can spike fast, but then inevitably crash.

In 2020: 1.5%; then in 2023: 2.22%, the Raf Manji era, my era, still no seats. Three elections since Morgan walked away, with no clear upward trend until now. The current approach, Wong as leader and Iain Lees-Galloway running operations separately as general manager, no single mega-funder who can close a chequebook and gut the whole thing, is a direct response to exactly what killed the party the first time.

There’s a second precedent worth flagging. For most of the 2000s and into the 2010s, ACT survived on the Epsom electorate alone, polling under 1% in the party vote for years at a stretch. It looked like a dead party walking. Then, from 2017 onward under David Seymour, it rebuilt into a multi-election political force, not off one news cycle but off sustained organisational work across several elections. Outstanding efforts, regardless of what you think of the leader or the party. Politically ACT is a masterclass for small parties. That’s the model the Opportunities Party would need to be following for its current numbers to mean anything lasting.

A word on the media debate

There’s a live argument right now, including from commentators like Ani O’Brien, about whether the Opportunities Party is getting more coverage than ever, especially compared with parties like the New Conservatives, who’ve sat in a similar range for years without anything like the same attention. As Ani mentions. Sure, but also it’s not that simple.

Sure, because the Opportunity Party’s current coverage probably is more favourable in tone than its raw polling alone would predict. No, because the comparison flattens two very different eras into one story, and that flattening is problematic and exactly the kind of oversimplification I think is the biggest risk in political commentary this year.

In 2017, the Opportunity Party got outsized coverage for the same reason Colin Craig’s Conservatives did: a wealthy, combative founder generates news. That’s spectacle and money buying attention, not journalists quietly favouring the Opportunity Party’s politics. It’s a cleaner explanation than a simple affinity theory, and it applies equally to a right-leaning party and a left-leaning one.

But Morgan is gone. There’s no equivalent figure driving the Opportunity Party coverage now, no chequebook, and no scandal-a-week routine. If the Opportunity Party is still getting heavy, favourable coverage in 2026 without that mechanism, the “controversy and money” explanation doesn’t work. I don’t think it’s the question that decides whether the Opportunities Party succeeds; media attention can be and is critical to generate momentum, but it is absolutely not easy to get, nor can it be manufactured, Ani. It takes a laser-sharp strategy, a leader that can deliver said strategy and a series of stars and vibes that need to align.

The real barrier

New Zealand’s political system is built in ways that make it extraordinarily hard for any new party to survive, let alone become influential. The threshold is too high. The funding model favours whoever already has money or a profile. The media economics reward spectacle over patience. The Opportunity Party hit all three walls under Morgan. Craig’s Conservatives hit the same walls from a different angle. ACT only got through by David grinding slowly and patiently for the better part of a decade.

For scale: across all seven MMP elections to date, minor parties that made it into Parliament and contested more than one election have averaged 7.7% for the Greens and 7.6% for NZ First, 3.9% for ACT, 1.8% for the Māori Party. Even the Opportunities Party’s best current polling sits around or below that long-run average for parties that succeeded at all.

That’s the real story here, not whether Wong is getting a fair shake from the press gallery. Whether the Opportunity Party breaks through this time or not, the structural barriers that make this nearly impossible for any small party aren’t going anywhere. What’s changed is that the Opportunities Party has spent the better part of a decade slowly working out how to survive them. Will they make it in? Can this political momentum materialise into votes? These are the debates worth having and understanding, not whether Q deserves media attention or not.

Why claim every business owner is greedy? Why the disdain for homeowners? Why hating so much for wanting more money? I moved to New Zealand from Mexico precisely so I could make more of it. Something I will never apologize for. They kept framing the value of having financial goals and fighting for them as a character flaw. Being poor, or not wanting money, their moral high horse. I don’t subscribe, nor do I think it’s a noble political position.

This year, I think they’ve finally cracked it.

Full policy here

For three elections running, the Green Party drew the wealth line at two million dollars. This year they drew it at ten million. The policy has three themes and eight clauses. Of the eight, six seem solid to me. Two still don’t quite square for me: the fixation on landlords, and how on earth they plan to enforce a 5% withholding tax on big tech. But first let’s unpack what they announced.

So what did they announce?

A 2.5% annual tax on net assets over $10 million, family home exempt. The Greens say this catches the wealthiest 0.3%, and why Mārama Davidson keeps repeating that 99.7% of us won’t pay it. Narrow, specific with solid exceptions.

A new inheritance and gift tax branded the Capital Acquisitions Tax: 33% on what you receive above a lifetime million, with family homes and family farms carved out. By their numbers it hits about 1,100 people a year.

A return to a 33% company tax rate, but only for the largest 0.7% of firms, the banks and supermarkets and energy companies. Everyone else stays at 28. Finally excluding most companies which are small and medium, honest hard-working folk employing other folks, making our economy hum.

A bank levy modelled on Australia’s, a crackdown on multinational profit-shifting, and a reversal of the landlord tax changes National brought in. Plus, income tax cuts the Greens say reach 96% of us, paid for by a new top rate of 45% on income over $160,000. 45% seems high to me, but I unpack that further down.

The two-million-dollar line they held for six years

In 2020, the Greens wanted a wealth tax that started biting at one million dollars. One percent over a million, two percent over two. In 2023 they simplified it to a flat 2.5% and set the threshold at two million. In their 2025 alternative Budget, the big swing-for-the-fences document, the threshold was still two million.

They defended it through two election campaigns and a full alternative Budget. The rate drifted up a little, from two percent to two and a half, and then held steady. This year, the rate stayed at 2.5%. The threshold jumped to ten million. This is a party deciding, after six years, exactly who it was willing to pick a fight with, and who it wasn’t. And I think that this is the right group to pick a fight with.

Who got let off the hook

The jump from two million to ten spared someone. People assume the higher threshold was about protecting Auckland homeowners. It wasn’t. The family home was always exempt, so moving the line did nothing for someone whose wealth is just their house.

The people it actually spared are those with two to ten million in wealth beyond the family home: a Waikato or Taranaki dairy farmer whose land and stock put them in the low‑single‑digit millions; a Wellington couple with two rental properties and a six‑figure share portfolio; the owner of a solid local business valued around a million; the provincial, asset‑holding middle whose accumulated properties sit well above two million but nowhere near ten. It’s a very particular group, and it’s more or less exactly the constituency the Greens have never been able to reach, the one National and ACT mobilise hardest. A wealth tax at two million lands on a lot of those people. A wealth tax at ten million sails right over them and settles on a few hundred genuinely rich families instead. Bravo Greens!

Why I think the guardrails work

A few things in this document made me take it more seriously than the earlier versions. The Greens assumed they wouldn’t collect it all. Their modelling assumes 28.5% of the super-rich tax simply won’t be collected, lost to avoidance and minimisation, on advice from the Parliamentary Library informed by Treasury. Most parties pretend their tax take is simple and it really never is. The Greens is admitting wealth taxes are leaky, and costing for it. I had not seen that political maturity before.

You can see exactly who ends up paying the inheritance tax. The policy spells it out with examples, and they’re good. Inherit a $1.5 million family home and $250,000 in shares, and you pay nothing: the home is exempt, and what’s left sits under the million‑dollar threshold. Inherit, instead, a $2.5 million commercial building and $500,000 in shares, or two rental properties worth $1.8 million plus $400,000 in cash, and you do pay: 33% on the amount above your $1 million lifetime threshold, with the family home and core farm assets still carved out. You only ever pay 33% on what you receive above a million, excluding the home. You can at least see exactly who this catches and who it doesn’t. Good!

The company tax rise is finally ringfenced. 33% for the biggest 0.7% of firms, 28 for everyone else. Earlier versions hit small and medium companies too, and I could never stomach that, because it rested on a shitty assumption that every business owner is greedy and every business is rolling in it. Both halves of that are wrong, and I’ll die on that hill. Most small business owners are drawing a modest salary and carrying all the risk.

But a hit aimed squarely at the supermarket duopoly and the banks? Let’s go! It’s a far narrower and more defensible target than “raise company tax”, and it drops the pretence that every firm is a villain. Which I just can’t with their narrative about folks being evil for making more money. It’s the framing which I challenge, but this policy is now going in the right direction.

And then they got caught funding the tax department too well. Lol. The one number they had to correct was the money for IRD to actually collect the tax. They’d set aside $100 million to run the new taxes, but in the spreadsheet, it got added to revenue instead of counted as a cost. The fix knocked about $800 million off their four-year net.

A bad look, sure. But … they over-funded enforcement and then fumbled where the number sat in the table. A typo, as Swarbrick said and I get it. Political parties with smaller budgets like the Greens, are running on fumes and trying to do way too much with little. I’m less interested in the slip than what it reveals: they were trying to over-fund collection, not skimp on it. I’d take that any day. Be realistic about what it takes to actually enforce a policy. Yes, all day!

The bad

The whole document leads with corporate greed: supermarket profits, bank profits, power bills. But the corporate measures are the small numbers. The big corporation’s tax, the bank levy and the big tech crackdown together raise less than the super-rich wealth tax does on its own.

And then there is the framing. They treat wealth, business, and landlords as if they’re the scum of the earth. The shitty rich-lister with the helipad and the couple with one rental and the family running a panel-beating shop folded into a single story: the greedy and the problem. It’s just not ok! And it’s bad politics. You can argue the super-rich should pay more without implying that wanting to do well is an evil value. Sigh!

The income tax side gives 96% of us a cut and lands a new 45% rate on income over $160,000. Sure. But actually, the Greens spend forty pages telling you the banks and the supermarkets are the villains. Then they tax those companies at 33%, while taxing a New Zealander who earns over $160,000 at 45. Under a policy built around corporate greed, the company keeps a bigger share of its next dollar than the dentist does. Make that make sense?

I get it: company profits get taxed again as dividends when they reach a person. But that doesn’t rescue it. So, if concentrated wealth is the problem, why does the person who works for a high salary pay the higher rate? And why such a jump, so fast? The top rate goes from 39% to 45% and kicks in $20,000 sooner, all at once. Bring us along. Start at 41% or 42% and build? Just my two cents.

The landlord fight

This one deserves its own piece, and it’ll get one. But in a nutshell, because it’s a shitshow. By the Greens’ constant rhetoric, landlords come off as the worst thing to happen to mankind. It’s exhausting, and it’s the same flattening I keep coming back to, the speculator with twenty houses and the nurse with one rental and a mortgage get painted as the same villain. They aren’t. I recently managed to own my first property, I will absolutely not apologize for that, and the Greens assuming I’m the same as a corporate greedy irresponsible developer is just not a pill I can swallow.

What grates most is that we’re this heated about a group we can’t even find. Depending on whose number you use, New Zealand has somewhere between roughly 120,000 and a couple of hundred thousand landlords, maybe, we are actually not sure. There is no official source that can tell us. We’re proposing to reshape the rules around a population we can’t measure or find within any data source.

Chlöe Swarbrick has worked this issue for years and knows it inside out, the policy includes a landlord register for example. A register is sensible. Overseas, Scotland has run one for nearly two decades for trivial money. But a register is a map, not a fix. It tells you where every rental is. It does nothing on its own about the ones that are cold, damp, or dangerous. That takes enforcement, and enforcement is the expensive part. It’s a start. It just isn’t the finish or this simple. Like I said, this is a large policy issue on its own.

So, did they crack it?

Mostly, yes. I still hate the framing of money bad, having less good. I still don’t accept that wanting to do well makes you a villain, and the document never quite lets that go. But the policy underneath the rhetoric is the most honest thing the Greens have put out in a decade. They moved the line to ten million, owned who that spares, funded the tax office to actually collect, and aimed their corporate hit instead of swinging wide. Lets see if this can get them the votes and conditions to make it to Cabinet.

When Stanford finally got the independent review, she called it “almost as bad as it gets.” The Public Service Commissioner is now promising to leave no stone unturned. Winston Peters wants prison. Andrew Little remembers some of it. Kris Faafoi is nowhere to be seen. MBIE has a new chief executive who now must wade through years of executive and institutional decisions to figure out what the f*ck happened. This is bad.

If even half of what Stanford described to the select committee holds up, some people behaved appallingly, and they should answer for it. But here’s where I want to slow the whole thing down, because the entire debate has collapsed into a single question, and it’s the wrong one.

The question everyone’s asking is: did they do it on purpose? Stanford says deliberate. She used the words “creative accounting,” “deception by omission,” a “trifecta of terrible things.” MBIE’s chief executive Nic Blakeley reaches instead for “optimism bias,” the idea that people who’d sunk years into a project kept telling themselves, and their minister, that it would come right. The Public Service Commissioner’s review will, we’re told, settle which of these is true.

I don’t think it will.

And I don’t think it matters as much as everyone assumes. Because underneath the question of intent sits a bigger one, we’re not asking: what do these officials think their job is? In a liberal democracy, public servants serve the government of the day. They advise, they implement, they tell ministers the truth even when it’s ugly. What they don’t do is decide for themselves which projects are worth protecting, then manage the elected minister’s information so the decision stays theirs. That’s not a clerical failure. It’s a misunderstanding of who holds power and who answers to whom.

There was a rule: if a project’s whole-of-life cost goes over $35 million, it needs Cabinet approval. A clean, sensible formal rule. The kind of guardrail you’d design specifically to stop officials quietly committing taxpayers to expensive things without political sign-off.

Now look at what the independent review found. When the project crept towards that threshold, officials split it into two. The review’s words, not Stanford’s: the split was “largely driven by efforts to avoid exceeding the Cabinet-level funding threshold.” They didn’t break the $35m rule. They obeyed it by making sure no single piece of the project ever technically crossed the political threshold.

This is the part the villain-hunt misses entirely.

The $35m threshold functioned as a target to avoid, not a target to respect. It told everyone involved exactly where the bright line was, and the entirely predictable human response to a bright line you don’t want to cross is to arrange your affairs, so you stay just underneath it. Dumb. This is a well understood political science phenomenon.

Formal vs Informal rules.

Formal rules, the ones written in glossy ministerial paper, on websites, in annual reports, into legislation, the thresholds and signoffs and Cabinet papers. Formal rules also never operate alone. They sit on top and amongst informal rules: the unwritten norms about what you do outside the formal ones to sidestep the ones that get in the way, what gets escalated, what gets quietly handled, what your boss wants to hear. Gretchen Helmke and Steven Levitsky, who did the foundational work mapping this, point out that informal norms fill the gaps left by formal ones, they actively compete with them, producing outcomes the formal rules were specifically designed to prevent.

They call these “competing informal institutions,” and Immigration NZ is a textbook case. When the two line up, the system works. When they pull against each other, the informal rules usually win, because they’re the ones that govern day-to-day behaviour and carry the real social consequences.

At Immigration NZ, the formal rule said get Cabinet approval over $35m. The informal rule, the one that ran the building, said don’t bring bad news up the chain, protect the project, keep the minister comfortable.

We know the informal rule was real because the review found people who raised concerns were moved off the project. That’s not optimism bias. Optimism bias doesn’t reassign your colleagues. But it’s also not necessarily a criminal conspiracy. It’s a culture doing what its incentives told it to do.

And this is why I think Stanford, for all that she’s substantively right, is reaching for a frame that lets the system off the hook. “Deliberate deception” locates the problem in a few bad individuals. Find them, sack them, and the integrity of the public service is restored. It’s a satisfying story. It’s also the story that requires the least change.

Because if it’s deliberate deception by a handful of people, you don’t have to ask why three successive ministers, across two governments, all got managed the same way. You don’t have to ask why Andrew Little was being told everything was “hunky-dory” while it clearly wasn’t. You don’t have to ask why RNZ’s Gill Bonnett was reporting red flags on this project back in 2024 and the official line was that the risk profile had “not worsened.” You don’t have to ask whether the $35m threshold itself, the supposed safeguard, was part of the problem.

A threshold that tells people exactly where the line is will always be gamed by someone. The question is whether your system notices.

Here’s the pre-emptive concession, because someone will raise it: am I excusing the officials? No. People made choices. Moving colleagues who raised concerns is a choice. Sitting on a finished review for two months is a choice. Telling a brand-new minister the project was “sound and robust” when the actual assessment doubted it would deliver “at all” is, at absolute minimum, a choice not to be honest.

Institutional analysis isn’t a get-out-of-jail card. It’s an explanation of why those choices felt available, even reasonable, to the people making them. Individuals are accountable. But if you only hold individuals accountable, you’ll do the whole thing again in five years with different individuals.

The genuinely uncomfortable part, the part that should worry you more than any single villain, is the bipartisan one. This wasn’t done to a National minister by a hostile bureaucracy. It was done to Labour ministers too. Little has effectively admitted his own government was kept in the dark, even as he sympathises with Stanford. That should kill the left-right framing dead, though it won’t, because an election year needs a story and “the institution malfunctioned regardless of who was in charge” doesn’t fit on a placard.

And the structure made it easy. In 2022, partway through the project’s life, it was shifted out of Immigration NZ’s hands and into MBIE’s Digital, Data and Insights group as part of a restructure. On paper, a tidy reallocation. In practice, the kind of move that quietly dissolves accountability: the people who started the project no longer owned it, and the people who inherited it never really did either. When something belongs to everyone, it belongs to no one. This is the bit institutionalists would flag in a heartbeat, because formal structure isn’t neutral. Draw the org chart so that responsibility falls between two boxes, and you have built a place for bad news to get lost. Nobody must hide it. The structure hides it for them.

So, what would actually fix this? Not a list of sackings, though some may be warranted. The honest answer is the unsatisfying one: you have to design rules that assume people will respond to incentives, because they will. A threshold that everyone can see is a threshold someone will engineer around. A culture where bad news travels down instead of up will produce misled ministers no matter how many integrity reviews you run after the fact. Nicola Willis said the right thing this week: do not cover up bad news, send it up to the minister’s desk. The trouble is you can’t instruct a culture into existence. You have to build a system were sending bad news up is the path of least resistance, not an act of career-risking courage.

Sir Brian Roche says he’ll leave no stone unturned. I believe him. I just hope that when he turns them over, he’s looking for more than names. Because the names will change. The threshold, the silos, the incentive to manage your minister rather than inform them: those are still standing. And they’ll be there for whoever runs the next doomed seven-year project.

Budget Day is big politically, but not for the economic reasons everyone treats it as. It’s big for political signalling reasons. If you set the money aside, this is the day the government tells you what it Cares about. The Wellbeing Budget is the biggest example of how this actually works in practice. You can’t commercialise or finance the idea of wellbeing, especially not across a nation, but you can signal that it matters to you as a government. This government’s value is responsibility. Theirs as a government, and yours as an individual.

I wrote about the Wellbeing era last winter, and the bit worth pulling forward is this. The Wellbeing Budget was never really an accounting exercise. It was a values declaration with a very estimated price tag. The Ardern government couldn’t put kindness on a balance sheet, but it could put it on a podium, and that was most of what wellbeing was for: a public claim about what the state was meant to be for. Whether you found that moving or insufferable said more about your politics than about the numbers. The numbers were almost beside the point. Same this week.

Less Certain.

The Politics of Trust: What the Wellbeing Era Got Right (and Wrong)

God, we throw around trust in institutions like confetti. Trust in government, trust in the system, trust between groups, it’s everywhere. It shows up in political speeches, policy frameworks, media headlines, and academic papers…

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a year ago · 23 likes · 18 comments · Natalia Albert

What’s worth noticing across both eras is that governments don’t actually change whether they do value signalling. They change which values get signalled and in what register. The Wellbeing years did it in the language of care, kindness and social cohesion, even when the budget mechanics didn’t always follow. The responsibility years are doing it in the language of discipline, efficiency and getting the basics right. Both are moral claims about who the government is for.

The current government has its own values claim, and it’s been telling us what they are all week. The Prime Minister has spent the run-up calling Thursday’s budget a “grown-up” one, free of what he calls a “lolly scramble”, with the last government cast as the babysitters. That’s the campaign tagline now. “Responsible” is doing the work “kindness” did six years ago.

Adulthood is responsibility; restraint is virtue; asking for more is petulance. The responsibility runs both ways. There’s a government in being prudent with the books. Yours as an individual in being prudent with your life. The state will be smaller because adults don’t need babysitting, and so, by implication, neither do you.

Fiscal discipline matters. You can’t borrow forever to cover everyday running costs. Sometimes restraint is the right call. What I am saying is that “responsibility” is a values claim doing political work well beyond the books, and it deserves to be looked at as such rather than as a self-evident fact. I will also assume as a fact that you need both the government focused on the collective and making decisions based on each of us carrying our own weight. Liberal democracies need the political pendulum to swing Left and Right in a way that keeps stability.

However, language matters more than numbers. If restraint is adulthood, then a nurse asking for a pay rise is asking for lollies. A family who can’t make rent is asking for lollies. The Climate Emergency Response Fund was, evidently, lollies. Pay equity for women in chronically underpaid sectors was a lolly. The point of the frame is that disagreement gets recoded as immaturity, and you can’t argue with a grown-up about whether they’re a grown-up without sounding petulant. That’s the trap.

You don’t have to take my word for what this government values, though. The receipts are public, and I went through the last two budgets in detail last week. The short version: judged by where the money has actually gone, this government wants a bigger military, a “smaller” state, and a better deal for business. The steady losers have been the climate, the care economy, and the everyday services, for which an $8.5 billion funding gap is quietly hollowing out. Those are the values of this government.

Less Certain.

Dear Nicola: Where’s my $5,000?

Earlier this year, in his State of the Nation speech in Auckland, Christopher Luxon said…

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3 months ago · 35 likes · 13 comments · Natalia Albert

So here’s a suggestion for Budget 2026: instead of trying to follow the money, read the items as their values. What words get the warm adjectives (”strategic”, “essential”, “core”, and “productive”), and what words get the cold ones (”discretionary”, “duplicative”, “wasteful”, and “legacy”)? What does the government call an investment, and what does it call a cost? Who’s a “taxpayer” in the speech, and who’s a “recipient”? Whose work is “frontline” and whose is “back office”? What gets called a “saving”, and what gets called a “cut”? When something doesn’t get funded, is it “deferred” or “reprioritised”?

They are values.

Budgets are how governments tell you who matters. The Wellbeing era told you that wellbeing did, even though it struggled to translate that into delivery, and your view on whether it ever really tried will depend on where you sit. The responsibility era is telling you that responsibility does, even though it’s already clear who’s expected to carry the cost of that virtue and who isn’t.

“In just the last two years, our Minister of Finance, Nicola Willis, has delivered savings of around $11 billion per annum, equivalent to around $5,000 for every single household in the country.”

Great. Excellent. Wonderful. I haven’t seen $5,000 in my bank account, have you? I checked with Emile Donovan at RNZ a couple of weeks ago. He hasn’t seen $5,000 either. I’ve asked around. Nobody I know has seen $5,000.

When Luxon says $11 billion is “equivalent to around $5,000 for every single household”, the maths is correct. New Zealand has about 2.1 million households. $11 billion divided by 2.1 million is roughly $5,200. The number checks. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. “Let’s put that in a speech,” said one of his advisors. Sigh. It’s misleading and irresponsible.

The government says repeatedly that they’re saving money, but where the money goes is a bit of a mystery to me. They say they’re making government smaller to save money and put it into frontline staff, sure. But that is not what is happening. The money is going into government, actually. It’s not $5,000 per household; I know that much.

I get that they redirect it, sure, but what does that mean, and why do they call it saving when what they are doing is moving it? Genuine question.

Budget 2024: from climate to business

The story Nicola Willis sold in May 2024 was savings plus reprioritisation equals tax cuts, fully funded, with no extra borrowing needed. The actual numbers: $23 billion in claimed savings across four years, $14.7 billion of tax cuts over four years, and $12 billion of extra government borrowing over the same period.

On Budget day, called the “fully funded” claim “a semantic question”. The tax cuts cost $14.7 billion over four years, while over the same period government borrowing rose by about $12 billion. As Hickey put it, “fully funded” was “dancing not-so-daintily on the head of a fiscal pin”. So where did the $23 billion in “savings” actually go?

About $3.68 billion a year funded the tax cuts. For a typical individual earner, up to $51 a fortnight. For households with children, up to $78 a fortnight. For a retired couple on Super with no other income, $9 a fortnight, rising to $26 a fortnight in 2026. That’s something. It is not the $250 a fortnight National promised the average household with kids in its pre-election “Back Pocket Boost”.

The biggest single line was $16.68 billion for health across three Budgets, alongside a build-up of frontline services in police, corrections and defence. But the telling move was smaller: $2.9 billion in restored interest deductibility for landlords. And to help pay for it, the Climate Emergency Response Fund was dissolved entirely, first-year Fees Free was cut and 20 hours of free ECE for two-year-olds was reversed, alongside hundreds of smaller savings line items across the public service.

The pattern in Budget 2024 was tax cuts plus a build-up of frontline services, a quiet handout to landlords paid for by closing climate, childcare and education programmes and an extra $12 billion of borrowing. Nobody got $250 a fortnight. Some people got a fraction of it. Most of the money went somewhere else.

Budget 2025: from pay equity to defence

In Budget 2025, Willis cut the operating allowance from $3.2 billion to $1.3 billion, less than half what she’d run the year before. She called it the “Growth Budget”. The savings claim was $5.3 billion a year in “reprioritisation”, which is government-speak for cutting one programme and using the money for another. Which is, conveniently, exactly the mystery box trick. In Budget 2025, the government moved billions from women in pay equity sectors to defence, business tax breaks, and a structural pension shift onto households.

But the biggest single “saving” was the pay equity change, rushed through Parliament under urgency in the week before Budget Day. Stopping 33 active pay equity claims and raising the threshold for future ones was scored as $12.8 billion in fiscal savings over four years. About $3.2 billion a year.

The headline destination was defence, $4.2 billion of it, the biggest reinvestment in over a decade. The rest went to things that don’t look like household relief at all: Investment Boost, a 20% upfront deduction for new business assets costing around $1.7 billion a year in foregone tax; and a KiwiSaver change that halved the government contribution and pushes default rates up to 4%, which is a saving for the government and a cost shifted onto households and employers.

The 2020 pay equity framework had real implementation problems: very broad sectoral claims, uncertain timelines, costs hard to predict, and a one-size-fits-all approach that hit small and medium employers as hard as it hit large corporates. Reforming that framework was defensible. But scrapping it under urgency in Parliament, with the explicit goal of scoring it as a $12.8 billion fiscal win, was a mistake. The message was unacceptable. On defence, I’ll grant that the world is going in a direction where being prepared isn’t a bad idea. But you can grant that and want them to not ignore institutional discrimination, which is a fact.

The missing $8.5 billion

According to Budget documents released in September and reported by RNZ, back in April the Public Service told the Treasury that they needed an extra $27.9 billion over four years to keep delivering, because costs like wages, supplies and equipment keep rising. The pressures were heaviest in education, defence, health, disability support and transport. The government reshuffled most of it, then left $8.5 billion unfunded. The bet is that growth fills the gap or that letting services fray slowly is easier to survive politically than borrowing.

Why not borrow it? Because borrowing for everyday running costs, as opposed to building something, breaks the whole “we’re the responsible ones” story. It would cost them more in brand than in books. And to be fair, they have half a point: you can’t borrow forever to cover costs that come back every year. Eventually you raise money, or you cut. So, the honest argument is about timing. Borrowing to hold services together through a rough patch is defensible; it’s what the OECD and IMF recommend, and Willis has yet to make a convincing case that cutting your way through a downturn grows the economy. Borrowing to paper over a permanent gap is another thing entirely. But “we can’t afford it” was never true. They could. They’d just rather not.

And before you ask whether this week’s public service cuts fix it: they don’t. The 8,700 public service jobs Willis announced on Tuesday are meant to save $2.4 billion, and she’s already told us where it goes. Not into the hole, but into new priorities like infrastructure, defence and police.

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Line up the three budgets, and this is the story

Budget 2024 was tax cuts and law and order, paid for by climate and childcare. Budget 2025 was for defence and business, paid for by pay equity claims. Budget 2026 is the public service redirected into health and balancing the books and avoiding debt.

Judged by where the money has gone, this government wants a bigger military, a smaller state, and a better deal for business. The losers have been just as steady: the climate, the care economy, and the everyday services that $8.5 billion hole is quietly hollowing out.

The Peters model, properly understood

You do not become a kingmaker by announcing you will work with either side. You become one by building the structural conditions that make that announcement credible. There are four of them.

First, an electorate seat. Peters survived the 1999 election on a margin of 63 votes in Tauranga. NZ First’s party vote had collapsed to 4.3%, well below the 5% threshold, after voters punished the party for going with National in 1996. The electorate lifeline rule kept him in parliament. Without Tauranga, Peters is a footnote. The seat was structural insurance: it meant his party could survive a party-vote collapse and live to fight another day. He spent the following decade treating that seat as his personal property, and his voters knew it.

Second, a voter base whose loyalty seems personal. NZ First voters follow Peters, not NZ First.

Third, a voter base with genuine cross-bloc origins. Peters' signature issues, immigration restriction and economic nationalism, are right-coded. But his anti-establishment populism and interventionist economic nationalism gave him reach into Labour-leaning provincial and Māori voters who felt left behind by urban-centred policymaking, while his cultural conservatism kept him credible with National. NZ First voters placed themselves near the centre on most scales, which is part of why the party fits poorly into standard radical right categories. Their economics were interventionist enough to do business with Labour. Their cultural conservatism was credible enough to do business with National. That dual legibility was structural.

Fourth, demonstrate willingness to go the other way. In 1996, Peters went with National. In 2005, he supported Helen Clark’s Labour government as Foreign Minister outside cabinet. In 2017, Labour again, this time in coalition with Ardern. In 2023, back to national. His credibility as a swing actor came precisely from having made each of those calls. A party that has only ever gone one way is not a kingmaker. It is a reliable coalition partner, which is a much weaker negotiating position.

Where Wong sits against that blueprint

She has none, yet!

She is standing in Mt Albert, where Labour’s Helen White held on by 18 votes in 2023, the slimmest margin of that election. If Wong wins it, she has her electorate insurance. That is a genuine possibility, though she has been publicly realistic about the odds. The seat is tight enough that it is not fantasy. It is also the one part of the blueprint she could plausibly achieve in the next six months.

Everything else is further away.

Opportunity’s voter base is concentrated in the progressive, urban, highly educated demographic that also considers voting Green or Labour. These are not voters with cross-bloc loyalty. They are left-leaning voters who are temporarily frustrated with Labour and looking for somewhere to park their vote. That is a real political constituency, and it is worth having. But it is not the same as Peters’ base, and it will not hold if Wong goes right.

The policy identity problem is real and has been real since the party was founded. Commentary going back to 2017 has noted the same contradiction: Opportunity wants to be both a Wellington policy-wonk party and a down-to-earth outsider party for people sick of the establishment. It cannot be both, and the tension has never been resolved. Neither of those identities is cross-coded in the way Peters’ issues were. Climate commitments and tax reform are left-coded. They attract centre-left voters. They do not attract the kind of National-leaning voter who might consider swinging to a third party if the policy offer were right.

And Wong has never gone right. It may be entirely deliberate, and it may be the right call for building the party in 2026. But it means that the “work with either side” framing is, at this point, a positioning statement rather than a demonstrated capacity. National’s strategists know that. Labour’s strategists know that too, which is part of why they are not panicking. A party that can only credibly go one way is not a kingmaker. It is a lever.

What Opportunity’s strategy actually is

Wong’s team have been clear about their model.

Opportunity is explicitly chasing the party vote. Their stated target is 150,000 votes to clear 5%. They are standing in over 30 electorates, not to win seats outright but to build local presence and visibility for the party’s vote. Wong is realistic about Mt Albert. The strategy does not depend on the electorate’s lifeboat. It is an all-in 5% play.

The framing they use for this is “teal”. They describe themselves explicitly as centrist, bridging Labour and the Greens on the environment and National on the economy. The pitch to voters is a version of “Keep Labour honest on the economy, keep National honest on the environment, and keep the extremes out of Cabinet.” It is designed to sound cross-bloc, and in the right political environment, it could attract voters from both sides. The problem is that their actual strategy does not match their positioning.

The teal model they are borrowing from is the Australian one, where independent candidates won specific seats in blue-green electorates where moderate Liberal incumbents were vulnerable to a cross-party environmental challenge. Those wins were built on individual candidates with strong local credibility in specific communities. They were seat wins, not party vote wins. Translating that model into a New Zealand MMP context requires something the Australian teals did not need: a party vote base that genuinely spans left and right.

Look at who Opportunity is actually targeting. Their demographic is young people, students, first-time voters, and under-30 professionals frustrated with the status quo. Their named funders are AJ Wilderland, co-founder of Serato; and Philip Mills, founder of Les Mills International, both with strong sustainability and climate focuses. Their headline policies include a land value tax and a citizen’s income alongside climate action and affordable housing. These are not cross-coded signals. They are left-coded signals with a centrist wrapper.

None of this is a criticism of the policies. A land value tax is good policy. So is a UBI-style citizen’s income, if any party manages to do actual tax-reform policy. But a voter in Tauranga or Tāmaki who might once have parked their vote with NZ First is not looking at that policy suite and thinking “this is my party.” Opportunity’s actual voter base is progressive voters who are dissatisfied with Labour and the Greens, not National voters looking for a more environmentally credible home. That is a real constituency. But it is not the cross-bloc base the kingmaker claim requires.

Peters’ leverage in 2017 and 2023 was credible because National genuinely did not know which way he would go, because his voters genuinely did not know either, and because his policy identity gave him structural reach in both directions. Opportunity’s funders, demographics, and policy suite tell a coherent story, but it is a story about a progressive minor party with a centrist brand, not a genuinely cross-bloc actor. The “keep National honest on the environment” line sounds like leverage. It is only leverage if National believes Wong can credibly walk away from a Labour deal and go right. Nothing in the current strategy suggests she can.

What Wong would actually need to do

To replicate the Peters model, Wong would need to either extend the timeline or compress the requirements. Extending the timeline means accepting that 2026 is a building election, winning Mt Albert, getting a toehold in Parliament, and spending the next three to six years deliberately cultivating a cross-coded voter base and policy identity before the real kingmaker play is available. That is the honest version of the strategy, and it has internal coherence.

Compressing the requirements is harder. To arrive at November with genuine cross-bloc leverage, Wong would need to do something that demonstrably costs her with her current voter base but gains her on the other side. That could be a specific policy position that draws right-leaning environmentally-minded voters, the kind of voter who used to park with National’s blue-green wing before the current government made that impossible. It could be a concrete signal that she is willing to give National something real in exchange for something real. It would need to be credible enough that National’s strategists start thinking about whether there is a deal to be had.

None of that is currently happening. The campaign is well-funded; Iain Lees-Galloway running the operation as general manager is a good appointment. The $500,000 war chest are real money by the party’s historical standards. But the structural requirements for kingmaker status are not fundraising requirements. They are voter-base and policy-identity requirements, and those take longer to build than a campaign cycle.

The wasted-vote trap and what it means for November

The more immediate question is whether Opportunity can break 5% at all. The wasted-vote trap is circular and well-documented: voters who like the party will not risk their vote on it if they do not believe it can win, which means it cannot win, which confirms their caution. Bryce Edwards, writing in The Democracy Project this week, puts Opportunity’s polling average for 2026 at around 2.3%, with a May 1News/Verian poll reaching 3.3%. Every party that has broken through into parliament under MMP has done so with a leader who was already a sitting MP.

On current polling, Labour is tracking between 34% and 37% depending on the pollster, which translates to roughly 42 to 46 seats. The Greens are around 11%, worth approximately 13 to 14 seats. Te Pāti Māori are at 2%, surviving on their electorate lifeline. That combination gets the left bloc to the government benches but without margin. A 5% Opportunity party sitting alongside Labour on confidence and supply changes that picture materially. A wasted 3% Opportunity vote drawn from the progressive end of the electorate does not come back to Labour. It disappears. That distinction matters, and it is why Labour’s current posture of deliberate distance from Opportunity is shortsighted even on pure electoral arithmetic. Assuming a wasted vote of around 5 to 6% from sub-threshold parties, Labour’s 34% gives them roughly 43 to 44 seats. At 37%, the figure rises to around 46. The assumption is worth stating because the seat count is sensitive to it.

The bottom line

Wong is not Winston Peters. Not yet and possibly not ever. The kingmaker model requires structural conditions that take years to build, and Opportunity has one of the four components at best. What Wong has is a genuine improvement on anything the party has previously managed, a serious campaign apparatus, and a political environment that is more favourable to a third-force insurgency than New Zealand has seen in a long time.

Whether that is enough to get to 5% in November is genuinely uncertain. Whether it is enough to be a kingmaker is a different question, and the answer is no, not this cycle.

But I’m in my final year of my PhD, with about seven months to get my thesis submitted, and I just can’t do both well. I started Less Certain to write more and write better. I have achieved that and I need to now use these skills to finish the thing I started Less Certain for in the first place.

I’ll be watching from the sidelines as this election year unfolds, which is going to be torture. There’s so much I want to dig into: how Opportunity’s strategy plays out, whether the Coalition holds together under pressure, what Labour’s rebuild actually looks like, how the Greens position themselves. All the dynamics we’ve been tracking are about to get stress-tested in real time, and I’ll be in my office writing my thesis for months instead of dissecting it all for you.

I’m unsure when I’ll be back. Thank you for reading, for engaging, for making this community what it is. It genuinely means everything.

See you on the other side.

Nat

Luxon looks exhausted.

I watched him on Breakfast this week with Tova O’Brien and what I saw was someone running on fumes, visibly fed up, going through the motions of reassurance without conviction behind it. He has been disorganised in his public crisis response, handing the economic framing entirely to Nicola Willis and Iran to Winston Peters. And then there is the reshuffle, ok, sure.

The reshuffle is hard to make sense of on any logic other than two things: punishing Chris Bishop for his alleged role in a failed coup in 2025, and filling the seats vacated by Judith Collins and Shane Reti. That was Luxon’s own explanation and on the Collins and Reti part, it’s true. But it does not explain what happened to Bishop. The official line, that he had too much on his plate, is total bull. You do not strip your highest performing minister of the campaign chair six months before an election because they are too busy. You do it because you no longer trust them.

Bishop’s rumoured role in a failed coup attempts late last year almost certainly had nothing to do with it, if you believe Luxon. Most political journalists do not. So, what did this reshuffle achieve beyond filling vacancies and settling internal scores? The honest answer is not much that the moment required. Meanwhile, Winston Peters is currently more visible on the international stage than the Prime Minister meeting with Marco Rubio in Washington while Luxon holds press conferences reassuring people not to hoard fuel. That should not happen. Not when Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran are all active conflicts reshaping the global economy in real time. Crisis moments require a visible head of government. What we have instead is a deputy filling the role.

So: is Luxon performing? No, I do not think he is.

And I will go further I do not think he makes it to November as leader of the National Party.

The polls released this week tell a more complicated story than the “National in trouble” narrative suggests. Yes, National is at 29.8% still below 30%, still well under its 2023 result. That number is genuinely bad for them as a party. But the coalition is projected at 65 seats. New Zealand First is at 13.6%, the highest it is recorded in this poll series since it started in 2021. That is Peters performing at its best and it is doing the coalition’s arithmetic for it.

Look at the preferred PM numbers alongside that: Hipkins leads at 26%, Luxon sits at 22%, and Peters who is technically a supporting coalition partner is at 13%. Luxon has never had a honeymoon and has never broken 25% as preferred PM. He is not the draw card. He is, at best, a neutral. And on issue ownership, the picture is worse: Labour now leads on cost of living, which is the single biggest voter concern a position that was National’s by default in 2023. The two parties are tied on the economy. National’s historic identity as the safe pair of hands has evaporated, and it has happened while they are in government. That is the real performance story, and it is ugly. It just does not tell you what it tells you about November.

This matters institutionally.

In our system, governments are built from coalitions, not parties, and certainly not individuals. A government can be durable even when its leading partner is struggling if the supporting partners are strong. Right now, NZF is surging, ACT is steady, and the opposition is not capitalising on any of its Labour is down, the Greens are down, Te Pāti Māori is down. The left bloc is sitting at 55 seats. On these numbers, the coalition wins in November regardless of what you think of Luxon personally.

So, the question is not really whether Luxon is performing. The question is whether National the party the institutional depth has to carry a government into an election year when its leader is visibly depleted. Because some National MPs in that government are performing. Nicola Willis has run the economic response to the Iran crisis with more coherence and discipline than anyone else in Cabinet. Erica Stanford has been consistently strong. Simeon Brown whatever you think of the politics behind giving him the energy portfolio has been competent and visible in the role. The Post named Bishop its 2025 Politician of the Year, calling him “the main character of New Zealand politics”. They are a talent bench. And right now, they are quietly holding the government’s credibility together while the leader finds the job harder than expected.

The Willis-Bishop dynamic is worth watching.

Bishop was sidelined the reshuffle made that clear enough, whatever the official explanation. That leaves Willis as the most visible and credible senior National figure now when the government needs exactly that. When you watch the media and Willis is doing the serious work while the PM does the reassurance rounds, you are watching a de facto redistribution of authority. Whether that becomes a formal one before November is the real leadership question not whether Luxon is tired.

Here is where I land. National is not performing well enough as a party to feel confident about November on its own numbers. But the government as a coalition is more durable than those numbers suggest. And the talent underneath Luxon is more capable than the coverage of Luxon implies.

Conflating the leader with the party leads you wrong in both directions. It made Luxon look stronger than he was when things were going smoothly. It makes National look weaker than it is now that things are not. The more useful question, six months from an election, is whether the party can successfully redistribute authority to its stronger performers before voters make the decision for them.

On current evidence, the people most likely to benefit from that redistribution are already doing the work. That is either reassuring or unsettling, depending on which side you are on.

There have been long press conferences with Nicola, Shane, and Chris. Anna Breman, the Governor of the Reserve Bank, was asked directly whether New Zealand was insulated from the war and said she didn’t know. Dr Geoffrey Miller, whose PhD is literally about New Zealand’s relations with the Gulf states, has been explaining the Strait of Hormuz across LinkedIn, radio, and the Democracy Project simultaneously. There are day-count trackers telling us how much fuel we have left. This is a lot to follow.

So, who is doing what, and how do the rest of us keep up?

The ministers

The Prime Minister has delegated the decision-making to his deputy, so the public face of this crisis has been Nicola Willis and Shane Jones. The minister formally responsible, Simon Watts, is largely absent. The architecture underneath is worth understanding, because it is less tidy than the press conferences suggest.

Nicola Willis | Finance Minister | The Crisis Manager in Someone Else’s Portfolio

Willis’s role has expanded well beyond what Finance Ministers normally do. She chairs the Fuel Security Ministerial Oversight Group, the group that decides whether New Zealand moves between the four fuel phases, with delegated Cabinet authority. She is co-ordinating public messaging and fronting joint press conferences with Shane Jones, often without the PM present.

The commentary has been unusually unanimous: she is across the detail, concerned without panicking, and thinking through several ways the crisis could go. One headline will probably define this period in political memory: “Can Christopher Luxon be more than Nicola Willis’ press secretary?”

There is one tension. Willis is being praised as a communicator, but is the policy behind the communication adequate? She has signalled that inflation could go significantly higher than current forecasts, while declining to share Treasury’s worst-case scenarios. She is reportedly operating without a clear central economic scenario from Treasury at all. That is genuine uncertainty about where this goes, and no amount of crispness resolves it.

Shane Jones | Associate Minister for Energy | The Plan Builder Who Cancelled the Plan

Jones is technically subordinate to Watts on energy, but in practice he designed the crisis response, cancelled the insurance policy that might have softened it, and is now fronting both.

Two years before the Iran war, New Zealand’s own officials warned the country was dangerously exposed to a diesel shortage and proposed a fix: 70 million litres of emergency storage in old crude tanks at Marsden Point, at a cost of $84 million. Jones cancelled it. His reason, in writing: too expensive. He acknowledged in the same document that New Zealand would remain vulnerable until at least 2028.

Whether that was reasonable fiscal caution or a catastrophic miscalculation depends entirely on when you’re making the judgement. In July 2024, with a tight budget and a coalition promise not to raise fuel taxes, declining an $84 million insurance policy against a low-probability risk was defensible. In April 2026, with petrol at $3.42 a litre, it looks like the most expensive saving this government ever made. Jones is now reportedly considering using regional development funds to buy the very storage he scrapped eighteen months ago.

On the data: Jones told reporters he had not seen “one single report” suggesting New Zealand would be caught short. But the crisis management framework relies on forecasts supplied by the fuel companies themselves, not independent government intelligence. His reassurance describes the architecture of the system he managed. It is not an independent verdict on the situation.

Simon Watts | Minister for Energy | The Minister on Paper

Watts holds the full energy portfolio. He is not, in any meaningful sense, running the energy crisis response. The Beehive’s own energy portfolio page lists Willis and Jones at the top of fuel-related releases. The four-phase Fuel Security Plan was developed by Jones and announced jointly by Willis and Jones. When RNZ needed a minister to discuss oil consumption data, they got Watts. When the country needed someone to explain the crisis framework, Willis and Jones turned up.

The response architecture has formed around him rather than through him. Whether that reflects a deliberate division of labour or something more uncomfortable is a question his government has not been asked loudly enough.

Christopher Luxon | Prime Minister | The Delegator-in-Chief

Luxon is technically running the country. The question this crisis has made unavoidable is whether he is running the response. The answer, structurally, is no and this appears to be by design. Willis chairs the crisis decision-making group with delegated Cabinet authority. Luxon has not chaired it. His most documented active intervention was changing the language from “alert levels” to “phases” so New Zealanders would not think of COVID.

On the day Willis announced the four-phase fuel security plan, Luxon was in Christchurch opening One New Zealand Stadium. The governance question is plain: is this a crisis, or isn’t it? If it is, where is the Prime Minister?

Who decides, with what data, and under what law?

The decision nobody is explaining

The minister who decides whether New Zealand moves between fuel phases is Nicola Willis. There are no automatic triggers. Even when specific criteria are met, like a recent three-day reduction in jet fuel stocks, that does not mean a phase change follows. What Willis is looking for is a “material worsening” of the overall supply situation: multiple signals assessed together, not any single threshold crossed in isolation.

That framing is reasonable, it prevents panic-driven escalation. But it also means the decision is inherently personal. “Material worsening” is Willis’s call, not a formula. What we do not know is what that explanation looks like in practice, how quickly it comes, and whose advice carries the most weight when the picture is genuinely ambiguous.

Where the numbers come from

The government publishes twice-weekly fuel stock figures measured in “days of cover”, how long current stocks would last if no new supply arrived at all. As of 29 March, New Zealand had 58.7 days of petrol, 52.2 days of diesel, and 46.2 days of jet fuel.

But roughly half of that total is still at sea. Of the petrol figure, only 29.3 days is physically in the country. Another 4.3 days is on ships already in New Zealand waters. The remaining 25.1 days is on ten ships still up to three weeks away. Whether it arrives depends on supply chains and geopolitical conditions that nobody fully controls.

Those numbers come primarily from the five companies that import fuel: Z Energy, BP, Mobil, Gull, and Tasman Fuels. The government cross-checks against shipping data but that is a check against the same supply chain, not an independent audit. The reassurances are only as good as the data being received.

The 44-year-old law

If the crisis escalates to Phases 3 or 4, the government’s ability to mandate restrictions, ration fuel, restrict driving, control distribution, depends on a piece of legislation from 1981: the Petroleum Demand Restraint Act. The Muldoon-era law that also gives the government the power to bring back carless days. It is still on the statute books.

The problem is the law was written for 1970s oil shocks, not a complex modern supply chain crisis. The trigger conditions are legally ambiguous, the government must show that “reasonably available supplies” are likely insufficient to maintain “normal prudent levels.” Nobody has defined what “normal prudent levels” means in 2026. Willis has confirmed the government is considering updating the legislation. It has not yet done so.

The broader framework also includes the Fuel Industry (Improving Fuel Resilience) Amendment Act 2023, the legislation that created the minimum stockholding obligations currently operating. That Act was passed under Labour. The current government is running a resilience framework it inherited, not one it designed.

What the COVID inquiry told us and why it matters now

The Royal Commission of Inquiry into COVID-19 released its final report on 10 March 2026. The Iran conflict began less than two weeks later. The lessons from our last major crisis, including specific recommendations about emergency powers, transparency, and the laws that govern them, were handed to the government while this crisis was still forming.

The commission recommended dedicated legislation clearly outlining the powers governments can use in a crisis, the conditions for using them, and the safeguards protecting transparency and human rights. It also recommended that an independent body monitor public trust and social cohesion during emergencies.

The RCOI’s lesson was not “governments shouldn’t act in a crisis.” It was: when governments act in a crisis, we need to know how and why and they need legal architecture that makes that legible.

The government is not operating under pandemic legislation right now. But the underlying democratic question is identical: when a government gains expanded powers over how citizens live, whether you can drive, whether you can buy fuel, what counts as a priority, what are the transparency obligations? Who reviews the decisions? Whose advice counts? The government changed “alert levels” to “phases” so New Zealanders would not think of COVID. The structural questions are the same regardless of what you call the levels.

The questions worth asking

None of this is to say the government is managing this badly. The fuel stock framework was largely built under Labour and is functioning. This government is running a system it inherited. Credit where it is due.

But “we’re not mismanaging it yet” is a low bar. Here are the things I think are still unanswered:

Willis is the sole decision-maker on moving between phases, applying a judgement call about “material worsening.” What does that explanation look like in practice, and how quickly will it come?

Jones cancelled an $84 million diesel reserve in 2024, knowing it left New Zealand exposed. He is now trying to buy it back. Who is accounting for that decision, and at what cost?

Phases 3 and 4 have published priority bands, from emergency services down to general retail. But who decides which band your business or community falls into, and what is the appeals process?

When will the government update the 1981 Petroleum Demand Restraint Act, the law it may need to use if this gets worse?

Complex systems favour insiders. To be clear, this is not corruption, it is how institutions work. When decision-making is distributed across multiple ministers, agencies, legislative frameworks, and industry relationships, the people who navigate it daily have an enormous informational advantage over everyone else. They know which minister chairs which group. They know the data comes from the companies being regulated. They know the law enabling rationing was written for a different century.

Most voters don’t know any of that, not because they’re not paying attention, but because the system doesn’t require them to. It requires them to trust. And trust, in a democracy, is supposed to be earned through transparency and accountability, not assumed because the numbers are still okay and the Finance Minister is across her brief.

That is the democratic stakes underneath this crisis. Not whether we run out of fuel. But whether the people making decisions on our behalf are visible enough to be held accountable for those decisions, before, during, and after the fact.

Less Certain is a weekly Substack on New Zealand politics, published every Friday at 6am. Written by Nat Albert Llorente.

Here is one reason it should be obvious: Anthropic is already a named signatory to the Christchurch Call, New Zealand’s own flagship international initiative to counter online terrorist content. DPMC records show Anthropic formally onboarded as a supporter in 2023–2024, alongside OpenAI, making them “major players in advanced AI” participating in a framework the New Zealand government helped build. We already have a relationship with this company. We just haven’t noticed what that relationship now implies politically.

I wrote about the naivety of New Zealand's approach to AI governance in Feburary Computers and Politics: We’re Having the Wrong Conversation. I want to return to it now, because the situation has escalated fast and the gap between what is happening offshore and what our political institutions are doing about it has become, in the space of a month, significantly harder to defend. I have spent the past two months using Claude (Chrome, Chat, Code and Cowork) daily for my PhD research, for this column, for understanding what it actually does. That is the lens I am writing from.

So, Anthropic and New Zealand politics, so what?

Our government is already using AI tools built on the same infrastructure to help run the country. One of them is called Paerata1. It started as a pilot programme, became permanent infrastructure inside Treasury and DPMC, and never became policy. Everything known about it has come through Official Information Act requests. There is no public-facing documentation anywhere on government websites.

By January 20262, DPMC was planning to use Paerata to draft New Year's Honours citations, processing nominees' health information, political involvements, and personal histories. They needed a special exemption to do it, because the government's own policy restricts AI use with personal data. The public found out through an OIA.

Anthopic, a private American technology company is now at the cold face of United States national security decision-making. It is refusing Pentagon demands. It is being designated a supply chain risk by the Trump administration. It is making judgements about mass surveillance and autonomous weapons that elected legislatures have not made.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei speaks to CBS News hours after the Pentagon designated his company a national security supply chain risk. February 28, 2026.

So what does our response look like? New Zealand’s National AI Strategy, released in July 2025, is framed primarily around economic opportunity. It reads like an investment prospectus. The government explicitly chose a light-touch approach: no AI-specific legislation, existing frameworks extended where needed, voluntary guidance for the public sector. New Zealand was, by the way, the last OECD member to publish a national AI strategy at all. As of late 2025, DPMC was still internally discussing whether leadership documents should include a checkbox disclosing AI use. Not implementing disclosure. Discussing whether to discuss it.

This is not as though the risk was invisible. New Zealand’s own National Security Strategy, published in 2023, explicitly identified AI as a national security issue, naming it an “amplify threats from both countries and criminals.” That was three years ago. The governance response since then has been a Public Service AI Framework that is not binding, a GenAI guidance document for public servants, and a toolkit of templates agencies are encouraged but not required to use. Three years on, the government's answer to a named national security risk is a toolkit nobody has to use. Sigh.

The easy interpretation is that New Zealand is simply behind. That framing lets our political class off the hook. The more accurate interpretation is that New Zealand made a judgement call: that the technology would move faster than any legislation could keep pace with, and that a permissive, principles-based approach was preferable to binding rules that might need constant revision. That judgement is understandable. It is also wrong and dangerous, and we now have evidence of exactly how it fails.

The Pentagon, Anthropic, and the last line of defence

In February 2026, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei a deadline. The Pentagon demanded unrestricted use of Claude for “all lawful purposes,” including mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons systems. Amodei refused. Trump ordered federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s products. Hegseth designated Anthropic a supply chain risk to national security3. A $200 million contract evaporated.

This is a hard limit. The US Congress has never passed legislation governing military AI use. The Department Of Defence sets its own policy on autonomous weapons. The phrase “all lawful purposes” has enormous teeth precisely because no law defines what lawful means in this context. Into that gap, the last line of defence between the US military and AI-enabled mass surveillance was a private company’s terms of service. When the government decided those terms were inconvenient, it called the company a security risk and contracted with a competitor instead.

Amodei wrote publicly that his company could not “in good conscience” grant the request, and that AI-driven mass surveillance “presents serious, novel risks to our fundamental liberties.” He also noted, with unusual candour, that mass surveillance of this kind is not clearly illegal. The law has simply not caught up with what is now technically possible.

That is a political and governance problem. And it did not appear suddenly. It was built, incrementally, by years of decisions to defer, to use principles rather than statute, to move fast and regulate later. The voluntary framework held until the moment it was tested by a government that did not feel bound by it.

The shift nobody explained to Parliament

There is a specific technical development that makes this more urgent, not less, and it has received almost no coverage in New Zealand political media. For the past two years, public conversation about AI has been organised around the chatbot. Useful, but dangerously narrow. The mental category most people have for AI is: a tool that answers questions. Again, send help!

That framing is now obsolete. Agentic AI is qualitatively different. These are systems that respond to prompts but take sequences of actions, make decisions across extended chains of tasks, and operate with degrees of autonomy that earlier systems did not have. A chatbot answers. An agent acts. Anthropic has been explicit about this development. Most legislatures, including ours, are still debating the chatbot.

This matters for NZ governance because the risks Hegseth was trying to exploit are agentic risks. Mass surveillance at scale requires a system that can not just retrieve data but cross-reference it, build profiles, and act on inferences, continuously, without human sign-off at each step. New Zealand’s Public Service AI Framework addresses none of this. It was written for a world of chatbots.

Bernie Sanders asked for a moratorium

Before the Pentagon clash became public, Senator Bernie Sanders sat down with Claude to discuss whether AI development should be paused. He asked the AI about privacy, about democracy, about whether a moratorium on new data centres was a reasonable demand. Claude answered thoughtfully. Its worth a listen below.

Senator Bernie Sanders asking the AI whether AI should be stopped. This is where liberal democracies are right now — and it's a problem.

But the image stays with me because it captures exactly where liberal democracies are. We are using the instruments of the previous era to interrogate something our institutions do not yet have the literacy to govern. The moratorium impulse is spot on. It also does not work, as the European Commission discovered when 46 major tech companies requested a two-year pause on the EU AI Act. The Commission declined. The Act is already experiencing implementation delays. Comprehensive AI legislation is hard to execute even when governments genuinely try.

The answer to that difficulty is not to stop trying. It is to build the institutional muscle to try properly.

New Zealand has said nothing

In October 2024, New Zealand signed a Five Country Ministerial communiqué4 alongside Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The communiqué included a dedicated section on AI and national security. The five countries committed to aligning their AI governance frameworks and ensuring “shared democratic values shape international standards and governance for AI.”

One of those five partners just tried to conscript a private AI company into building mass domestic surveillance infrastructure. New Zealand’s response, on the public record, is silence. The commitment New Zealand made in 2024 implied a willingness to say something when the framework being built together was violated. What it revealed instead is that our AI governance posture is built for a world of stable allied consensus, not for a world in which one of those allies is actively working against the democratic values the communiqué described.

What this requires

The oversimplification that most threatens New Zealand politics in 2026 is not a lie. It is the quiet, reasonable-sounding assumption that managing AI is a technical and economic challenge, best handled through voluntary guidance and OECD principles, by officials who are trying hard and mean well or have yet to enageg with it. It worries me.

It is that assumption, not any single policy failure, that leaves us without the institutional vocabulary to respond when the situation demands it. Paerata has a human-in-the-loop principle and no public documentation. The NZ Defence Capability Plan does not mention AI governance. The Cyber Security Strategy, published the same week Hegseth was threatening Anthropic, frames AI primarily as a threat that comes from outside. And DPMC is still debating whether to add a disclosure checkbox to leadership documents.

Nobody in our political system is publicly asking what happens when the threat is not external. When it is the gap between what our closest ally’s government is now willing to do, and the frameworks we built together assuming they would not. That question is not too complex for New Zealand politics. It is exactly the kind of question our political institutions exist to answer. The problem is that nobody is answering it.

Here is the structural version of Hipkins drama. The Left Bloc is running on fumes. Every public poll since 2023 tells the same story: Labour cannot govern without both the Greens and Te Pāti Māori. A list of policies is not a coalition or good campaign strategy. It leaves zero room for any of those relationships to deteriorate, any of those parties to have a bad campaign, or any of those numbers to move in the wrong direction on election night. Meanwhile, The Opportunity Party sits below the 5% threshold, with no electorate lifeboat. Every one of those votes disappears entirely. That is a structural hole no amount of leader resilience fills.

The question worth asking is why Labour has allowed that hole to persist. Labour has spent thirty years operating on a single strategic principle inherited from the first MMP election: never commit to a coalition partner before the votes are counted. Never signal. Never endorse. Keep every option open and let the numbers decide. That doctrine made some sense in 1996, when Winston Peters held the balance of power and chose National against most predictions. It has calcified into a systematic refusal to build the coalition architecture that MMP requires.

The clearest evidence that this is a chronic failure, not a current-cycle one, is what Peter Dunne published last month. A careful, thoughtful piece arguing that the Governor-General should play a more active role in government formation, specifically to stop NZ First from playing the two main parties off against each other. His proposed fix: the Governor-General formally invites the largest party to attempt to form a government first, and if that fails, passes the invitation to the second largest. It is a procedurally clean solution to a problem that, Dunne notes, has recurred in 1996, 2017, and 2023.

If this were a problem that Labou’s coalition strategy had ever seriously addressed, Dunne would not need to write that piece. The fact that he does — thirty years in — is proof that no one in a position to fix it has tried. And the reason no one has tried is that the ambiguity is not incidental to Labour and National’s strategies. It is the feature that makes Peters possible in the first place. Both major parties prefer a post-election negotiation they can control to a pre-election commitment they cannot walk back. Peters is the cost of that preference. Dunne wants a smarter referee. But you do not need a smarter referee if the players have already agreed on the rules before the game starts.

His solution addresses the symptom. The disease is that New Zealand never developed the coalition culture that MMP requires and Labour, more than any other party, has actively chosen not to build it.

What this means for Hipkins

The Hipkins story lands the way it does because Labour has given the press gallery nothing else to cover. There is no coalition offer to analyze. There is no pre-election transparency about who would govern with whom. There is no structural argument about what a center-left government would look like or who it would include. There is a leader, his personal situation, and a caucus trying to manage the fallout. When a party’s entire public architecture is a single person’s credibility, every threat to that person becomes an existential threat to the party’s electoral prospects.

The standard Labour is failing

The 1986 Royal Commission that recommended MMP was explicit: its value lay in giving voters more meaningful choice and more accountability over who governs them. Post-election deals negotiated in private for weeks after voting closes sit uncomfortably with that intent. The letter of the report does not require pre-election transparency. The spirit of it demands it. That is the democratic standard Labour is failing.

None of this is an argument about whether Hipkins should stay. He is entitled to be judged on his record, not his marriage, and the media ethics questions raised by how a deleted private Facebook post became a national news story in 48 hours are worth examining. But they are a distraction from what matters this election year.

It’s not a bad question. Whether Luxon leaves matters. The poll matters. But I want to argue that every time we stop there, at the number, at the leadership drama, we miss something. We miss quite a lot, actually.

So let’s unpack it

Before I go further, I want to flag that Bryce Edwards has done the forensics on who is actually behind these numbers, who commissioned what, who funds whom, and why the media’s reporting standards are embarrassingly inconsistent. That piece is worth your time.

The Democracy Project

Democracy Briefing: The Hidden politics behind NZ’s opinion polls

Friday’s Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll was a political earthquake. National at 28.4%. Christopher Luxon’s net favourability in freefall. The centre-left, for the first time in this polling series, able to form a government on the numbers. Senior figures in the National Party reportedly told the Prime Minister to go home for the weekend and seriously consider whether he was the right person to lead them into November…

Read more

6 months ago · 37 likes · 13 comments · Bryce Edwards

What I want to do here is something different. I want to look at what happens after the poll lands and why the conversation we have in response to it is so much smaller than it should be.

Polls shape political reality

Its called the bandwagon effect: the tendency for people to update their own views in the direction of whatever the polls say the majority thinks. It identifies three ways polls induce conformity: people want to be on the winning team, people assume the crowd knows something they don't, and people resolve cognitive dissonance by switching to whoever looks like they're winning. A poll that triggers a leadership crisis may contribute to the very collapse in confidence it was measuring.

When voters see 28.4%, they absorb it and make it gospel. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu1 went further, arguing that polls don't discover public opinion at all, they produce it. The act of asking millions of people whether they approve of a leader manufactures a discrete, measurable opinion on a question most of them had never consciously formed before. On this reading, the poll reflects the political landscape and actively shapes it. Which means when we ask whether Luxon should go because the polls say so, we are in part responding to a political reality the polls themselves helped construct. Regardless if that is true or not.

And what has that constructed reality produced?

One question, repeated across every outlet, every panel, every dinner table conversation this week. Will he go?

Even if Luxon goes, less changes than you think

Let’s say the caucus moves. Let’s say there’s a new face at the podium by April. What actually changes? Really? Let’s say it’s Erica, or Nicola, or Chris? Will that transform anything substantial or structural?

A National leadership change does not reset the coalition architecture. Luxon leads a three-party government. ACT and NZ First are independent power centers with their own electorates, their own brand, and their own survival imperatives going into November. A new National leader inherits those relationships and doesn’t get to renegotiate them from scratch. If anything, a mid-term leadership change destabilizes them. Peters and Seymour would immediately start recalibrating their leverage.

Then there’s everything else that doesn’t change. The existing coalition agreements. The budget cycle already in motion. The policy commitments already locked in, the regulatory reforms, the public service restructuring, the Roads of National Significance programme. The institutional machinery of this government keeps running regardless of who stands at the podium. What changes is just a name and a face. What doesn’t change is the direction or the institutions that drive the direction.

This is also worth remembering: in New Zealand we don’t vote for individuals at the national level. We vote for parties. The leader is not the government. The party and its coalition commitments are. Our fixation on individual politicians as the primary unit of political analysis is analytically shallow, and it actively obscures where power actually sits and how it actually operates. Leadership drama is compelling. It is also one of the smallest parts of the political picture. And the more space it takes up, the less room there is for the questions that actually matter.

The problem is what we’re not even imagining

When a bad poll drops, the entire political conversation collapses into one question. The leadership question. And while everyone is watching that drama, nobody is asking the harder one. What would a genuinely different political offer actually look like? What would it take to govern differently?

Last week, I published a piece on what a Labour and Opportunities Party pre-election coalition could look like, the structural complementarity between a capital gains tax and a land value tax, the MMP arithmetic that makes it viable, and the case for Labour signaling coalition intent before the election rather than after. The comments I got were revealing. Some readers couldn’t hold the hypothetical at all. The framing kept collapsing back into “but TOP isn’t polling well enough” or “Labour would never do that.” Which are answers to a different question. The question I was asking is whether the architecture makes sense. Whether the political imagination exists to even try.

It doesn’t, right now. And I think poll obsession is part of why

When we train ourselves to think in terms of who’s up, who’s down, who’s in, who’s out, we lose the capacity to think structurally think of the broader system that matters so much. We lose the ability to ask what a creative, coalition-aware opposition strategy would actually look like. We let everyone off the hook. National waits out the storm. Labour watches the numbers without building anything. Minor parties stay in permanent limbo. The media refreshes the leadership drama. Nobody has to do the harder work of imagining what change requires because the poll cycle keeps supplying a simpler story.

This is not just analytically incomplete. It has a real cost. Votes fall below threshold and disappear. Coalition possibilities that could shift the arithmetic never get tested because nobody dares name them before election night. The conversation we need to have about what governing differently actually means gets crowded out by a question that, even when it resolves, resolves into very little.

So watch the polls. But watch what they’re doing to the conversation too

Whether Luxon survives the next month matters. I’m not dismissing it. But the leadership question is the smallest possible version of the change question, and we keep treating it like it’s the whole thing.

The number tells us the public has lost confidence in this government’s direction. That’s significant. But it doesn’t tell us whether the opposition has a plan, whether the coalition architecture exists to do something different, or whether any of the actors with the power to change things are thinking beyond the next poll.

Those are the questions that actually determine what happens after 7 November. Right now, nobody is being asked to answer them. And that is a problem the polls will never show us.

I have some exciting news to share with this beautiful community — you made this possible. Starting now, I'll be appearing regularly on RNZ Nights with Emile Donovan every other Thursday at 8:30pm, talking politics. And Less Certain will now be published weekly on interest.co.nz. None of this happens without you. Thank you, genuinely, from the bottom of my heart.

A Labour and Opportunities Coalition.

Not a confidence-and-supply shrug after the votes are counted. A committed, campaigning partnership, two parties with complementary policies, running together from today, telling New Zealand exactly what they’d do if they won.

The numbers: where both parties actually stand

Before the argument, the reality check.

The most recent polls, taken in January and February 2026, tell a stark story. Labour is tracking between 30% and 37% depending on the pollster the Freshwater Strategy has them at 37%, Roy Morgan at 30%, the average across five polls sits around 33%. That puts Labour ahead of National in some polls and neck-and-neck in others. A win is possible. It is not guaranteed.

Opportunity is polling between 1% and 4%. Roy Morgan’s February poll their most generous put them at 4%. The Curia poll in early February had them at 1.4%. The RNZ/Reid Research January poll: 2.3%. In every single major poll this year, Opportunity is below the 5% MMP threshold. As it has been in every election they have run. Because we are doing MMP all wrong, talking to you Chris Luxon and Chris Hipkins.

Here’s what the numbers mean in practice. Under MMP, 120 seats are up for grabs. You need 61 to govern. Labour at 33% wins roughly 40 seats. Add the Greens at around 11%, and that’s roughly 53–54 seats. That’s short. The gap between a Labour-led government and another term of Luxon is, right now, about 7–8 seats. Opportunity at 5% is worth 6 seats. Opportunity at 7% is worth 8–9 seats. Those numbers are not coincidental.

This is not a philosophical question about the future of the centre-left. It’s a seat-count question with a very clear answer about what could be possible if Hipkins came out today with Q and announced a strategy to create a coalition government.

Why Labour won’t do it, and why that’s the problem

The short answer is: because they never have. And in New Zealand political culture, that’s almost sufficient reason on its own.

MMP was supposed to produce transparent, pre-election coalitions. Voters would know before they voted what combinations were on offer. Parties would campaign honestly about who they’d govern with and on what terms. That was the theory. What actually developed was something different, a set of informal norms that treat post-election negotiation as the only legitimate form of coalition-building, and pre-election commitment as either naive or strategically reckless.

The trauma that shaped those norms has a name: Winston Peters, 1996. The first MMP election. NZ First held the balance of power, spent weeks negotiating with both sides, and then, against most predictions, went with National. The left learned a lesson that calcified into doctrine: never commit early, never narrow your options, never let a minor party extract pre-election concessions you can’t take back. Keep everything fluid until the votes are counted.

That lesson made some sense in 1996. It has governed Labour’s coalition strategy for thirty years, and it no longer makes sense at all.

Here’s how it actually plays out. In the year before an election, Labour’s internal culture treats any explicit endorsement of a minor party as a tactical liability on three simultaneous fronts. First, the credibility problem: if you back Opportunity and Opportunity doesn’t cross 5%, you’ve publicly staked credibility on a party that just handed its votes to nobody. Second, the activist problem: Labour’s base has a decades-long relationship with the Greens. This alliance is not working Post-Woke era and Post-Shaw era. Signaling preference for a different partner is read internally as a betrayal, and Labour’s caucus is not immune to its own activist pressure. Third, and this is the one that drives strategists genuinely mad, the vote-splitting problem: every vote Labour tells someone to give Opportunity is a vote Labour doesn’t get itself.

The result is a political culture of studied vagueness.

We’ll work with whoever the voters give us. We’re focused on winning. We’ll see what the numbers say on election night. It sounds reasonable. It’s actually a strategy for ensuring that the left bloc never operates coherently, that minor parties live in permanent uncertainty about whether they’re wanted, and that voters never get to make an informed choice about what coalition they’re actually voting for.

What nobody in Labour wants to say out loud: the vagueness isn’t neutral. Refusing to endorse Opportunity doesn’t help Labour. It helps National, by keeping Opportunities numbers low enough to waste, by keeping the left bloc fragmented, by ensuring that affordability voters who’d love an alternative to the Greens don’t know where to go.

This is how things usually go. Labour plays it safe. TOP limps along at 2.5%. Votes disappear below threshold. Labour falls a handful of seats short. National forms another government. Everyone agrees that MMP is complicated and moves on.

The only question is whether 2026 is the year someone decides that’s not good enough.

What does a different political strategy look like

Opportunities problem is their visibility and their funding, things that a Labour endorsement could deliver overnight. Opportunity provide a different way of doing MMP, a more mature, creative one.

There is a well-established pattern in New Zealand MMP politics: when a major party signals that a minor party is a legitimate, welcome coalition partner, the minor party’s numbers move. When Labour under Ardern explicitly supported the Greens in 2020, Green numbers held. When Peters got a wink from both major parties in 2017, NZ First surged. Endorsement from a credible major party is the single most powerful lever a minor party has.

If Labour publicly committed to governing with Opportunity from today, joint press conferences, shared platforms, explicit endorsement of Opportunity land value tax as the structural complement to Labour’s CGT, Opportunity’s numbers would move. Conservatively, a 2–3 point bump is achievable. Voters who are currently backing the Greens out of tactical habit, voters who are undecided, voters who have been waiting to see if Opportunity is real: these are the voters who move when a major party says we want this partner.

A credible bump puts Opportunity from 2.5% to 5–5.5%. That’s the threshold. That’s Parliament. That’s 6 seats Labour doesn’t have to find anywhere else.

And here is the other side of that equation, the one nobody in Labour seems to have done the arithmetic on: every vote for the Opportunities Party that disappears below threshold is a vote the left bloc needed and didn’t get. Labour needs to stop being indifferent to whether Opportunity survives and have the vision to see that if the Opportunity Party success is Labour’s success.

The policy case: why these two fit together

Labour’s capital gains tax is deliberately narrow. 28% on investment and commercial property, not the family home, not KiwiSaver, not farms, not businesses. Revenue ring-fenced for three free GP visits. Chris Hipkins has framed it as “simple and targeted,” and he means it: this is a policy designed to survive an election campaign, not to restructure the tax system.

Opportunity is proposing something structurally different: a land value tax on urban residential land, paired with a $15,000 tax-free income threshold and a citizen’s income, a regular payment to every adult, roughly equivalent to the current Jobseeker benefit, replacing most benefit classes and eliminating the welfare trap that currently punishes people for taking on work.

These are not the same policy. They’re not competing policies. They’re complementary and the fact that no one in either party is saying this out loud is one of the most frustrating features of this election year.

A capital gains tax discourages speculation. It taxes the windfall when an asset changes hands at a profit. But it does nothing about land that sits there accumulating value while its owner does absolutely nothing because there’s no sale, there’s no taxable event. That’s the gap. A land value tax closes it. It creates an ongoing cost to holding unproductive land. The incentive shifts: use it, develop it, or sell it to someone who will.

A CGT without an LVT taxes the transaction but not the accumulation. An LVT without a CGT taxes the holding but not the windfall. You need both if you’re serious about a tax system that stops systematically favouring those whose wealth comes from owning things over those whose wealth comes from doing things.

Labour gets its politically palatable CGT as the headline the thing you can explain at a barbecue, the thing that polls well enough to survive a campaign. Opportunity gets a land value tax as the structural reform underneath. Labour says “we’re taxing speculators.” Opportunity party says “we’re shifting the tax base.” Both say “affordability.” For the first time in decades, New Zealand taxes not just the income people earn through work, but the wealth that accumulates through ownership.

The overlaps go beyond tax

Both parties want to redirect investment from property into the productive economy. TOP’s Productivity Unleashed policy uses a land value tax to push capital toward business investment and away from land-banking. Labour’s CGT reduces the relative attractiveness of property speculation. They’re running the same play from different angles.

Both support compulsory KiwiSaver with higher contributions. Both want serious action on supermarket and banking monopolies Opportunity explicitly calls for a strengthened Commerce Act to rein in sectors making record profits while ordinary Kiwis cut household budgets. Labour has been saying the same thing for years. A governing partner who lists it as a priority changes that calculus.

Neither party requires the other to abandon a single position. They require each other to notice that their positions fit together.

What the deal looks like from today

The Opportunities Party campaigns hard for the party vote. Labour doesn’t contest Opportunity best electorate prospects. Both parties release a joint policy statement not a full coalition agreement, but a clear public commitment to the areas where they will govern together. Voters know what they’re getting before they vote, not after.

This is the reform that MMP was supposed to enable and that New Zealand has almost never actually used. Pre-election commitments. Transparent coalitions. A mandate from voters, not a backroom deal. The 2026 election is the chance to do this properly.

Q Wong has already said no one is being bold enough on tax. She’s right. Hipkins has said he wants the CGT simple and targeted. He’s also right. Both of those things are true at the same time, and they’re true because they’re describing different parts of the same problem.

The only question left

Labour’s caution on tax is understandable. The CGT is already a target. But here’s why the “it gives National an attack line” argument fails: Opportunity is a separate party. Labour doesn’t have to own the LVT, they govern alongside a party that does. A voter can back Labour’s CGT and also back TOP’s LVT, and both things can be true without Labour putting a land value tax on its own hoarding. This is exactly what coalition government is for.

Land value tax has been the reform New Zealand keeps almost having for a hundred years. We abolished ours in 1990 and haven’t been back. The politics are hard. But the context has changed: housing unaffordability has reached a level of crisis that makes structural reform not just defensible but demanded. Voters who laughed at land value tax in 2011 are now renting in their forties with no prospect of ownership. The political risk calculus has shifted.

doesn’t buy it. In theory the system is progressive, he argues, but in practice it loads an unusually heavy burden on the poorest New Zealanders, through a GST that applies to virtually everything and makes up 30% of the total tax take, nearly double the OECD average1. No tax-free threshold. A top marginal rate that’s low by international standards. And no tax at all on the capital gains that flow overwhelmingly to the wealthiest.

Rob Salmond’s analysis put the numbers on it: the poorest pay just under 30% of their income in tax, the richest pay 34% and that’s before you count the untaxed capital gains that would almost certainly tip the wealthy below the poor.

Craig Renney, for years the CTU’s chief economist, has been saying the same thing with less patience: most New Zealanders pay tax on every dollar they earn, while the wealthiest pay nothing on large parts of their economic income.2

Renney is now Labour’s candidate for Wellington Bays, and his recently published book The Good Economy lays out a left-wing agenda for tax reform. The man who spent years arguing the system wasn’t fair is now running for the party that had six years to fix it and didn’t.

Which brings us to Grant Robertson. As Finance Minister, Robertson never quite defended the system as progressive, he consistently framed it as needing to be “fairer.” He extended the bright-line test, ring-fenced rental losses, aligned the trust rate with the top personal rate. Incremental moves. Then Ardern killed the capital gains tax and Robertson had to sell that too.

In his valedictory speech, freed from the constraints of office, he finally said what everyone already knew: New Zealand needs a wealth tax or a broader capital gains tax. As it stands, the system exacerbates inequality. Jack Tame’s response wrote itself: if only they’d been in government for six years.

So who’s right? Is our tax system progressive or isn’t it? The answer, as with most things in this country’s political discourse, depends entirely on what you’re willing to count.

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The Reality Behind the Rates

Most of us pay tax the old-fashioned way, it comes straight out of our wages before we even see it. That's where the bulk of the government's income tax revenue comes from: people who work for a living. But the system doesn't treat all income the same. If you make money by selling a property for more than you paid for it, and you're outside the bright-line test, you pay nothing. Not a reduced rate. Nothing. The biggest way New Zealanders build wealth isn't even visible to the tax system.

Here’s a concrete example: a senior doctor earning $200,000 through their labor will pay roughly $58,000 in income tax, an effective rate of about 29%3. Meanwhile, someone making the same $200,000 through property capital gains outside the bright-line test pays nothing. Zero. The bright-line test itself only captures property sold within specific timeframes (currently two years for all residential property, following changes on 1 July 2024), meaning patient investors can accumulate wealth entirely tax-free.

How We Got Here: The Historical Unravelling

This wasn't always our approach. New Zealand's tax system looked very different just a few decades ago, and understanding that shift reveals a set of deliberate choices about what we tax and what we don't.

In 1992, we abolished death duties (estate tax). Before that, inherited wealth over certain thresholds was taxed, ensuring that accumulated capital contributed to public revenue when passed between generations. The abolition was framed as helping ordinary families keep the family home, but the primary beneficiaries were large estates.

Before 1990, we had a land tax. Introduced in 1878, it became a tool specifically designed to break up large landholdings and ensure that unearned increases in land value contributed to public revenue. It worked until it was repealed in the name of “simplification” and “efficiency.” What we lost was a mechanism for capturing value increases that landowners did nothing to create.

The top income tax rate has also steadily declined. In the 1980s, the top marginal rate was 66%. It dropped to 33% by 1989, stayed there for decades, and only recently climbed to 39%. Even our current “top” rate is historically modest, and it only kicks in at $180,000, hardly capturing the truly wealthy.

We’ve had at least three serious attempts at introducing a capital gains tax: in 1989, 2011, and 2019. Each failed, often using the same arguments about complexity and fairness that conveniently ignored how we were already creating unfairness by not taxing capital gains.

The Land Tax Question

Of all the tools we’ve dismantled or rejected, land tax might be the most compelling for addressing our current inequities. And TOP agrees.

Land tax works differently from other wealth taxes. You can’t hide land. You can’t move it offshore. You can’t claim it doesn’t exist. The value of land is largely created by public investment, infrastructure, schools, transport networks, not by the landowner’s effort. When land values increase, it’s typically because of what society built around it, not what the owner did to it.

Here is how TOP defines it:

A land value tax (LVT) makes housing affordable by shifting the tax load off working people and onto land. The tax applies to land only (not any buildings on that land) and for ‘land rich, cash poor’ Kiwis like farmers and retirees, exceptions and deferrals will apply.

An LVT encourages high-density housing and discourages urban sprawl, land-banking or large rental property portfolios, which helps force down house and rent prices. It also retools our economy for innovation and production, instead of rent-seeking and paper profits. This will help drive real economic growth, by redirecting investment away from housing and towards business.

Henry George made this case in 1879, arguing that land value increases represent the community's investment and should be returned to the community. New Zealand was already ahead of him our original land tax predates Progress and Poverty by a year, but George's ideas turbocharged the Liberal reforms of the 1890s that turned that tax into a tool for breaking up large estates. So New Zealand was a pioneer in this, not just a follower.

has been making this argument for over fifteen years. Back in 2011, he was writing on interest.co.nz that Labour should introduce a land tax alongside a capital gains tax. By 2016, he was calling it "long overdue" in the Herald. In 2018, he laid out the case in Newsroom that a land tax was the clearest path to reform, given how heavily we already tax workers, companies, and consumers. By 2022, he'd distilled it to a single line in The Spinoff: "all roads lead to a land tax." And when Hipkins ruled out a capital gains tax "in his political lifetime" in 2023, Hickey called it what it was a complete victory for property-owning median voters and a disaster for everyone else. Through The Kākā, he's been relentless: our tax system makes leveraged investment in residential land vastly more profitable and vastly less risky than investing in actual businesses, and until we fix that, nothing changes. He's right. And the fact that he's been right for fifteen years while nothing has moved tells you everything about who our tax system is designed to protect.

The Kākā by Bernard Hickey

All roads lead to a land tax

TLDR: We’re discovering all over again how hard it is to go cold turkey on our economy’s addictions to imported low-wage labour and leveraged-and-tax-free gains on residential land price appreciation…

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4 years ago · 60 likes · 91 comments · Bernard Hickey

A well-designed land tax could shift our tax burden from income (which we want to encourage) to land value (which exists regardless of productivity). It could discourage land banking and speculation. It could make productive use of land more attractive than simply holding it for capital gains.

The political toxicity of land tax fascinates me. It’s often painted as an attack on homeowners, but this conflates the home, which is what most people actually care about, with the land value underneath it, which increases passively through population growth, infrastructure investment, and zoning decisions the owner had nothing to do with. Every time a land tax gets proposed, the conversation immediately jumps to farmers being forced off their land and retirees being taxed out of their homes. These are real design questions, not deal-breakers, other countries manage them through thresholds, deferrals, and exemptions. But they dominate the debate because they’re emotionally powerful.

What never gets the same airtime is the cost of not taxing land. Young families priced out of housing because speculation is more profitable than building. Productive businesses carrying the full weight of income tax while untaxed capital gains compound quietly in the background. A growing divide between those who got into the property market at the right time and those who didn’t not because of effort or talent, but timing and luck.

The GST Complication

Then there’s GST, our tax hero. At 15%, the rate itself sits below the OECD average of around 19%. But NZ collects the among the highest GST revenue as a share of GDP in the OECD because unlike most countries, we have almost no exemptions. Unlike Australia, which exempts fresh food, or the UK, which zero-rates most groceries, New Zealand charges GST on almost everything. But simplicity isn’t the same as fairness.

According to IRD, those at the bottom, earning less than $356 a week, are spending between 11% and 14% of their income on GST. Top income earners? Between 6% and 8%. The consumption tax that's supposed to treat everyone equally hits hardest at the bottom. We've built a tax system that heavily relies on taxing consumption while barely touching wealth accumulation.

We collected about $26 billion in GST in the 2023 tax year. That’s nearly as much as we collected from all personal income tax in the lowest three brackets combined. We’ve built a tax system that heavily relies on taxing consumption while barely touching wealth accumulation.

What the Numbers Tell Us

Looking at New Zealand’s tax composition tells a story. Roughly 51% of government revenue comes from taxes on individuals, 25% from GST, and about 16% from corporate tax.4 But capital gains on property? Largely untaxed. Inherited wealth? Untaxed. Land value increases? Untaxed.

If you earn your income through wages, you’re paying an effective tax rate north of 20%. But IRD’s own research — the High-Wealth Individuals project commissioned by David Parker in 2023 — found that 311 of New Zealand’s wealthiest families, with a median net worth of $106 million, paid a median effective tax rate of just 9.4%. Treasury estimated that a comparable middle-wealth New Zealander was paying 20.2%. The difference isn’t effort or cleverness. It’s that most of the wealthy families’ income came from capital gains that our system doesn’t touch.

The Deeper Question

This makes me wonder about our national mythology around taxation. We tell ourselves we have a progressive system where the wealthy pay more. But we’ve designed a system that taxes effort more than advantage, work more than wealth, productivity more than property.

Whether that structure is right or wrong depends on your political philosophy. But we should at least be honest about what it is: a system that comprehensively taxes income from labour while providing multiple shelters for income from capital.

The next time someone tells you our tax system is progressive, ask them: progressive compared to what? To our own history, when we taxed estates and land? To the actual distribution of economic gains in New Zealand? Or just progressive in the narrow sense that wage tax rates increase with wage income, while ignoring all the other ways wealth accumulates untaxed?

Sometimes the most clarifying questions aren’t about whether a policy is good or bad, but about whether it actually does what it claims to do. Our tax system claims to be progressive. Whether it truly is depends entirely on how you make your money.

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Read Part I: The Machinery of Government

We are ten months out from the election on the 7th of November, and its the time in the cycle where our politicians and political parties have well and truly divided their attention into two racetracks.

The first racetrack is the campaign

They start competing for your votes in earnest. They do this still in a very much first-past-the-post format where parties campaign as though they will govern alone, with very little acknowledgement that once they are elected thy wont be able to deliver on any of those policies alone, or without serious compromise. Their understanding of what coalition governance actually requires is totally absent.

The second racetrack is the governing

Where, for the Parties in an actual coalition government, they still need to at least pretend they are governing a country, while aiming to get on racetrack number one.

If you work in the public service, the split is painfully obvious. You start to lose ministers’ attention on policy; their interest becomes laser-sharp on the campaign and election day. It’s annoying.

So, for the jarred, confused, and utterly burnt-out voter, you need to keep track of both, and it’s all chaotic, a bit Mickey Mouse, and more than a little bit underwhelming. So, buckle up!

On the governance side, the top-tier headlines right now are the move-on orders for homelessness in Auckland, the resurgence of the pay equity bill, the absolute clusterfuck of the sewage infrastructure at Moa Point here in Wellington, the usual revolving door of overpriced housing, rotting infrastructure, transport, health, climate. That’s your policy top table as of the 26th of February. There’s more going on, but that’s what a headline scan gives you today.

And then there’s the state of the nations.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about National and Labour and how incredibly underwhelming they were. Both pitched to the Auckland Business Chamber, which tells us everything about their focus and positioning. I’m not going to revisit them here. Instead, I want to talk about three smaller parties: ACT, the NZ Alliance Party, and the Opportunity Party, because why not? And also so you dont have to.

Last week I argued that institutional literacy is the missing skill in our political conversation. This ability to be able to read both the formal register (the policies, the legislation, the announcements) and the informal one (the cultures, the relationships, the institutional memory that actually determines what gets implemented). I said I’d be applying that lens all year. So here we are.

ACT: Institutionally Literate, Ideologically Narrow

David Seymour delivered ACT’s state of the nation at Rydges Latimer in Christchurch on Valentine’s Day weekend, to around 200 supporters, with about 30 protesters outside. The speech was titled “Telling It Like It Is,” which is whatevs! I have zero interest in the campaign marketing side of politics.

I’ll give Seymour credit for something the other leaders I’m covering today lack: he knows how the machine works, and his speech showed it. He ran an inventory of what ACT ministers have done inside government, school lunch savings, Waikato Medical School cost reduction, Pharmac consent times halved, court hearings 20 percent faster, passports issued in record time, ram raids down 85 percent. He named each ACT minister and connected them to specific outcomes in specific agencies. Whether you agree with his framing or not, and I have reservations about several of these, the man can point to institutional levers his party has pulled and describe the results. He’s reading the informal register, not just the formal one. Few politicians can do this well.

His five “warning lights on the dashboard” were productivity stagnation, the government deficit, democratic decline globally, the national identity crisis around Te Tiriti, and a generation that can’t make the numbers add up. And his headline campaign policy: no more than 20 ministers all sitting in cabinet, no more than 30 departments, each answering to one minister, no minister holding a portfolio without a department, tells me he gets how the Beast works. He pointed out that MBIE alone currently answers to 17 ministers. This is structural analysis grounded in institutional knowledge. I respect that.

But here’s where I part ways. Seymour’s institutional literacy is real, but it’s narrow. He understands the architecture of the state, but his diagnosis of why it fails is relentlessly ideological. His framing of the country as divided between “change makers” and those building a “majority for mediocrity” is exactly the kind of binary that flatters an audience while explaining fuck all! His treatment of Te Tiriti as a “disaster” and his characterisation of Te Pāti Māori’s aspirations as akin to “former Prince Andrew syndrome” is disgusting. And the line about ACT’s “first mission” being to keep Labour, the Greens, and Te Pāti Māori out of power tells you that for all his administrative competence, this is still a campaign built on scapegoating. He just picks different scapegoats than the left does.

The deeper issue is that Seymour’s vision of institutional reform is entirely about size and cost. Smaller cabinet. Fewer departments. Less spending. It’s a managerial fix applied to what is fundamentally a relational problem, the gap between the people at the top of the accountability system and the people living complex lives at the bottom.

Which brings me to a useful counterpoint.

This week at the Capital City Complex Systems Symposium 2026 here in Wellington, Sir Bill English, former National Prime Minister, former Minister of Finance, now running Impact Lab, gave a keynote on systems thinking about the public system. English is someone who has sat exactly where Seymour aspires to sit, at the very top of the accountability system, seeing more data flow than anyone. And his conclusion isn’t that government needs to be smaller. It’s that government needs to learn.

English described running organisations that support around 10,000 chronically disabled households through a policy he calls “accidentally brilliant”, giving people control of their own budgets. He told the story of a quadriplegic man who was offered depression medication when he entered the system, and who responded that for 30 years he hadn’t been able to choose who provided his most intimate care. When he got that choice, the depression lifted. Not because the system shrank, but because it gave up the power to decide and handed it to someone else.

English also described an experiment applying self-direction to schizophrenic recidivists, cash and choice with full transparency, and found that the system’s biggest struggle was that the care ecology couldn’t imagine people it had controlled for years being trusted with agency. That’s the informal register resisting change from within, exactly the dynamic I described last week.

And then the kicker: English said that having worked with around 300 small charities across about 400 social and health interventions via the ImpactLab, many of these organisations are producing better analysis and using it better than large government agencies. On very thin resources. His explanation? You don’t need to be a large specialised institution to know things anymore. The cost of knowledge is dropping so fast that it will undermine hierarchical institutions whether we reform them or not.

Seymour is right that New Zealand is overgoverned. But English’s argument suggests the problem isn’t the number of ministers or departments. It’s that the institutions Seymour wants to streamline are designed to decide for people rather than learn from them. Shrinking the machine without changing what it does just gives you a smaller machine that is relentlessly dumb.

The NZ Alliance Party: Happy Thoughts Without Architecture

The New Zealand Alliance Party re-emerged at its national conference in Christchurch on the 14th of February, with Victor Billot elected as leader. His state of the nation was published last week on Scoop and I gave it a read, because it matters. It’s important to take small parties seriously in an MMP system, and the NZ Alliance has a storied history on the New Zealand left.

Billot explicitly framed his address as a counterpoint to Luxon and Hipkins. While they pitched to the Auckland Business Chamber, he addressed the “90% of New Zealanders outside this world: nurses, port workers, cleaners.” The Alliance describes itself as a democratic socialist alternative1, and its policy priorities are state-led housing projects, a wealth tax, a financial transaction tax, and free education and healthcare under a plan called KiwiWorks.

I respect the positioning. Billot is right that both major party leaders were performing poorly to who gives a dam, while the people who keep the country running were, well, working. And the NZ Alliance is at least honest about what it is, a left-wing party making a left-wing case, without pretending to be something else.

But the institutional literacy question bites hard here. On the wealth tax, I made the case last week that the institutional infrastructure simply doesn’t exist the valuation systems, the legal frameworks, the agency capacity, the international agreements. I won’t re-argue it. The question for the NZ Alliance is: does anyone in that party know this? Have they mapped which agencies would be responsible, what the implementation timeline looks like, what it would cost to build the machinery before you can even start collecting the tax? I don’t get that impression.

The same question applies to state-led housing. It’s a policy I have sympathy for. But does Billot understand the mechanics and actual architecture required? The legislation, the agencies, the funding structures, the tension between central and local government, the capacity constraints, the regulatory frameworks? These aren’t details you figure out after the election. They’re what determines whether a policy is real or aspirational.

And on free education and healthcare: universalism is a beautiful principle, but I don’t think it’s going to survive the fiscal pressures coming at us. I think means-tested education, means-tested healthcare, and means-tested superannuation are options we’re going to have to debate seriously, soon. New Zealand’s egalitarian instinct is going to have to reckon with the fact that universal provision for everyone, regardless of need, are not be sustainable and that targeting resources where they’re most needed might be our only choice. Which comes with its own devils.

Opportunity Party: The Polished Pitch

Qiulae Wong, known as Q delivered the Opportunity Party’s state of the nation on February 21st at an event in Auckland attended by sustainability and business leaders. Of the three smaller-party speeches, hers was the most polished as political communication. She took a storytelling approach, asking what kind of country her daughters deserve to inherit, painting a vision of high-density green cities, a 100-year infrastructure plan, and a more unified society. She positioned Opportunity as a potential MMP kingmaker and “accelerator for progress.”

She announced a Blue Oceans policy banning bottom trawling, an Abundant Energy policy focused on large-scale renewable investment, and she’s campaigning on land tax. She positioned herself clearly against New Zealand First’s “politics of fear and division.” Conservation NGOs who had boycotted National’s Blue-Greens forum turned up to her event instead, which tells you something about where the environmental constituency is heading.

On paper, it was a strong-ish political statement from a small party giving it another go. No obvious holes in the rhetoric. The framing was optimistic without being naive.

But the same institutional literacy questions apply. A blue ocean policy? Do you know which agencies run it? Which collaborate? What are the tensions between fisheries management, conservation, economic development, and Māori rights in the marine space? An abundant energy policy? Sure, do you know who builds it, who funds it, who consents it, and how do you overcome the regulatory and investment barriers that have stalled renewable expansion for years? A 100-year infrastructure plan sounds visionary, but who writes it, who governs it across electoral cycles, and how does it survive the first change of government?

I’m not trying to be a dick, but I think knowing this as candidates and voters matters so much! They’re the questions that determine whether a vision becomes a functioning programme or ends up as another entry in the long, quiet catalogue of good ideas that didn’t survive contact with the New Zealand state.

The Drum I’m Going to Bang

Every party, in every state of the nation so far, falls somewhere on the spectrum between institutional literacy and ideological aspiration. Seymour is the most institutionally literate of the lot, he reads both registers, even if his ideology narrows what he sees. The NZ Alliance and TOP are, in different ways, operating in the formal register only: announcing policies without demonstrating they’ve grappled with the informal infrastructure that will determine whether those policies live or die.

I keep coming back to this: candidates oversimplify, and I don’t buy it that it’s because voters want simple messages. I don’t think that cuts it anymore. Candidates need to explain how they’re going to implement their policies, not only under MMP, but through the institutions we actually have. Does Q know which agencies would deliver her blue ocean policy? Does Billot know which ministry leads on state housing and what its capacity constraints are? I genuinely don’t know if they know that they need to know this.

The gap English described, between the people making decisions at the top and the people living complex lives at the bottom, isn’t going to be closed by achievement lists, socialist manifestos, or polished vision speeches. It’s going to be closed by politicians who understand how institutions actually work and who can tell you not just what they want to change, but how, through which institutions, with what resources, facing which constraints.

That’s the institutional literacy test. Ten months out, almost nobody is passing it.

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Today’s an exciting day

I start a regular fortnightly slot on RNZ Nights with Emile Donovan, talking all things politics through to the election. Check that out, and I’ll see you next week.

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