Articles from ‘elocal magazine’

Inflation has moved back above the Reserve Bank’s target range, driven less by discretionary spending than by unavoidable household bills. Council rates and electricity costs are now biting hardest, pushing inflation higher even as families cut back elsewhere. Summarised by Centrist · Statistics New Zealand figures show the consumer price index rose 0.6 per cent in the December quarter. · This has lifted annual inflation to 3.1 per cent. That…

The picture is firming up, and it’s devastating. Six people are dead at the foot of Mount Maunganui because, over four critical hours on the morning of 22 January, New Zealand’s emergency management system failed. Not just failed, but failed repeatedly, in ways that now look systemic. And what’s becoming clearer with each new revelation is that this wasn’t just bad luck or an unforeseeable tragedy. This was a disaster waiting to happen, built…

Despite talk of cross-party cooperation, polling suggests Te Pāti Māori may not be needed to form the next government, leaving the party pitching flexibility from a position of diminished leverage ahead of the 2026 election. Summarised by Centrist · Speaking at Rātana, co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer said she could work with Winston Peters and New Zealand First, floating the idea of cooperation across ideological lines. · The comments come as…

Erin Gourley left New Zealand in 2024 for Europe, and says there's a 'huge risk' of New Zealanders forgetting to vote _ even if they're politically minded. Former local government reporter Erin Gourley forgot to vote in last year’s council elections. She was living in Sweden, where she moved to study law in 2024. Now registered as an overseas voter, Gourley says she won’t be making that mistake again. “It’s crazy, because I used to be a local…

This week Chris Hipkins gave us the clearest picture yet of how Labour plans to fight the 2026 election. His speech at the party’s caucus retreat in West Auckland, and then a rally-style address to party activists, revealed a strategy that combines class-based attack lines, relentless positivity, and a narrowed focus on kitchen-table concerns. But can this rebranded Labour convince voters it’s genuinely different from the party they rejected so…

The starting gun has been fired on the 2026 general election. There are now 277 days until voting starts in the New Zealand general election. And it’s 290 days of campaigning to endure, until voting closes. Then there’s the weeks of waiting for official results after polling day, and probably weeks more of coalition negotiations. It’s going to be a long year of politics. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon confirmed yesterday that the election…

For more than five decades, New Zealand has been trapped in a quiet, grinding decline. Productivity has flat-lined. Living standards have slipped down the OECD rankings. Wealth has concentrated upward while poverty has spread downward. Our young and capable leave in record numbers, chasing wages and opportunity elsewhere. Those who remain are told this is normal, inevitable, and global. · It isn’t. · And it doesn’t have to be this way. At Davos…

President Trump told the World Economic Forum in Davos that the United States has staged a rapid economic turnaround since his return to office, claiming falling inflation, accelerating growth, surging investment, and a sharply tightened border. He credited tariffs, deregulation, tax cuts, and expanded domestic energy production for the shift, while criticising Europe’s energy and migration policies. He also raised Greenland, NATO…

“New Zealand should learn from the problems emerging in Australia's new anti-hate legislation, not seek to replicate them, says the Free Speech Union. "Australia's Parliament passed sweeping new laws in an emergency late-night session with barely three days of public consultation," said Jillaine Heather, Chief Executive of the Free Speech Union. · The Bondi tragedy was horrific and antisemitism is a genuine problem. But when legal experts,…

If the first step is exposing neo-piracy, the second is asking a harder question: what replaces it? Critics of the current monetary order are routinely dismissed with the same lazy retort — “fine, but what’s the alternative?” The implication is that debt-based, privately issued money is the only system possible, and any deviation would mean chaos. That is simply false. In Part One of this series, Neo-Piracy, we traced how modern financial…