Articles from ‘elocal magazine’

That is the day New Zealanders will decide whether this country stays on the course of common sense, stability, and national interest or whether it risks sliding back into the chaos, ideological excess, and economic recklessness we are still recovering from after the last Labour government. New Zealand First entered government to restore balance. And, after just two years, we are delivering. · Michael, we have stood for common sense when it was…

Christopher Luxon is back from holiday. And if his State of the Nation speech is anything to go by, it might actually be a very boring election year indeed. The Prime Minister delivered his first big set-piece address of 2026 on Monday to a 700-strong business audience at Auckland’s newly opened International Convention Centre. Hosted by the Auckland Business Chamber and former National leader Simon Bridges, the speech was long on slogans but…

In my last column, I laid out the sorry state of the Green Party as 2026 kicks off. Scandals piled up, staff jumped ship, polls slid south, and the leadership clung to excuses about algorithms and the Coalition Government being responsible for turning people off the Greens. All this despite a coalition in chaos and a Labour Party that’s barely visible. The symptoms are clear, but what’s the disease? Today, I’m digging into the deeper mess: a…

The most revealing moments in Christopher Luxon’s “State of the Nation” address were not the confident passages on growth, exports, or geopolitics. They were the subjects never mentioned at all. · Across more than forty minutes, the Prime Minister offered a fluent defence of fiscal restraint, export-led recovery, global engagement, and security alignment. But on two foundational questions facing New Zealand—money creation and energy…

The Green Party should be flying high right now. They’re not. As the 2026 election year begins in earnest, the Greens find themselves in a deeply anomalous position: polling has slumped, internal organisation has been shaken by staff departures and scandals, and the co-leaders seem strangely detached from the scale of their problems. The political conditions could hardly be more favourable for an opposition party like the Greens. The…

It was hailed as ‘a game changer for the clean tech sector’ and a model for the world; less than three years later, BlackRock is walking away from its NZ climate fund by Sam Sachdeva - Caption: BlackRock says "client feedback" and a new acquisition has led to it shutting down a dedicated climate investment fund in New Zealand. File photo: Getty Images · American multinational asset manager BlackRock is closing down a $2 billion climate…

Early announcement of the date has been customary since 2011, initially to provide certainty around the Rugby World Cup and later adopted as standard practice. Summarised by Centrist · Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has indicated he intends to follow the practice by announcing the election date early in the year. · Under electoral law, the current 54th Parliament expires on November 9, 2026, unless dissolved earlier. The last possible day an…

Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters has criticised Reserve Bank Governor Anna Breman for publicly backing US Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell while he is subject to a criminal investigation in the United States. Summarised by Centrist · Peters said the Reserve Bank of New Zealand is “statutorily independent” of government on monetary policy, but that independence does not extend to commenting on US domestic politics. · “We remind the…

After six columns dissecting the MisManageMyHealth debacle, the diagnosis is clear. Decades of privatisation built a fragile system, leaving our health IT infrastructure splintered and under-resourced. A near-monopoly concentrated the risk, handing 1.8 million New Zealanders’ records to a one-man private empire. The watchdogs were ignored and muzzled: successive Privacy Commissioners’ warnings went unheeded, and regulators were kept toothless…

The release of the United States’ 2025 National Security Strategy under President Trump is more than a geopolitical reset — it is a brutal mirror held up to countries that dismantled their own economic sovereignty while assuming globalisation would protect them. View the U.S. 2025 National Security Strategy here · For New Zealand, that mirror is unforgiving. · Once ranked 3 in the OECD in the 1960s, New Zealand now hovers closer to 40, with…