Articles in ‘Opinion’

If you want to understand what will happen on 7 November, forget the polls for a moment. Forget the horse-race coverage, the personality contests, and the pundit predictions. Instead, read Danyl McLauchlan’s cover story in this week’s Listener magazine. It’s the sharpest piece of political analysis I’ve read this cycle – and probably the most important you’ll read before voting day McLauchlan’s article draws on the 2023 New Zealand Election…

Six years on from the pandemic the questions that remain unanswered can only be answered from a rigorous scientific perspective. It is remarkable that the Commission failed to engage with the volume of scientific publishing that was submitted to them. Our modern civilization and its technology is built on the foundation of evidence which is assessed using quantities and mathematical analysis. For a complex problem the assignment of mathematical…

There are moments in history when professions are tested. · Doctors. Judges. Journalists. · The pandemic was one of those moments. · In a recent interview, Patrick Gower admitted something extraordinary: he crossed a journalistic line. He acknowledged being “too entrenched” in a pro-vaccine stance. He conceded his ethics slipped “for the greater good.” He admitted he became an advocate rather than an observer. · Then came the line that stopped…

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. · Luxon said he was…

Stuff’s Quarantine Nation podcast sells itself as sober reflection on the Covid years. Read through the lens of Edward Bernays, it looks more like a second wave of propaganda: regret without reversal, fear and heroism without accountability, and a tightly controlled story about what we’re allowed to question. Quarantine Nation presents itself as a reflective oral history of New Zealand’s Covid years. It’s marketed as “a mostly serious history,”…

Sinking without a trace. · According to the latest Taxpayers Union Curia poll, National has the support of just 28.4% of respondents. · Given that National are the leading party in the coalition government it is almost unbelievable that they could drop so low. · The leader of the party, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, is said to be stunned by the result. He was attending a meeting this morning (Friday 6^th^ March) where he was discussing his…

It has been one of those days in politics when everything accelerates. This morning I published a briefing warning that Christopher Luxon and National were in serious trouble after leaks of a dire Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll. By lunchtime the numbers were official: National on 28.4 percent. By mid-afternoon the conversation had shifted from “if” Luxon might leave to “when and how”. I don’t normally publish two columns in a day. But when the…

Is Prime Minister Christopher Luxon finally on the way out? A Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll out today reportedly puts the National Party on only 28% support. And rightwing commentator Matthew Hooton says today in the Herald that the senior leadership of the party “need to set up a conference call amongst themselves this weekend” to start the process of replacing him. Hooton says that after Luxon’s extremely poor performance over the US-Iran War,…

New Zealand’s media-politics-lobbying revolving door keeps spinning. The latest turn is the most brazen yet. · On Monday, NZME announced that Hamish Rutherford would chair its Editorial Advisory Board. The news was first reported by Shayne Currie in the NZ Herald’s Media Insider column, which described the appointment alongside other editorial changes as a “real coup” for the company. The Herald announcement itself was revealing for what it…

Corporate lobbyists have become central to decision-making in the New Zealand political system. But we know remarkably little about how they work, who they work for, or what they charge. In my ongoing research on influence behind the scenes of government, one lobbyist told me that the standard pitch of lobbying firms to business is that they can normally change a government decision for a $250,000 fee. That kind of money gets you into the room…