Breaking Views Update: Week of 11.10.26

Thursday October 15, 2026 

News:
Calls to fly Tino Rangatiratanga flag permanently on Auckland Harbour Bridge
The Tino Rangatiratanga flag should fly permanently alongside the New Zealand flag on Auckland Harbour Bridge, supporters say, rather than being raised there only for Waitangi Day.

The Flag Poll campaign, led by Whānau Ora alongside Te Kura o Tipene and flag co-designer Linda Munn, is seeking 80,000 signatures in support of the move.

Wendy Geus: Compass voters disagree with media and choose Seymour over Top golden girl

A quarter of over 3,000 voters chose ACT’s David Seymour as winner of minor party debate

Seymour committed the cardinal sin, according to a chic, coiffed to the nth degree Heather du Plessis-Allan, in referring to 'One law for all' as the policy he would most like to see progressed next term. In the presence of seasoned left wing journalists, Guyon Espiner and Toby Manhire on the 1News debate panel she let rip at Seymour for picking a subject not, apparently, on the radar for this election.

Owen Jennings: When Idiocy Beats Common Sense

Government policy can produce weird outcomes sometimes. We welcome foreigners coming to our country, buying up farmland, planting trees, decimating rural communities so that foreign entity can claim an offset to their Greenhouse Gas emissions. But we don’t let our own farmers use their plantings as an offset to their emissions.

Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: Te Pāti Māori and Greens have scored the campaign's first own goal

I think we might have the first significant own goal of the election campaign. It's the Mongrel Mob photos.

If you haven't caught up on this yet, you should take a look. It's blown up online. Photos have emerged showing a group of Māori Party and Green Party MPs and candidates meeting the Mongrel Mob at one of their gang pads.

Ani O'Brien: Everybody's promising jobs. Who's actually going to create them?

I've examined what every major party is proposing to do about unemployment.

Unemployment is at an 11 year high, young people are struggling to get a foot in the door, and political parties are making some very expensive promises. We are being offered a macro approach by those who are attuned to the needs of business, but perhaps less familiar with the struggle to find work. And we are being offered pie in the sky solutions from those who would possibly be among the unemployed were we not paying their generous salaries. On the whole things don’t feel particularly bright and yet “jobs” is one of the words of this election. So I thought I would take a closer look at what is on offer and how parties are approaching our unemployment challenges.

David Harvey: The Rationale for Media Regulation

This article is to be read alongside a detailed examination I conducted of the advice given to the Minister surrounding the disestablishment of the BSA. In this article I tease out the fundamental underpinning for media regulation and the ethereal nature of the “public interest”.

The basic justification for State involvement in media regulation is the public interest.

The argument follows this path. Media – especially mainstream media – are not just a business. They perform a democratic function as the Fourth Estate. Thus society has a stake in how media behaves.

There are a number of linked or associated arguments.

Roger Partridge: The Hole in Democracy Elections Do Not Fix

The American satirist P. J. O’Rourke spent the late 1980s watching the United States Congress at work. He ended the book he wrote about it, Parliament of Whores (1991), with this: “Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us.”

James Madison feared what a majority faction might do to a minority. But what restrains a majority when the people who will pay for its decisions have not been born?

Andrew Dickens: Why is Qiulae Wong polling so well when her policies are so radical?

So, if Qiulae Wong is generally considered to be the best thing in last night's debate how did she do it and how is her fringe party keeping popular enough to perhaps enter parliament?

Her greatest strength last night was acting like a normal person.

It struck me that she was the only person on our screen that was not a career politician.

Simon O'Connor: CPAC Australia and the Future of the Centre-Right in New Zealand

Returning from the CPAC Australia conference, it is clear that conservative parties lose support when they abandon their core voters.

I’ve recently been in Brisbane for CPAC Australia. CPAC stands for Conservative Political Action Conference and originated in the United States. Just like the American conferences, this Australian one is glitzy with huge screens, loud music, bold lighting, smoke generators, and an array of speakers and topics from across the conservative right of politics.

Kerre Woodham: If you want to vote, you have to take it seriously

I've seen a few posts on my social media over the past month from young people moaning that "they're locking us out of voting". They, presumably being the rich white patriarchal establishment, us, presumably being the 18 to 24 year olds. What absolute hogwash. Yes, the rules around enrolment have changed and same day enrolment is no longer possible, but they are doing everything they can to get young people registered to vote and have been doing so since time immemorial, since every election.

Bob Edlin: How Maori have thrived in the Royal Society environment

The champions of diversity policies for long have been bothered that Māori students and academics are under-represented in science courses and science departments in the country’s universities.

Overall Māori participation in higher education has increased over the years, but Māori make up less than 5% of total academic staff in science faculties.

Google steered us to papers published in 2020 and 2021 to support those figures.

One of the papers (pictured below)

David Farrar: Education is heading in the right direction

Erica Stanford released:

New independent assessment results show primary and intermediate students made the equivalent of four months’ additional progress in mathematics between 2024 and 2026, signalling a turnaround in achievement, Education Minister Erica Stanford says.

Richard Prebble: Erica mania?

With that warning, the best campaign posts I have seen are Erica Stanford’s.

It is difficult to talk straight to a camera and be authentic. It is even harder to explain a complex message.

Stanford does both.

Check out this example:

Wednesday October 14, 2026 

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Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: National needs to keep fighting on education

If you're a regular listener, you'll know we've spent a lot of time predicting that voters would hate Chris Hipkins' claim in the TVNZ leaders' debate that he would scrap the hour of reading, writing and maths for kids.

And now I have the numbers to prove that prediction was bang on.

Mike Grimshaw: The KISS election strategy…or is it just electoral caveat emptor?

As we enter the election campaign, two things are readily apparent.

1: Parties promise policies and decisions and implementations that they believe will both retain and attract voters

2: Any government is going to have to a be coalition so all that is expressed and claimed will be undertaken in point 1 is in fact only aspiration, not necessarily deliverable, nor indeed will define the actions of any government that is elected.

Mike's Minute: Why don't young people care about their future?

Latest numbers from the Electoral Commission as of the weekend show 63.4% of 18-24-year-old voters are enrolled.

It's a shockingly low number.

It's lower than previous elections. This is bad news for democracy and especially bad news for the Greens.

There's no excuse for this.

Caleb Anderson: Marxism in Disguise

In the 1960s, an ideology was seeded within our universities that would have a profound effect on our nation's direction of travel. Barely discernible to the majority at first, it moved slowly through our public institutions, filtered into our schools, and gradually corrupted the body politic.

Bob Edlin: Royal Society paper flaunts the Treaty....

......(in call for more govt funding for science) and bats for mātauranga Māori

Only in the past few decades has the Royal Society of New Zealand included the social sciences as an official class of scientific disciplines.

That shift controversially allowed a slew of professional social science organisations to formally affiliate with the society.

Kerre Woodham: We need to have a discussion about the future of NZ Super

Well, it looks like a matter of when, not if, given that Barbara Edmonds and Nicola Willis, Finance Minister and Finance spokesperson respectively, were appearing on Jack Tame's Q&A yesterday, and they've agreed they'll work together on the future of superannuation in this country.