You had a lot of questions. Some of them are enormous and deserve proper essays of their own. Quite a few of you want me to go back down the He Puapua and co-governance rabbit hole, others want a forensic examination of TOP, and several want me to work out what a Labour-Green-Te Pāti Māori-TOP government might actually look like. There was also interest in strategic voting, electorate races, and what the minor parties could extract from National or Labour in coalition negotiations.
I will endeavour to write essays covering as many of those topics as possible. But there were also lots of questions that have reasonably straightforward answers. So I thought I would begin with a kind of Q+A format.
Consider this the first instalment of Stuff You Wanted to Know.
Do MPs get their Wellington accommodation paid for 52 weeks a year even though Parliament is in recess for large chunks of it?
Yes, but there is some context worth adding before we get too excited about dragging MPs about it.
If an MP’s main home is outside the Wellington area, they can receive what is called a continuous accommodation payment to help cover the cost of maintaining somewhere to live in Wellington. For an ordinary MP, that is capped at $36,400 a year and for Ministers the cap is $52,000 a year. Alternatively, MPs can instead claim actual accommodation costs as they go. The current maximum is $260 a night for commercial accommodation e.g. hotels, motels, etc, or $70 a night for other accommodation like staying with friends or family. There are additional criteria and annual limits though.
To be fair to them, this is not quite the rort it might sound like. The payment exists because MPs from outside Wellington need to have somewhere to live in Wellington. Parliament may not be sitting every week, but landlords have this irritating habit of continuing to charge rent during recess too. The independent Remuneration Authority says the continuous payment is based on estimated central-Wellington market rents.
And parliamentary recess is not the same thing as MPs being on holiday. Select committees, electorate work, caucus meetings, ministerial duties, and political events all continue when the House is not sitting, and MPs can still be required in Wellington during those periods.
Why is ACC investing billions of dollars? Isn’t that money supposed to be helping injured people?
I can see why it might look a bit dodgy at first glance. But don’t worry, investing the money is actually part of how ACC pays injured people.
The Government doesn’t collect this year’s levies to cover this year’s accidents and hope everything roughly evens out. Some injuries create costs that last for decades, for example, someone seriously injured at 25 might need treatment, rehabilitation, weekly compensation, and other support for the rest of their life. So ACC has to fund not just the immediate cost of an accident, but the future cost of claims.
ACC is funded through levies, Crown contributions, and investment income. So the returns on the investments help reduce how much has to be collected from levy payers and taxpayers later.
Is it true that Māori corporations pay no tax?
No. There is, however, a kernel of truth buried inside it. Entities that qualify and elect to be treated as Māori authorities are taxed at 17.5%, compared with the standard company tax rate of 28%. Not every business owned by Māori automatically gets this rate as the status has eligibility requirements.
There are separate questions around charities, rates remissions, government contracts, and other arrangements involving iwi organisations, and I suspect I will return to those because several people asked.
But the claim “Māori corporations pay no tax” is false.
Has the public service actually got much bigger since 2017?
Yes. Considerably. In 2022, the Public Service Commission reported 60,381 full time equivalent (FTE) public servants, which it said was 27.8%, or 13,130 FTEs, larger than in 2017.
The workforce subsequently peaked at 65,699 FTEs in December 2023. After the current Government introduced its savings programme it fell, reaching 62,654 in June 2025. But it has since begun climbing again and in March this year it was back to 64,535 FTEs, up 2.1% from March 2025.
The coalition has reduced the public service from its late-2023 peak, but it remains vastly larger than it was in 2017.
Is it true that 14.3 per cent of New Zealand children are now living in material hardship?
Yes. But we should be careful about what that number means. The latest official figure, for the year ended June 2025, is 14.3%, or around 169,300 children. The comparable rate was 13.5% the year before, and Stats NZ says that year-on-year movement was “not statistically significant”.
The 14.3% figure is also higher than the 10.6% recorded in 2021/22. But “material hardship” does not simply mean that 14.3% of children are starving or homeless. It is a specific statistical measure of whether households are unable to afford a collection of things regarded as essentials. The new measure uses an 18 item questionnaire, with households classified as experiencing material hardship when enough deprivation indicators are flagged. Stats NZ also changed the survey and measurement methodology for the latest year, which is another reason to be slightly cautious about waving the numbers around without context. None of which makes 14.3% good, to be clear.
Can ACT and NZ First candidates split the centre-right electorate vote and accidentally let Labour win?
Kind of. In electorates, but not party vote if we assume that National, ACT, and NZ First pool their votes and become a coalition again.
Your electorate vote works under first-past-the-post (FPP) rules. Whichever candidate gets the most votes wins. They do not need 50%.
So lets imagine an electorate where the polling is about 55% centre-right candidates and 45% left candidates.
If on election day, the National candidate gets 30%, the ACT candidate gets 15%, the New Zealand First candidate gets 10% and the Labour candidate gets 45%, Labour wins the seat even though a majority of voters preferred centre-right candidates.
This is why electorate-level strategic voting is such a hot topic.
However, as I say, splitting your party vote does not work like this. Your party vote helps determine each qualifying party’s overall share of Parliament. It is these votes that are tallied and combined so the result could be National 37%, ACT 9%, New Zealand First 12% (=58%) or National 24%, ACT 18%, New Zealand First 16% (=58%), and the coalition would win.
If you are worried about splitting your electorate vote, it will be worth looking into any polling or previous results that can inform you of who is in the best position to win for your side.
What the hell is an overhang?
An overhang occurs when a party wins more electorate seats than its share of the party vote would normally entitle it to. How it works:
Are we really potentially going to spend billions overseas because of the Paris Agreement?
The answer is kinda. Potentially. Maybe. New Zealand has made a commitment under the Paris Agreement to reduce our emissions by 2030 and this Paris target is more ambitious than the emissions reductions we are currently expecting to achieve domestically. So, yes, that leaves a gap.
One way we can fill that gap is by effectively paying other countries to reduce their emissions and put those reductions on our climate tab. Current Treasury modelling puts the possible cost of buying enough offshore reductions to meet our first Paris target at around $4.4-$5 billion. However, Treasury is very clear that this is not a bill already sitting on Nicola Willis’s desk. It is just modelling. What we ultimately need to pay for, if anything, will depend on our emissions here, international prices, what is available and, crucially, what the Government ultimately decides to do.
What the Government decides to do is the biggest factor, because New Zealand is not alone in staring at an ambitious climate target that it is unlikely to meet. UNEP says countries collectively are not on track to meet their 2030 commitments under Paris.
This has created somewhat of an international game of chicken. Who will blink first?
There is no global climate policeman who turns up, confiscates our fossil fuels, and fines us $5 billion if we miss our target. Though I am sure such an idea would delight the Greens. Paris’ compliance mechanism is explicitly non-punitive. It cannot impose penalties or sanctions. So one option for New Zealand, and other countries, is to just not meet our NDC1 target and adopt an attitude of “and what?” Treasury has acknowledged this option, but rightly points out it carries some reputational risk.
This is mostly because over the past decade climate commitments have become woven into international trade deals all over the place. Most significantly for us, the New Zealand-European Union Free Trade Agreement makes commitments concerning the Paris Agreement enforceable under the FTA and could technically trigger a dispute. Likewise, our UK trade agreement contains specific climate provisions and reaffirms both countries’ Paris commitments. However, the UK is in a very similar situation to us so won’t be pointing any fingers and the EU may just scrape through to its target, but it will have much bigger non-compliant fish to fry than us.
Basically, every country has an obvious incentive to look sideways at everybody else before voluntarily writing enormous cheques to meet their targets. Why would anyone want to send $5 billion offshore to satisfy an agreement barely anyone else is upholding? Hence the stand off.
Personally, I think Paris is an expensive and ineffective waste of time. I want New Zealand out of it, but I understand that we need to play the game of chicken first.
I am happy to get into this more in depth if there is interest. It can get very nerdy and dry with credits and offsets.
This was the first batch of Stuff You Wanted to Know.
I still have your questions about TOP’s land tax, He Puapua, Matike Mai, Māori seats, the National Iwi Chairs Forum, the sex voting gap, public sector DEI, energy security, interesting electorates, the actual ideological difference between National and Labour, and what the various possible coalition governments would really do.
I will do another batch of short answers next week and get to work on the essays!
Ani O'Brien comes from a digital marketing background, she has been heavily involved in women's rights advocacy and is a founding council member of the Free Speech Union. This article was originally published on Ani's Substack Site and is published here with kind permission.
Yes, but there is some context worth adding before we get too excited about dragging MPs about it.
If an MP’s main home is outside the Wellington area, they can receive what is called a continuous accommodation payment to help cover the cost of maintaining somewhere to live in Wellington. For an ordinary MP, that is capped at $36,400 a year and for Ministers the cap is $52,000 a year. Alternatively, MPs can instead claim actual accommodation costs as they go. The current maximum is $260 a night for commercial accommodation e.g. hotels, motels, etc, or $70 a night for other accommodation like staying with friends or family. There are additional criteria and annual limits though.
To be fair to them, this is not quite the rort it might sound like. The payment exists because MPs from outside Wellington need to have somewhere to live in Wellington. Parliament may not be sitting every week, but landlords have this irritating habit of continuing to charge rent during recess too. The independent Remuneration Authority says the continuous payment is based on estimated central-Wellington market rents.
And parliamentary recess is not the same thing as MPs being on holiday. Select committees, electorate work, caucus meetings, ministerial duties, and political events all continue when the House is not sitting, and MPs can still be required in Wellington during those periods.
Why is ACC investing billions of dollars? Isn’t that money supposed to be helping injured people?
I can see why it might look a bit dodgy at first glance. But don’t worry, investing the money is actually part of how ACC pays injured people.
The Government doesn’t collect this year’s levies to cover this year’s accidents and hope everything roughly evens out. Some injuries create costs that last for decades, for example, someone seriously injured at 25 might need treatment, rehabilitation, weekly compensation, and other support for the rest of their life. So ACC has to fund not just the immediate cost of an accident, but the future cost of claims.
ACC is funded through levies, Crown contributions, and investment income. So the returns on the investments help reduce how much has to be collected from levy payers and taxpayers later.
Is it true that Māori corporations pay no tax?
No. There is, however, a kernel of truth buried inside it. Entities that qualify and elect to be treated as Māori authorities are taxed at 17.5%, compared with the standard company tax rate of 28%. Not every business owned by Māori automatically gets this rate as the status has eligibility requirements.
There are separate questions around charities, rates remissions, government contracts, and other arrangements involving iwi organisations, and I suspect I will return to those because several people asked.
But the claim “Māori corporations pay no tax” is false.
Has the public service actually got much bigger since 2017?
Yes. Considerably. In 2022, the Public Service Commission reported 60,381 full time equivalent (FTE) public servants, which it said was 27.8%, or 13,130 FTEs, larger than in 2017.
The workforce subsequently peaked at 65,699 FTEs in December 2023. After the current Government introduced its savings programme it fell, reaching 62,654 in June 2025. But it has since begun climbing again and in March this year it was back to 64,535 FTEs, up 2.1% from March 2025.
The coalition has reduced the public service from its late-2023 peak, but it remains vastly larger than it was in 2017.
Is it true that 14.3 per cent of New Zealand children are now living in material hardship?
Yes. But we should be careful about what that number means. The latest official figure, for the year ended June 2025, is 14.3%, or around 169,300 children. The comparable rate was 13.5% the year before, and Stats NZ says that year-on-year movement was “not statistically significant”.
The 14.3% figure is also higher than the 10.6% recorded in 2021/22. But “material hardship” does not simply mean that 14.3% of children are starving or homeless. It is a specific statistical measure of whether households are unable to afford a collection of things regarded as essentials. The new measure uses an 18 item questionnaire, with households classified as experiencing material hardship when enough deprivation indicators are flagged. Stats NZ also changed the survey and measurement methodology for the latest year, which is another reason to be slightly cautious about waving the numbers around without context. None of which makes 14.3% good, to be clear.
Can ACT and NZ First candidates split the centre-right electorate vote and accidentally let Labour win?
Kind of. In electorates, but not party vote if we assume that National, ACT, and NZ First pool their votes and become a coalition again.
Your electorate vote works under first-past-the-post (FPP) rules. Whichever candidate gets the most votes wins. They do not need 50%.
So lets imagine an electorate where the polling is about 55% centre-right candidates and 45% left candidates.
If on election day, the National candidate gets 30%, the ACT candidate gets 15%, the New Zealand First candidate gets 10% and the Labour candidate gets 45%, Labour wins the seat even though a majority of voters preferred centre-right candidates.
This is why electorate-level strategic voting is such a hot topic.
However, as I say, splitting your party vote does not work like this. Your party vote helps determine each qualifying party’s overall share of Parliament. It is these votes that are tallied and combined so the result could be National 37%, ACT 9%, New Zealand First 12% (=58%) or National 24%, ACT 18%, New Zealand First 16% (=58%), and the coalition would win.
If you are worried about splitting your electorate vote, it will be worth looking into any polling or previous results that can inform you of who is in the best position to win for your side.
What the hell is an overhang?
An overhang occurs when a party wins more electorate seats than its share of the party vote would normally entitle it to. How it works:
- The party vote determines how many seats the Party will be entitled to.
- The electorate vote determines which MP will represent your electorate.
- MPs who win an electorate seat are guaranteed a seat in Parliament regardless of how their party performs.
- When parties fill the seats that they are entitled due to their party vote, the MPs who won electorates take up spots first as they are guaranteed.
- Then any leftover seats the party is entitled to once electorate MPs are in are filled by MPs who haven’t won an electorate but are on the party’s list.
- For example, if a party were entitled to 15 seats thanks to its party vote and they won 10 electorates, they would bring in 5 list MPs to fill the remaining seats.
- Sometimes a party will win more electorate seats than the number they are entitled to thanks to their party vote. Because electorate seats are guaranteed, the party is not expected to cull some of their electorate MPs. The required additional seats are added to Parliament and the party ends up with more seats than its party vote entitles it to. This is an overhang.
- For example, if a party were entitled to 15 seats thanks to its party vote and they won 20 electorates, they would get 20 seats (5 extra). They would have zero list MPs.
Are we really potentially going to spend billions overseas because of the Paris Agreement?
The answer is kinda. Potentially. Maybe. New Zealand has made a commitment under the Paris Agreement to reduce our emissions by 2030 and this Paris target is more ambitious than the emissions reductions we are currently expecting to achieve domestically. So, yes, that leaves a gap.
One way we can fill that gap is by effectively paying other countries to reduce their emissions and put those reductions on our climate tab. Current Treasury modelling puts the possible cost of buying enough offshore reductions to meet our first Paris target at around $4.4-$5 billion. However, Treasury is very clear that this is not a bill already sitting on Nicola Willis’s desk. It is just modelling. What we ultimately need to pay for, if anything, will depend on our emissions here, international prices, what is available and, crucially, what the Government ultimately decides to do.
What the Government decides to do is the biggest factor, because New Zealand is not alone in staring at an ambitious climate target that it is unlikely to meet. UNEP says countries collectively are not on track to meet their 2030 commitments under Paris.
This has created somewhat of an international game of chicken. Who will blink first?
There is no global climate policeman who turns up, confiscates our fossil fuels, and fines us $5 billion if we miss our target. Though I am sure such an idea would delight the Greens. Paris’ compliance mechanism is explicitly non-punitive. It cannot impose penalties or sanctions. So one option for New Zealand, and other countries, is to just not meet our NDC1 target and adopt an attitude of “and what?” Treasury has acknowledged this option, but rightly points out it carries some reputational risk.
This is mostly because over the past decade climate commitments have become woven into international trade deals all over the place. Most significantly for us, the New Zealand-European Union Free Trade Agreement makes commitments concerning the Paris Agreement enforceable under the FTA and could technically trigger a dispute. Likewise, our UK trade agreement contains specific climate provisions and reaffirms both countries’ Paris commitments. However, the UK is in a very similar situation to us so won’t be pointing any fingers and the EU may just scrape through to its target, but it will have much bigger non-compliant fish to fry than us.
Basically, every country has an obvious incentive to look sideways at everybody else before voluntarily writing enormous cheques to meet their targets. Why would anyone want to send $5 billion offshore to satisfy an agreement barely anyone else is upholding? Hence the stand off.
Personally, I think Paris is an expensive and ineffective waste of time. I want New Zealand out of it, but I understand that we need to play the game of chicken first.
I am happy to get into this more in depth if there is interest. It can get very nerdy and dry with credits and offsets.
--------------------------
This was the first batch of Stuff You Wanted to Know.
I still have your questions about TOP’s land tax, He Puapua, Matike Mai, Māori seats, the National Iwi Chairs Forum, the sex voting gap, public sector DEI, energy security, interesting electorates, the actual ideological difference between National and Labour, and what the various possible coalition governments would really do.
I will do another batch of short answers next week and get to work on the essays!
Ani O'Brien comes from a digital marketing background, she has been heavily involved in women's rights advocacy and is a founding council member of the Free Speech Union. This article was originally published on Ani's Substack Site and is published here with kind permission.
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