The Breaking Views blog is administered by the New Zealand Centre for Political Research at NZCPR.com. The views expressed are those of the author alone.
News: Te Kāika’s $1.3m loss is the bill for years of soft contract monitoring Te Kāika, the Dunedin health and social services provider, has posted a $1.3m loss in its latest audit, with revenue from government grants and contracts down by nearly $4m in a year. Government probes are still running.
The coalition government has passed legislation under urgency removing voting rights for non-elected members on council committees, directly impacting the Auckland Māori Statutory Board.
While the fundamental argument rests on democratic accountability, that only elected representatives accountable to ratepayers should hold voting power, serious questions remain over how this change was delivered. Auckland Council leadership claims Minister Simon Watts assured them removing these voting rights was off the table, only to see the policy pushed through Parliament weeks later.
In this episode, Duncan Garner is joined by regular panelists Maurice Williamson and Ashley Church to analyze the governance decision, the ratepayer funding behind these boards, and the political fallout. They also look at the broader election campaign, poll numbers, and how major parties are navigating coalition politics heading into polling day.
Election 2026: Three polls, two leaders, and absolutely no clarity
‘Tis the season of polls and 3 were released this week. The RNZ-Reid Research poll had Labour on 30.8%, National on 25.9%, the Greens on 14.8%, New Zealand First on 10.6%, ACT on 9%, and Opportunity on 5.5%. The 1News-Verian poll told a slightly different story, with National ahead of Labour at 29% to 28%, the Greens on 16%, New Zealand First on 10%, ACT on 9%, and Opportunity on 7%. Notably both put Opportunity in the position of potentially deciding the next government.
Kisses of death The Nats are planting on their party and ordinary New Zealanders’ prospects
The National Party is repeating an ordained-from-on-high mantra that New Zealand voters must two-ticks National at the next general i.e., give both their electorate and party votes to the nosediving Nats.
That voting, they say, is the best way to help ensure another National-led coalition Government. At the National Party’s campaign launch on Sunday 27 September, ex-National Party Prime Minister John Key cajoled voters to two-ticks Nats and labelled all New Zealanders who are contemplating voting otherwise “stupid”. Two-ticks Nats is therefore clearly official, mandated Nats messaging, which campaign manager Simeon Brown repeated on media outlet The Platform (where PM Luxon refuses to appear) on Wednesday, 7 October.
Britain has already spent more this year switching wind farms off and gas plants on than it did throughout last year. The bill: £1.51bn. Energy suppliers, meanwhile, warn of the worst winter crisis since 2022. Labour’s promise of cheaper energy looks increasingly expensive to deliver.
One of the more absurd questions to emerge in the Leaders Debate on Tuesday 6 October focused upon the morality of wealth and whether it was morally acceptable to be a billionaire. The absurdity continued into the “Futures” debate the next evening.
In my view the question should have been rejected at the outset. To ask whether being a billionaire is acceptable or moral assumes wealth needs moral permission, as if the default is guilt.
This election is highlighting yet another war being fought on the ideological battleground that is education. Charter schools, as they operate now, are in the sights of Labour because they're doing something different. To be fair, Labour's never liked the idea of schools operating under their own curriculum. Nothing new there. As Chris Hipkins told Mike Hosking this morning, they're all for new ideas in education, so long as the schools follow the party line.
I wrote this column about MMP 18 years ago and wouldn’t change a word. Some of the references are dated (United Future, the Tight Five, Alamein Koopu) but the system remains as flawed now as it was then.
This year, in case it has escaped your attention, is an election year. And as with every election since 1996, it will be conducted under the Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) system.
This year's NZSIS Security Threat Environment report lists many threats facing New Zealand. But one of the biggest is not on its list: the Government has more useful intelligence than ever before, yet it is not digesting that intelligence fast enough to matter.
Ministers need faster briefings that turn intelligence into policy choices before events move on. To achieve this, Cabinet requires a decision-support process fit for today.
Human beings have a tendency to blame and punish others for their misfortunes.
The ancient Greeks turned this tendency into a ritual called pharmakos. When plague, famine or another disaster struck a city, its people drove one of their own out to purge their misfortune. Victims of pharmakos had done nothing to cause the calamity, although they were usually considered socially undesirable.
The election campaign has revived this ancient ritual.
If people had used the March 15th Christchurch mosque attacks to vilify the victims, there would have been national and international outrage.
But since Hamas invaded Israel three years ago, torturing, raping and imprisoning innocent people of all ages, it’s the victims who have been vilified with Jews all over the world subject to verbal and physical attacks.
The attacks have been minimised and those who took part in the atrocities excused, even supported.
News: Ngāti Whātua contacts McLaren over Remuera and Muriwai trademark bid An international supercar firm says it “deeply respects” New Zealand’s cultural heritage after applying to trademark two Māori place names in Auckland.
But Ngāti Whātua says “no one has spoken to us” about the application by British company McLaren. Māori leaders have now contacted the carmaker after being alerted to the legal bid by the Herald.
The video below discusses "The aim of our national system of education is development—intellectual, moral, and physical". These are the words of the Otago inspectors in 1899. Episode 5 is about the key role of the remarkable men who were the school inspectors.
......(And why the process is not what Parliament laid out)
This article was first published in LawNews on 8 October 2026. It is part of a series on how the New Zealand Supreme Court has upset the balance of the constitution by straying out of its lane – and what can be done about it.
Appointments to the High Court, the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court come down to a list of no more than three names. Who decides which names make the list is not straightforward, even if you have read the relevant statute.
......even if a majority of submissions are opposed
Call a kaumatua and ask for a new name to be “gifted”.
That’s our advice to Green MP Julie Anne Genter, who is miffed about the name the Electoral Commission has given to the electorate which she hopes to represent in the next Parliament.
Names that have been “gifted” by local Maori have a strong chance of being adopted by public authorities.
This came to mind recently when EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen got cosy with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney at her 2026 state of the union address over Canada becoming an “associate member” of the European Union. If it’s good enough for them, why not us Kiwis?
Socrates is known for his claim that the unexamined life is not worth living. What did he mean by that, and what implications does this have?
I have spent thousands of hours counselling others, often young people. I have been struck by an explosion in the number of young people (and not so young people) who seem devoid of direction, desperate for certainty, lost in the convenience of dogma.
Last month, a member of the public filed a formal complaint against Massey University’s Distinguished Professor Peter Schwerdtfeger that raises a fundamental question: Are university staff allowed to publicly criticise aspects of Māori culture — whether spiritual beliefs, tikanga, language, life choices or history — without attracting official investigation or censure?
The complainant sent a 3100-word missive to the Vice-Chancellor in a belated response to five columns the professor had co-written three years ago that discussed university funding, decolonisation and mātauranga Māori.
When the Treaty of Waitangi settlement process was introduced by Norman Kirk’s Labour Government in 1975, it was framed as a means of dealin...
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