Pegasus Brief — The two rejected bids
Two groups bid to keep Pegasus operating as a golf course. One had local skin in the game. The other had twenty years of golf-industry expertise. The receivers preferred the bid that erased the course. Why didn't anyone put the two bids together?
Grant McLachlan
4 hours ago5 min read
A quagmire on a swampy battlefield: What Wolfbrook actually walked into at Pegasus
Two of New Zealand's premier residential golf courses collapsed twenty minutes apart in 2026. One is being cannibalised by a developer who has just donated to National. The other is in liquidation. The model is broken. The fix starts at Pegasus.
Grant McLachlan
1 day ago24 min read
Cannibalising Pegasus: How a 77-hectare slice of a championship course becomes a land bank
A developer has bought 77ha of Pegasus Golf Course — clubhouse, practice range, six holes — and wants it rezoned for housing. That contradicts the consent that built Pegasus, the zoning that protects it, and the reason the course exists at all.
Grant McLachlan
2 days ago15 min read
Vindicated, then banished: Three days that exposed Queenstown council’s playbook against its only watchdog
How a ratepayer-funded communications operation removed the journalist who proved it wrong — seventy-two hours before RNZ confirmed his reporting.
Grant McLachlan - Column
3 days ago12 min read
Donations don’t follow policy. Policy follows donations.
Stuff’s Glenn McConnell asked New Zealand’s biggest political donors why they give. He should have asked what they got.
Grant McLachlan - Column
4 days ago5 min read
Cutting themselves out: how two Wellington ministers engineered their own unemployment
It started with the civil servants. Then the cafés, landlords, contractors and small businesses. Willis and Bishop spent thirty months gutting Wellington. On 7 November, every Wellingtonian they hurt gets to vote — and the arithmetic is unkind.
Grant McLachlan - Column
4 days ago7 min read
Immigration is the economy, stupid!
“It’s the economy, stupid” is a phrase coined by Bill Clinton's campaign strategist James Carville in 1992, highlighting that voters prioritize their personal financial situation over all other issues. In New Zealand, immigration has been the driver of economic growth.
Grant McLachlan
5 days ago4 min read
A very natural progression
A real estate empire’s fundraiser, its donations, its former chief executive and a friendly columnist all point the same way. The pattern is the story.
Grant McLachlan - Column
6 days ago23 min read
The great butter racket: How New Zealanders pay export prices for milk we produce
A pale $0.80-per-100g American import has done what a year of inquiries couldn't: shown New Zealanders how thoroughly the butter market is rigged against them. Why the press won't say so. And why the Finance Minister won't either.
Grant McLachlan - Column
May 147 min read
Days, not decades: Auckland already has the data to settle its bridge argument
The Mayor and the Transport Minister are arguing about whether to put a bridge or a tunnel parallel to the existing harbour crossing. I crunched the data that they ignored and modelled the solution.
Grant McLachlan
May 137 min read
When the journalist is the target
How a year-old apology became a two-week pressure campaign — and how the architecture of New Zealand’s astroturf industry was used to take out a wahine Maori political editor in election year, while the Prime Minister smiled.
Grant McLachlan - Column
May 1228 min read
Marking their own homework: Why the Anti-Corruption Taskforce pilot makes the case for a truly independent agency.
The Serious Fraud Office has just audited the public sector. The most useful thing in its report is the silence about who audits the SFO.
Grant McLachlan
May 74 min read
A simpler council? Auckland tried that — and got the country's biggest bribery case.
Hawke's Bay's mayors are being asked to design something Auckland already failed to deliver. The order of operations matters more than the merger.
Grant McLachlan
May 65 min read
A generation of ambition lost?
New Zealand's brain drain has been measured to exhaustion. What the academics keep missing is that the country is not just losing people — it is losing the kind of people who refuse to play in-house.
Grant McLachlan
May 36 min read
Going out — but staying home
New Zealanders eat out as often as Melbournians and drink as much. So why are the cinemas, stadiums, concerts and racecourses emptying out? The answer is not just money. It is time, fuel, congestion and exhaustion.
Grant McLachlan
Apr 2721 min read
Stupid is as stupid does: How the Police buried a complaint, only implicating themselves
Imagine committing a serious crime in front of a judge, registrar, and Crown Prosecutor. It was all documented and the Chief Justice and Criminal Bar Association were notified. Yet, the Police covered it up, which only exposed their complicity.
Grant McLachlan
Apr 2624 min read
The naming rights fire sale
New Zealand taxpayers and ratepayers have wasted more than a billion dollars building three stadiums — and handed the corporate branding rights away for what amounts to small change. There were better options - demonstrated in Melbourne and Los Angeles - but nobody in this country took notice.
Grant McLachlan
Apr 2537 min read
The rot in New Zealand sport hosting
This is the story of an attitude problem masquerading as an economics problem.
Grant McLachlan
Apr 2416 min read
Who watches the watchmen? The slow death of New Zealand investigative journalism — and the industry that could bring it back
The lack of investigative journalism is costing New Zealanders - and it is cheaper that industries affected sponsor it.
Grant McLachlan
Apr 2313 min read
Has the ‘Butter Chicken Tsunami’ already arrived?
The data New Zealanders deserve to examine — without being shut down for asking.
Grant McLachlan
Apr 226 min read
