Why fixing New Zealand's electricity market would wipe billions off the sharemarket
Contact Energy's record profit is being reported as a winter windfall. It is closer to the going rate for a market built to protect scarcity.
Grant McLachlan
1 day ago3 min read
Luxon panics and resorts to old MMP tricks
Fifty years after a fringe party decided Auckland Central, the Prime Minister is reaching for the same panic Richard Prebble once rode into Parliament.
Grant McLachlan
3 days ago3 min read
Have engineers caused the ballooning of big projects?
Blaming the profession lets the real cost driver — a broken delivery model — off the hook.
Grant McLachlan
5 days ago3 min read
The problem with MMP is Luxon, not MMP
A Prime Minister who can't manage his own coalition wants voters to fix his problem for him.
Grant McLachlan
6 days ago4 min read
Police shouldn't get to decide who never sees a judge
The Solicitor-General's Prosecution Guidelines were meant to keep politics out of criminal justice. In practice, they let police quietly bury the cases that embarrass them.
Grant McLachlan
7 days ago6 min read
Who really wins when councils scrap minimum parking rules?
Central and local government stripped car parking requirements from new developments to fix the housing crisis. It has made land more valuable, planning weaker, and streets unliveable — for residents and for the businesses whose customers can no longer find a park.
Grant McLachlan
Jul 316 min read
The tentacles of ACT: the lobbyists who never really left
A grocery lobbyist’s career move has drawn attention to one insider. Follow the money and the bylines and the network is much bigger, and it runs both ways through the Beehive.
Grant McLachlan
Jul 295 min read
Two Crown companies just spent $3 billion crossing Cook Strait separately. Why not one tunnel?
Transpower and KiwiRail are both 100% owned by the same shareholder. They didn't even talk.
Grant McLachlan
Jul 234 min read
Was Paul Henry ACT's dead cat?
The same Tuesday ACT unveiled its newest star candidate, the Herald confirmed the party’s own former president had pleaded guilty to further sex offending. Coincidence, or convenient timing?
Grant McLachlan
Jul 164 min read
The Super City failed. Why Hawke’s Bay council mergers will be a disaster.
Wellington wants Hawke’s Bay’s councils redesigned by 9 August. Auckland already ran this experiment — and the man now advising Hawke’s Bay on the redesign is the one whose mayoralty set Hastings on its debt path in the first place.
Grant McLachlan
Jul 97 min read
Is Steven Joyce still running the show?
Two boardroom rescues and a courtroom costs judgment inside five weeks have put the same handful of National-aligned names back at the centre of the party's donor world.
Grant McLachlan
Jul 85 min read
Is OneRoof talking down Jacinda's premium the night before her auction?
OneRoof ran its “celebrity homes don’t sell for more” story the night before Jacinda Ardern’s own auction — and its own numbers say otherwise.
Grant McLachlan
Jul 85 min read
How New Zealand Tourism saw stars rather than the purpose behind the Michelin Guide
The Government paid $6.3 million to bring the world's most famous restaurant guide to New Zealand, then confined its inspectors to the four cities least in need of the introduction.
Grant McLachlan
Jul 45 min read
Is Nick Smith race-baiting over Abel Tasman?
The Nelson mayor says he is defending a national park from a bill he calls the largest removal of protected land in New Zealand's history. His own post, and his own record, leave out the parts that complicate that claim.
Grant McLachlan
Jul 33 min read
The game of candidate chess in Hawke’s Bay that could decide this year’s election
This election, Hawke’s Bay won’t be the sideshow. It could even be the main event.
Grant McLachlan - Hawke's Bay Today - Column
Jun 271 min read
Are we grown up enough to be a republic?
Jacinda Ardern says New Zealand will be a republic in her lifetime. She has not said what problem it solves — or whether we are mature enough to do it well.
Grant McLachlan
Jun 226 min read
Why does it take a foreign watchdog to catch a New Zealand official?
John Edwards is the latest senior New Zealander official who rose at home and was brought to account abroad. The pattern says more about our institutions than theirs.
Grant McLachlan
Jun 205 min read
Is the Greater Auckland campaign against the Northland motorway fighting waste — or causing it?
Greater Auckland calls Warkworth to Te Hana the most expensive road the country has ever built. But picking off the single hardest stage of a staged corridor, weeks before a contract is signed, is exactly how you manufacture the incrementalism the group says it opposes.
Grant McLachlan
Jun 198 min read
TSB-Heartland deal: Did the Toi Foundation meeting make the case?
Two hours of questions in New Plymouth, and the Toi Foundation’s trustees fronted up. But the answers raised sharper doubts than the deal began with — and the most forensic case against the sale came from the bank’s own former auditor.
Grant McLachlan
Jun 188 min read
The roads we can’t afford, and a plan that will stall them anyway?
The National Infrastructure Plan is right that the country cannot pay for the roads it keeps promising. But its remedy — defer, stage, build later — is the very stop-start it was written to end.
Grant McLachlan
Jun 173 min read
