The octopus that turned on National
Jordan Williams started as an apprentice to the men who wrote the playbook. Twenty years later he runs the octopus they trained him to build — and its tentacles now reach into National’s own polling and the Prime Minister’s “captain’s calls.” This is how the apprentice became the thing his masters never controlled.
Grant McLachlan
3 days ago13 min read
Were Auckland's 1950s planners right about the Eastern Motorway all along?
Greater Auckland's own archive of harbour crossing options shows the road the city chose not to build. What has gone up in its place — a bus corridor here, a shared path there, a stalled industrial link somewhere else — is proof of what was lost, not a substitute for it.
Grant McLachlan
6 days ago8 min read
Was Jeremy Wells right about Mike Hosking all along?
A decade-old radio parody is now Exhibit A in a High Court defamation case — and the media company trying to bury it owns the target, the impersonator, and the columnist covering the trial.
Grant McLachlan
Aug 289 min read
If social media is addictive enough to sue over, is property media too?
Four American states are on trial against Meta this week over algorithms engineered to hook children. New Zealand has spent three decades building a media, political and financial machine that runs the same trick on adults — and calls it aspiration.
Grant McLachlan
Aug 2222 min read
The “I know a guy” threshold: How Brick Bay Lodge was fast-tracked on the vaguest of details
A 45-suite luxury lodge on a Snells Beach wine farm won referral to the fast-track process while Auckland Council said the economic case did not stack up — and the public only found out after the Minister had already signed off.
Grant McLachlan
Aug 2113 min read
Is Rocket Lab a vehicle for US foreign policy in New Zealand?
A Kiwi rocket company launches from the world's most isolated coastline, but its money, its biggest customers, and increasingly its purpose, now come from the Pentagon.
Grant McLachlan
Aug 106 min read
What did Sam Neill see that New Zealand still hasn’t fixed?
Thirty-one years after Cinema of Unease, the industry Sam Neill helped build still hasn’t decided whether it wants to tell its own story or rent out its scenery.
Grant McLachlan
Aug 47 min read
Was New Zealand capitalism's soft underbelly?
China wrote down the industries it intended to dominate, then found a small, indebted trading partner willing to hand them over one contract at a time.
Grant McLachlan
Aug 38 min read
Why is Queenstown asking the public to fix a mess it approved?
A resort town let ribbon development swallow its only roads, blacklisted the journalist who exposed its wastewater failures, and is now asking the public for ideas on how to fix what its own decisions caused.
Grant McLachlan
Aug 213 min read
Why doesn't humility make good cinema?
A hundred veteran interviews across nine countries suggest New Zealand and Britain's self-effacing war traditions haven't earned Hollywood's respect — they've earned its silence, and that isn't only about modesty.
Grant McLachlan
Jul 307 min read
Will backlash against donors decide this election?
Imagine gloating about donating tens of thousands of dollars to National, ACT and the Taxpayers' Union. Imagine paying thousands more for a selfie at the Prime Minister's table. Then imagine becoming the reason voters can't stand the government you paid for.
Grant McLachlan
Jul 1211 min read
Are the Greens dumbing down conservation?
From Vienna’s first menagerie to Fiordland’s stoat-plagued islands, conservation has always demanded hard, unsentimental choices. Green politics is increasingly unwilling to make them.
Grant McLachlan
Jul 212 min read
How noise drowns democracy
How political noise is engineered to silence debate and freeze the vote.
Grant McLachlan
Jun 289 min read
Whose land is it — and why settle the question now?
The Conservation Amendment Bill reopens two centuries of argument about who owns the back country and what it is for — and it does so in an election year, by a government whose biggest donors deal in land.
Grant McLachlan
Jun 258 min read
We’ve seen this muppet show before
Matthew Hooton’s move to the editor’s chair at The Post follows a script already written in Washington — and it lands at the moment New Zealand’s newsrooms have never been cheaper to capture.
Grant McLachlan
Jun 1611 min read
Whose bank is it to sell?
Taranaki is being asked to bless a $620 million deal that hands its last locally owned bank to a listed company — at a discount, with the seller lending the buyer the money. New Zealand has watched this story before.
Grant McLachlan
Jun 1412 min read
An independent anti-corruption commission: who keeps blocking it?
Four parties have demanded one for three decades. Journalists and watchdogs back them. So why does an anti-corruption commission never survive a coalition negotiation?
Grant McLachlan
Jun 1311 min read
Should Trump pardon Kim Dotcom?
A president who built his second term on the word “lawfare” has freed a parade of crypto convicts. The man who fits his own logic most cleanly is sitting in New Zealand, waiting to be put on a plane.
Grant McLachlan
Jun 67 min read
How to takeover TVNZ and RNZ with pocket change
Stuff was bought for $1. Newshub’s TV news operation was absorbed into it. NZME was infiltrated by Jim Grenon. Is TVNZ and RNZ next?
Grant McLachlan
Jun 310 min read
Who is the state really housing?
How New Zealand’s great housing experiment turned from sheltering the poor to subsidising the people who profit from them.
Grant McLachlan
May 3010 min read
