“Choosing the tallest dwarf”: The rot in New Zealand politics
Every serious failure in this country has already been diagnosed, costed and written up by people the taxpayer hired to do it. What is on offer on 7 November is not a set of remedies. It is a choice of brands.
Grant McLachlan
5 days ago20 min read
When National's plan cannibalises its marginal voters
The party promising to lend you 95 per cent of a house is the same party working to make that house worth less.
Grant McLachlan
Sep 83 min read
How Trump will decide New Zealand’s election
The road to the Beehive now runs through the Strait of Hormuz — and the Oval Office.
Grant McLachlan
Sep 33 min read
Four spokesmen, one script, no answer on the bill
Bridges, Hartwich, Abernethy and now Genesis’s own chief executive have all run the same defence this winter. Watch what happens whenever someone asks them a number.
Grant McLachlan
Aug 313 min read
ACT’s small-state pitch is a big-state con
Andrew Ketels wants a leaner public service. Follow the money and it is his own client base that keeps getting bigger.
Grant McLachlan
Aug 234 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
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
Aug 113 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 does New Zealand spend more than almost anyone, and build so badly?
The familiar excuses — too little money, too few people, an awkward geography — do not explain why New Zealand’s infrastructure is late, incremental and over budget. The real cause is a system built to be defensible rather than right, and nothing this government has planned will change it.
Grant McLachlan
Jun 2810 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
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
The Bullshit Budget: who actually believes these numbers?
Arbitrary cuts, heroic forecasts and no map to the surplus — a Budget engineered to win a week of headlines before anyone does the maths.
Grant McLachlan
May 313 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
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
May 2124 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
May 197 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
May 174 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
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
