Why 'fix' a Powerball that wasn’t broken?
Worse odds, more hooks and a smaller guarantee — and the people paying for it are not the people it pays.
Grant McLachlan
1 day ago9 min read
The poll that lands first
Jordan Williams and David Farrar have spent twenty years learning how one poll can move another. Their Taxpayers’ Union–Curia poll just did it again.
Grant McLachlan
Sep 83 min read
Why did the Herald sit on the ambassadors’ op-ed?
Moscow and Beijing wanted a commemoration. They got a quarantine.
Grant McLachlan
Sep 53 min read
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
Sep 113 min read
The one detail 1News left out
An undeclared conflict of interest doesn't stay hidden. It just waits for someone else to expose it — and turns the story into something else entirely.
Grant McLachlan
Aug 303 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
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
Aug 93 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
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
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
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
Why does the press conference now come before the disaster?
Prediction is the riskiest science in public life — but the political rewards for fronting a forecast have never been higher.
Grant McLachlan
Jun 1011 min read
Why does one poll count and another vanish?
When TOP recently cracked five percent, the newsrooms that live off polling looked the other way — just as they do when a rival wins an award.
Grant McLachlan
Jun 86 min read
Is New Zealand really the most beautiful country in the world?
We sell the world a postcard and then punish anyone who turns it over. The published record — and our own talent — tells a harder story.
Grant McLachlan - Column
Jun 74 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
Is New Zealand the best democracy money can buy?
We are almost certainly not the most corrupt country in the world. We may simply be the cheapest to influence — and the least likely to check the receipts.
Grant McLachlan - Column
Jun 26 min read
Shield or weapon? Why the new stalking law arrived already broken
Today, 26 May 2026, a new stalking offence comes into force. The bar has been lowered, the police given new powers to dispose of complaints without a court, and the records kept selectively. What could possibly go wrong?
Grant McLachlan
May 269 min read
