“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
2 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
6 days ago3 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
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
STITCH UP: New investigative podcast lays out the documentary trail behind a jury acquittal — and names names
Six-part series traces four years of complaints, staged incidents and internal police records through a former ACT Party deputy leader, two sitting Cabinet ministers and the current Police Commissioner
Grant McLachlan
Sep 214 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
Did New Zealand need AUKUS to become a target?
Professor Gehan Gunasekara warns that joining AUKUS Pillar II could turn Rocket Lab's Mahia site into a wartime target. That exposure already exists, with or without Pillar II, and that his China comparison tells only half the story.
Grant McLachlan
Aug 313 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
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
Aug 298 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
The overhang is real — and ACT saw it coming
Richard Prebble’s column this week caught up with maths this website published in April. ACT’s own campaigners are proving the point.
Grant McLachlan
Aug 283 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
Next Auckland harbour crossing needs a rethink
Chris Bishop's new business case looks like more delay. It is actually the government admitting the data behind the last one was never good enough.
Grant McLachlan
Aug 193 min read
Does Te Paati Maori’s ‘Overhang Strategy’ make sense?
Splitting the vote worked once by accident. Trying it on purpose is a very different, riskier game.
Grant McLachlan
Aug 173 min read
What would it take for National to lose Rodney?
Paul Goldsmith is weighing a switch from Epsom to Kaipara ki Mahurangi. History suggests the seat will not much care whether he fits.
Grant McLachlan
Aug 163 min read
Is fast-track backfiring on National?
Hawke’s Bay, Canterbury, Queenstown, and Auckland ratepayers are being asked to carry the infrastructure bill for growth their own councils tried to stop.
Grant McLachlan
Aug 153 min read
Why did Chris Penk knock himself out?
A building industry and defence minister called a confidence vote he could not win, lost every portfolio he held within hours, and left behind more questions about who benefits than about himself.
Grant McLachlan
Aug 128 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
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
