Are mayors playing whack-a-mole with fast track?
Councils plan where towns grow. The minister keeps letting developers pop up somewhere else.
Grant McLachlan
2 days ago3 min read
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
3 days 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
Walker’s words are worth a commission
Hamish Walker spent three and a-half hours in Queenstown traffic and wrote a column about it. By his own account, he is “selling around two houses every month” to people leaving town because of the traffic.
Grant McLachlan
Sep 33 min read
STITCH UP: Twelve Attempts. Zero Coincidences.
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
Aug 64 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
Aug 56 min read
Pegasus Brief — Treated like mushrooms
Days after 16,000 signatures were carried onto the steps of Parliament, the Government fast-tracked a motorway it says will “unlock housing” at Pegasus — then this week finally confirmed what it had spent weeks declining to confirm or deny.
Grant McLachlan
Aug 59 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
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
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
