The Herald reports:

The Green Party is refusing to apologise after one of its MPs made a false claim about a National MP in the House, with a clip of the comment racking up more than one million views. 

National’s Northland MP Grant McCallum is requesting an apology from Green MP Tamatha Paul after she incorrectly claimed he had bought a house in Wellington to take advantage of an accommodation allowance given to MPs. …

“Let’s talk about the National and New Zealand First MPs” Paul said. “Including Grant McCallum, who bought a house in Wellington, so they can pay themselves the accommodation allowance while taxpayers pay their mortgage off.” 

Clips of the speech were posted by Paul to TikTok and Instagram, with the former version attracting more than one million views. 

McCallum corrected the record in the House, denying he had purchased a property in Wellington and was paying it off with the accommodation allowance. …

“I did buy another home in Paihia. The reason is simple. It was so I had somewhere to stay when I was working in the mid and far north of my electorate. I do not rent it out,” the post said. 

He said his own investment in the property saved taxpayers money because he didn’t need to stay in motels when he travelled to the Far North.

How hard is it to just apologise and say you got it wrong? Her false statement has been seen by one million people and she doesn’t even have the decency to say sorry for it.

Incidentally Paul lives in an electorate which takes around 20 minutes to cross, and is a tiny 144 sq kms. McCallum’s electorate is almost 100 times larger at 11,300 sq kms and can take six hours to cross.

UPDATE: Paul didn’t just get it wrong about one MP, but at least four MPs, yet still won’t apologise.

A post by PaulL, commenter and occassional poster.

Noting DPF’s post on TPM overhang, I’ll make some comment on a proposal I saw on Twitter (X) from Liam Hehir. His point is that the overhang problem arises from having two votes, and from the potential of splitting those votes. He suggests keeping MMP, but going back to a single vote – your vote for your electorate MP would then be counted once in selecting the electorate, and separately for the party to elect the list.

It took a bit of thinking for me to see where he’s going with this. It would mean that you can’t have a party that gets lots of electorates (therefore lots of electorate votes) but very few list votes – since they’re the same vote. No doubt the numbers could still throw up some small anomalies, but it’d be a hell of a lot closer.

The downside would be if you are looking to vote for a minor party that has no chance of winning your local electorate. For example, you live in Rangitikei but like ACT. You can still vote for your local ACT candidate (thereby giving ACT your list vote), but they have no chance of being elected. You effectively would get no say on who your local MP is.

My proposition to extend his would be to allow a form of STV as well. This would mean:
1. You have one ranked vote. Your #1 pick for electorate and for the party need to be the same. In my example above, in Rangitikei you rank ACT and Andrew Hoggard #1

2. You can then rank electorate candidates as you see fit. So you might rank the National candidate next, then NZF etc

3. If your #1 electorate candidate is eliminated then your electorate vote goes to your second choice and so on

4. If your #1 party don’t make the 5% threshold, then your party vote would move to the party of your second ranked electorate candidate.

From a voter perspective, you just rank your electorate candidates (and their parties) in the order you like. It’s relatively easy (but still more complex than a single vote). From a counting perspective it’s a pain, but that’s what computers are for. In a proportionality sense, I think it becomes hard to end up manipulating things to create an overhang – your electorate and list vote are now tied together.

Overhang is only created when your electorate vote elects an electorate candidate to whom you didn’t give your party vote. This prevents that scenario – if your #1 candidate gets elected, then by definition they have met the threshold, so your party vote will go to the same party. There’s maybe a scenario where, in an electorate, lots of people give their #1 vote to an ACT candidate, and their #2 vote to TPM. TPM get no party votes, but their electorate MP could still get in. However, in that scenario it seems to me that it’s suddenly likely the ACT candidate wins the electorate – it would be very hard to reliably game this.

Of course, another option is to just change to STV with multi-member electorates. It gives a similar result, with a bit more of a bias towards larger parties, which isn’t necessarily bad.

The Post reports:

The country’s largest gas user Methanex will close its Taranaki methanol production facilities next year saying New Zealand’s declining natural gas supply made continued operations unsustainable.

Labour’s decision to ban gas and oil exploration has not just cost 150 jobs, but is one of the stupidest decision of recent decades.

The Iran crisis has shown how vulnerable we are to relying on importing our energy needs from overseas. Their exploration ban has meant we have to import gas. They put ideological purity ahead of NZ businesses and consumers. And we’re all paying the price.

The Herald reports:

Labour’s Ginny Andersen admits she wrongly claimed the National Land Transport Fund doesn’t pay for road maintenance during a live radio exchange in which she also attacked National minister Mark Mitchell. 

Appearing on The Mike Hosking Breakfast on Newstalk ZB on Wednesday morning, Andersen claimed maintenance on roads wasn’t funded by the NLTF. 

The NLTF funds road maintenance with an allocation for state highway and local road pothole prevention. 

Andersen repeatedly told Mitchell that money came from a “different budget”.

“You don’t even know what you’re talking about. That is not that budget,” the Labour MP said. 

As Mitchell said maintenance money did come from the NLTF, Andersen said: “No, it’s not. It’s not. It’s a separate fund. You need to go check that. It’s a separate fund.”

She said if Mitchell didn’t understand the budgets and “you want to be credible on financial things, then you’re really kidding yourself”.

It takes a special skill to not be wrong, but to be so certain you are right that you attack the other person as not being credible, when in fact they were 100% right, and you were 100% wrong.

Transport Minister Chris Bishop said Andersen’s comments went to “the heart of Labour’s economic credibility”. 

“Ginny Andersen’s comments beggar belief. First she claimed the land transport fund doesn’t pay for road maintenance (which is completely wrong) then after accepting that was wrong, she bizarrely continued to insist there was another ‘separate fund’. There is not.”

This wasn’t an area of technical specialist knowledge. This was a pretty basic thing to get so wrong.

Stuff reports:

A long-serving school IT manager was sacked after joking to a student involved in a car crash with a cyclist that he “should have backed up and finished him off”.

Kevin Whelan had worked at Lindisfarne College for 23 years when, in August 2024, he showed two students CCTV footage of a crash on school grounds.

The footage showed a car – driven by one of the students – rounding a corner before colliding with another student on a bicycle, who suffered minor injuries and was taken to hospital.

Whelan said the student driver appeared stressed and worried he might be in trouble, so he offered to show him the footage in an effort to put his mind at ease.

While replaying the 28-second clip, Whelan remarked that the student “should have backed up and finished him off”.

The joke was in bad taste (attempt at black humour) and ill advised, especially to a student. But he had worked for the school for 23 years without incident, and dismissal seems rather harsh. I’m surprise the ERA found the dismissal justified.

Te Pati Maori are trying to use the Māori seats to engineer overhang seats, to try and lock the centre right out of power – even if they win more votes. But recent law changes means the potential impact of this strategy could be huge.

At present there are seven Māori seats. If TPM won all seven, and got fewer than 0.4% PV that would be a seven seat overhang. It means that you would need 64 seats to form a Government instead of 61.

But if they are allowed to do this without consequence, then at the next boundary setting it could be even worse. The law recently changed so that Māori can change rolls at whim (except just before an election). This means that TPM could campaign for every person of Māori descent to go onto the Māori roll just before the boundaries are set, to get more Māori seats. Then they can transfer back off it a few weeks later. This is why the law change was a very bad thing – it encourages tactical roll changes. When you have to stay on the roll you choose for the next five years, you are less inclined to play games.

There are currently 256,000 NZers of Māori descent on the general roll and 305,000 on the Māori roll. If the vast majority swapped tactically (and most vote left so could be inclined to do so), then we could have 13 Māori electorates rather than seven. And if TPM managed to get 13 overhang seats, then you would need 67 seats to form a Government, instead of 61.

In 2008 the CR got only 64 seats. In 2011 61 seats and in 2014 62 seats. If the threshold for the CR to govern is 67 seats instead of 61, you will end up with near permanent CL government. It will be race based minority rule, which will engender a huge backlash.

Casey Costello announced:

Newly published data shows a continued decline in the sale of cigarettes and tobacco, Associate Health Minister Casey Costello said today.

“The figures are encouraging and are consistent with the long-term fall in smoking rates,” Ms Costello says.

“The latest annual tobacco returns show the volume of tobacco sold in New Zealand fell by more than 20 percent in 2025 compared with the previous year and has more than halved over the past decade. Since 2010, the volume of tobacco sold here has reduced by two-thirds and the number of cigarettes sold per capita is down nearly 80 percent.

A fall in legal tobacco sales is an excellent thing, if it means there has been a fall in smoking rates. So on the surface, this is good news. But I doubt there has been a 20% decline in smoking in the last year.

“It would be great if that reflected a corresponding decline in smoking rates, but it is likely that it is also to do with the availability of black-market cigarettes. It’s harder to encourage people to quit or use alternatives like vapes when they can get their hands on cheap cigarettes, which is why I asked Customs, Police, Health New Zealand, and the Ministry of Health to join forces to better tackle the illegal tobacco trade.”

To achieve the goal of fewer than 5% of NZers smoking, we need to tackle the growing black market.

David Cohen writes:

Right now, virtually anyone aged 18 or older can enrol if they have lived in New Zealand continuously for just 12 months and aren’t here on a visa requiring them to leave by a certain date.

So: a recent arrival, should they wish, gets a real say in who sits in Parliament or on the local council long before they are eligible to become a citizen. Even though the country asks five years of residence before citizenship, it’s apparently fine with only one year before voting.

This is bonkers.

It is bad policy.

Political pollster David Farrar makes the fairly obvious point that if people can vote without becoming citizens, some will understandably feel less urgency to take that critical final step.

I don’t want fewer people voting. I want more people becoming citizens.

It is worth noting what our own Bill of Rights Act says:

Every New Zealand citizen who is of or over the age of 18 years has the right to vote in genuine periodic elections of members of the House of Representatives, which elections shall be by equal suffrage and by secret ballot

Our own Bill of Rights Act says voting is a right that only citizens have. We may extend it to other groups, but the right falls with adult citizens.

Voters in the Western Australian state electorate of Secret Harbour just delivered a huge swing. Here’s the results.

1. One Nation 39.1% (+30.7%)
2. Labor 24.4% (-22.2%)
3. Liberal 17.3% (-7.7%)
4. Greens 7.5% (-1.3%)

The significance isn’t just the swing to one Nation, but that they won a safe Labour seat – ie they are not just picking up disaffected Coalition voters.

Now it is only a by-election, but Victoria goes to the polls in November and it will be very interesting to see how One Nation does there.

This is shocking, yet not surprising. A senior editor at CBC tells their journalists that they should not refer to 9/11 as terrorist attacks, but just as hijackings that led to crashes.

Hard to describe how much contempt one should feel at this.

Radio NZ reports:

After being caught stealing from Kmart, a recidivist shoplifter told police she could go where she wanted.

“I’m not trespassed; I was born here. I’m Tainui. I can go where I want,” Karrie-Ann Tiny Moana Lee Ngahere said.

Oh no, you can’t!

Nicola Willis has announced some changes to the student loans scheme to reward those who stay in NZ and repay the loans, and targets those who go overseas and don’t. The changes are:

• The repayment rate for NZ borrowers drops from 12% to 10%, boosting take home pay by $58 a fortnight for someone on $100k a year
• Increasing the interest rate on borrowers who move overseas from 5.6% to 6.6%
• Restricting KiwiSaver withdrawals for overseas borrowers so they can’t access it until they have paid back their student loans

A good mixture of carrot and stick.

Labour’s campaign is “Better Starts Now”. It sounds like an ad for a watch manufacturer, and in fact it is. They even have it trademarked in NZ!

Th parodies have been fun though

The headline:

Barrister says maternity leave battle added to neonatal intensive care unit stress

This makes it sound like a lawyer was being asked to go back to work when they had a week old child in neonatal care (which would be horrific if true). But what really happened is:

• A self-employed barrister (note self-employed – there is no big bad employer here) had her baby turn up early in June 2025. The baby was in NICO. She had been clearing her diary for the next ten months and asked for a client’s trial to be delayed until May 2026 (11 months time) when she would be available.
• The court set the date for March 2026. She fought against this.
• The Crown argued the trial should proceed out of fairness to the affected complainants giving evidence, and there was time for a new counsel to prepare.

I don’t think you delay a trial because the defendant’s lawyer is on maternity leave. Lawyers should arrange cover for maternity leave, just as doctors, teachers, nurses do etc.

Absolutely judges should be flexible with scheduling when it comes to clashes with other trials etc. But I don’t think one can have all proceedings involving a defendant put on hold for 12 months because their lawyer goes on maternity leave.

Shayne Currie reports:

One of the country’s more colourful legal cases has been revealed in the High Court, with media firm NZME trying to strike out a Waiheke Island woman’s claim that Hauraki radio host Jeremy Wells defamed her and breached her privacy as he impersonated Mike Hosking 12 years ago.

So this was Jeremy Wells taking the Mickey out of Mike Hosking.

This week, the High Court heard that on July 30, 2014, Wells focused his Like Mike commentary on a stoush that was unfolding on Waiheke Island between TV personality and former sports star Marc Ellis and a neighbour over Ellis’ construction of a driveway.

The Like Mike piece was quoted at various stages during Monday’s proceedings, including the opening lines: “If there’s one thing that annoys me more than even Green voters it’s silly do-gooding neighbourly nosy parkers, in particular the ones that stop you doing things on your own property.

“Marc Ellis knows all about them – he’s trying to build a driveway to his practical, unpretentious five-bedroom family bach on Waiheke and some neighbour is getting in the way. The council has granted consent so what’s the problem?

“My guess is that the complainant is either a lesbian or bi-curious, both of which spell danger. Most people who block progress on Waiheke Island are lesbians. You see, lesbians are often lesbian and by their very nature they complain. They’re often jealous, they own dogs …”

Wells, impersonating Hosking, also said: “Occasionally you’ll get a good lesbian, one that plays sports. But in my experience, which is zero when it comes to lesbians because I’ve never met one, they’re potentially terrible neighbours.”

This sounded hilarious. He is taking the Mickey out of Hosking and Marc Ellis. The part about occasionally you get a good lesbian that plays sports (remember he is saying this is what Hosking thinks or would say) is especially funny.

The Waiheke Island resident – named in news reports in 2014 as a neighbour in dispute with Ellis – took exception when she discovered a transcript of the Like Mike item on an independent and anonymous blog site more than nine years later, in October 2023.

So nine years later she discovered the transcript, and despite it not even naming her, she decided to sue for defamation!

NZME maintains that neither Wells nor anyone else at the company knew the woman’s sexuality when the segment aired, a point central to its argument that the privacy claim cannot succeed.

What this infers is that the complaining neighbour was in fact a lesbian! And she is so thin skinned she is trying to sue a decade later, over a satirical peace that wasn’t even aimed at her. Sad.

The Post reports:

The Wellington City Council is one step closer to getting the Government to axe heritage listings for four buildings, including the former General Headquarters Building (GHQ) and the old British Imperial Oil storage tank in Miramar.

Councillors agreed on Thursday to send a letter to RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop asking him to use new powers under the Resource Management Act to remove heritage protections for the GHQ building beside Pukeahu National War Memorial Park, the Miramar tank, the Karori Tunnel and the Kelburn Viaduct.

Good.

This what Hertitage NZ regards as a building needing heritage protection. Once the protection is remove, we should get permission from the owner to have a fireworks display inside it, and burn it down.

By Lucy Rogers

I found this photo in a newspaper article the other day, and I’ll never pass up the opportunity to have some good-natured fun at David Seymour’s expense:

Andrea Vance summarises what we know:

• In May 1999, an engineering and geotechnical consultant Dr Laurie Richards explicitly told council that putting campers under those over-steepened cut slopes was “imprudent” because of the high risk from fast-moving mud and rock.
• In 2005 and 2006, Avalon Industrial Services warned that a major slip could kill 21 people in one hit.
• Avalon called fir an end to earthworks, excavation and tree clearance without a full geotechnical check
• In 2005 Council ignored Avalon and trenched a fire main across the fragile hillside
• In 2019 Council felled large trees directly above the campground without an engineering review
• In 2023 and 2025 two seperate consultants recommended a Trigger Action Response Plan which is a simple operational rulebook so that if rainfall hits a set threshold, or if muddy water starts seeping from the toe, evacuations are immediate.
• The Council never did that
• Not a single hazard sign warning incoming campers

That is all bad enough to clearly identify the deaths were preventable. On the day we had people warning of the danger, but council staff did nothing.

The Council Chief Executive must resign/ Not because he is legally or morally culpable. But because it demands accountability – just we saw at Cave Creek. For years they had these reports telling them there was a risk to life, yet this never ended up on their corporate risk register. That is a failure of management, not governance.