In what would have been a hotly contested selection, National has selected Jessica Rowe for the safe seat of Kaipara ki Mahurangi, vacated by Chris Penk.

She grew up locally in Riverhead, became a journalist and then did a Masters in Global Diplomacy, joining MFAT. She’s been involved in numerous global groups, and is the NZ co-chair of the Australia-NZ Leadership Forum Emerging Leaders Programme.

She was seconded to work in the Beehive to the Foreign Affairs Minister in 2022 and the Climate Change Minister in 2024. A few months ago she became a ministerial advisor to Louise Upston. She also serves as a board member to the Student Volunteer Army.

Her family also run a century-old haberdashery business based in Auckland, and Jessica has business interests in New Zealand wool and property.

An exciting addition to National’s team.

The Herald reports:

The Green Party is promising to nationalise 120 Woolworths and Foodstuffs supermarkets to create a new Government-owned supermarket, KiwiMart, if elected.

The party says the Parliamentary Library costed the policy at $2.8 billion, comprising the cost of nationalising 120 stores and two distribution centres at $1.3b, with a further $1.5b to capitalise KiwiMart as a commercially viable competitor. KiwiMart would have a mandate to prioritise affordability.

You have to laugh or cry at this policy – or both.

Can you think of a more sure fire way to lose $2.8 billion – have the Greens appoint some mates to run 120 supermarkets.

And imagine all the other restrictions the Greens will impose on them. They’ll instruct therm not to stick any foods they deem unhealthy. They’ll also instruct them to ban any non organic food, any food with a high carbon footprint etc.

The Post reports:

The draft report said the most significant example in a pattern of incorrect information from FENZ was about 30 MAN fire trucks bought in 2019 after a cold-call sales pitch. There was no procurement or competitive process for the purchase.

They purchased 30 fire trucks on the basis of a cold call sales pitch? My God. The salesperson definitely earnt their commission, but how could you do such a large purchase without a tender or competitive process?

In December 2024, the majority were apparently in operation. By February 2025, FENZ confirmed none were operational and were not expected to be delivered until September that year. By January 2026 the committee was told 14 were handed over and staff were undergoing training. Then, in March, it was confirmed none were operational and the first 16 were expected to be in operation by the end of the financial year.

“None of the 30 appliances were in operational service during this inquiry, nearly seven years after the MAN cab and chassis units were purchased,” the report said.

So once again we seem to have a government entity that can’t tell the truth to Parliament.

“It is becoming increasingly difficult to understand what is intentional misinformation, and what is unintended errors due to FENZ representatives not fully knowing or understanding their own organisation,” a draft committee opinion said.

So the choice is incompetence or malice, or both!

Henry Cooke writes:

This week showcased the unfortunately strong case for depoliticising political decisions.

First, a group of politicians in Cabinet made a regrettable call that some of them were clearly regretting as they made it – delaying fuel tax hikes, yet again. The political case for putting off fuel taxes going up is strong, especially with the Opposition promising it, but Transport Minister Chris Bishop made quite clear that the economic case does not stack up, given construction costs have risen 45% since 2020, while fuel taxes have stayed flat, meaning every bit of politically untouchable road spending has come instead from general taxation or the bond markets. It would benefit these politicians greatly if these decisions could be made by someone else, with Cabinet only intervening to stop rises, rather than create them in the first place.

This would be sensible. The failure to lift fuel taxes means that rather than road users pay for roads, they are being subsidised out of general taxation. I am a believer in user pays. I absolutely understand though the politics of not wanting to increase petrol tax when petrol prices are so high, due to the Middle East conflict.

Ideally petrol tax (and road user charges) should adjust automatically to match road/transport spending. I am quite happy to pay more, if it means we get roads like Transmission Gully, Kapiti Expressway etc.

The Herald reports:

A woman who murdered her two children, stuffed their bodies into suitcases and abandoned them in a storage unit has had seven years taken off the time she must spend behind bars.

Hakyung Lee is still subject to a life sentence, but her minimum non-parole period has been cut from 17 years to 10.

The reduction has been made after the Court of Appeal noted there was a “stark” disparity between her sentence and that given to Lauren Dickason, another mother who murdered her children.

Dickason is serving a sentence of 18 years for killing her three daughters, but is eligible to apply for parole after only six years.

The disparity between the sentences is stark, because the facts of the cases were starkly different. Both very sad cases with mothers killing their children, but Lee’s offending was far worse.

Dickason smothered her children. She was rightfully found guilty of murder. But she did not flee the scene or deny what she did.

Lee poisoned her children. She stuffed their bodies into suitcase and hid them in a storage container. She left the country on a business class flight and changed her name. When arrested and extradited she denied she did it.

This makes her offending quite different to Dickason who never covered up what she did. Dickason was given a relatively lenient sentence, but that doesn’t justify knocking seven years off Lee’s sentence.

Top 70 Schools: University Entrance (UE) for LEAVERS

Three notes:

– The leavers data includes all students who begin a school year and leave during, or at the end of the year, from any Year level – and don’t enroll in another NZ school.

– The implication here is not that UE is the only valid school qualification – but it is the one that provides the most future options and, on average students leaving school with it earn significantly more:
(“Modelling done by the Ministry of Education in 2024 of earnings at age 30 showed income premiums for those attaining a Level 2 qualification, a Level 3 qualification or for meeting the requirements for University Entrance (UE). These were around $10,000 higher for learners with a Level 2 or Level 3 qualification and $23,000 higher for learners with UE compared to those with no qualifications.”: www.educationcounts.govt.nz/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/208072/Indicator-NCEA-Level-3-2025.pdf)

– This list does not necessarily define NZ’s “best” schools and, in a future post, I will look at those improving fast. National mean was 42.8%.

For those who want the full data set:

The seventeen sheets cover:

1. Base data by School Number

2. Base data by EQI

3. Listed by Size

4. Listed by L2 NCEA for leavers 2022 – 2025

5. Listed by L3 NCEA for leavers 2020 – 2025

6. Listed by UE for leavers 2018 – 2025

7. Listed by L3 NCEA to UE for leavers gap – 2028 – 2025

8. Listed by student retention until 17yo 2018 – 2025

9. Listed by Progression to L7+ degree study 2019 – 2024

10. Listed by UE results in EQI 10ths – 2021 – 2025

11. Listed by UE results with EQI coded – 2021 – 2025 (highlighted those doing well from higher EQI situations)

12. STATE only: Listed by UE results with EQI coded – 2021 – 2025 

13. National Measures – Attendance & UE Means by EQI 10ths (2022 – 2025)

14. Broad Sector Measures – Overall, Ethnicity, Gender, School Governance, School Type, Geographical Area.

15. Boys’ School Groups (Super 8, South Island) – UE and Retention 2024 – 2025.

16. UE Data for 59 Impressive Improvers – 2023 – 2025.

17. Data Summary and Goal Setting Sheet for Schools to Use. 

If you order the data for professional use I will send it immediately (with an invoice that can be paid in your payments cycle). The cost is $400+ GST.

For private use – a donation is a good thing – in recognition of the work and value.

[email protected]

I have now completed 14 electorate race profiles on my Patreon (paywalled). They are from Invercargill to Waimakariri.

So far I have:

• Safe National: 5
• Likely National: 2
• Leans National: 1
• Too Close Too Call: 1
• Leans Labour: 1
• Safe Labour: 4

The next two will be Kaikoura and Nelson, and then we move to the North Island.

Audrey Young writes:

Te Pāti Māori not only released a radical Treaty of Waitangi policy this week that would upend New Zealand’s democracy as we know it, co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer said the whole policy was a bottom line, meaning it was non-negotiable.

That means Te Pāti Māori would not sign up to a centre-left Government unless it agreed to its policy, and that is the crucial factor. That’s not only a coalition killer, it will make it less likely the parties of the left are elected.

You’d expect Te Pāti Māori policy to be radical and unlike any other party’s. You’d expect the party to champion the Mātike Mai report on constitutional change and make some gains in any coalition agreement.

But to suggest that a 3% party should impose an unelected Te Tiriti of Waitangi Commission with authority over the Government to overturn or prevent Cabinet decisions that it believes breach the Treaty is off the planet.

To suggest that it would be non-negotiable is unfathomable.

To be very clear, TPM’s non-negotiable bottom line is the end of democratic parliamentary sovereignty in NZ. This is what a change of government could deliver.

The UK Government has published a guide for asylum seekers who are living in the UK while awaiting a decision. A summary of the booklet is:

You should not rape women. You should not try to have sex with someone who is asleep, drunk, or unable to consent clearly.

You should not have sex with children. You should not sexually harass strangers. You should not beat your wife, tell her what to wear, or control where she goes. 

You should not physically or verbally abuse your partner. You should not prevent women from working, studying, or leaving the house. 

And when you are in public spaces, you should not make sexual comments, whistle or make kissing noises. You should not follow someone, or block their path.

And they wonder why there is a backlash!

I have blogged previously on how the Te Pati Maori plan to deliberately engineer an overhang for the left is a very bad idea. It is basically trying to engineer a scenario where you can form a government despite winning fewer votes than the opposing parties.

Some people, such as Nick Mowbray, have said one should try and do the same on the right.

This is a very very very bad idea, for numerous reasons. Let me go through them.

1. This would mean National has no List MPs at all. That means you would replace Nicola Willis, Paul Goldsmith, possibly Chris Bishop with whoever is ranked No 17 or 15 on the NZ First or ACT party list. If you think that will make for a stronger centre right Government, you’re out of your mind.
2. It would also be profoundly undemocratic. The public will have a revulsion to any government that gets formed despite winning fewer votes than the opposition.
3. It creates an arms race, where all parties will then try to manipulate the system – Labour could try the same with Greens and TOP. You’ll end up with absolute chaos.
4. It permanently weakens National. If National is reduced to an electorate only party, with no List MPs, then its ability to bring talented people such as Tim Groser, Steven Joyce etc in is gone.
5. It treats National, NZ First and ACT as interchangeable parties. The fewer seats National has, and the more NZ First has, then the fewer policies National will get to implement – so expect lots more money for horse racing and MFAT, and no chance of plugging the deficit to get out of debt

The way you get a centre-right government is to have more people give their party vote to either National, ACT or NZ First, than to Labour, Greens, Te Pati Maori or TOP. It’s that simple.

If you want more National Party policies and Ministers, then choose National. If you want more ACT Party policies and Ministers, choose ACT. If you want more NZ First Party policies and Ministers, choose NZ First. But do not vote for ACT and NZ First if you actually want National Party policies and Ministers, on the basis of a cunning overhang plan. It won’t work, and will only damage National.

ACT have proposed a number of good constitutional ideas. They are:

Add to the Constitution Act 1986:

• Parliament is sovereign;
• the rule of law is fundamental; and
• all New Zealanders are equal before the law.

The Constitution Act is not supreme law. So putting these principles in there doesn’t impact any particular court decisions, but it is an important assertion of democratic values.

ACT will add property rights to the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, giving stronger protection to your home, farm, business, and other property.

The Bill of Rights Act is also not supreme law, but it does have significant impact. Courts need to find a BORA compliant interpretation where possible when deciding cases. So including property rights in the BORA will significantly strengthen property rights. It won’t make property rights the only factor in a case, but it will make them more important – which is good. Property rights are the reasons some countries have economies 10 times stronger than others. They matter.

We will amend the Legislation Act 2019 to ensure statutes mean what Parliament enacted, read in the context of the time they were passed, and so that judge-made presumptions can resolve ambiguity but cannot override clear statutory language.

This is the correct way to respond to judicial over-reach – not attacking judges, but by proving a statutory guide to interpretation.

ACT will stop governments writing vague Treaty clauses into law and leaving courts and officials to decide what they mean.

The more certain the law is, the better it is for everyone (except lawyers!).

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.