Chris Hipkins Is Right
Chris Hipkins is not Jacinda Ardern. His small bore policies may not even reward Labour in 2026 vote share. But 2026 is the right time for the Chris Hipkins school of politics.
Chris Hipkins is not Jacinda Ardern. His small bore policies may not even reward Labour in 2026 vote share. But 2026 is the right time for the Chris Hipkins school of politics.
This is the diesel election and we need the fastest way possible out of it.
Damien O’Connor has a unique chance to wrest the safe seat of Waitaki off National’s Miles Anderson.
Remember when the leader of the National Party made sure everyone could see his MAGA hat in the background? Not even Winston Peters would be so foolish now.
A review of its behaviour over time shows that National can’t be trusted with your Kiwisaver.
We are witnessing a full-scale trade war between Canada and the United States and there’s every sign it will get much, much worse.
Plenty of politicians will seek credit when it opens, but none of them will have lifted a spade. The reason New Zealand’s largest infrastructure project exists is because over 1700 workers actually built it.
Anyone remember it was just a year ago that businesses and government politicians were crying about the loss of natural gas availability?
Kiwibank are proposing to buy TSB Bank, before Heartland get it.
Dolly Parton was raised in poverty but excelled not only as a musician but also as a humanitarian. What she has left behind is social progress any left leaning government would be proud of.
There is now a 50-50 chance that the government will change in November 2026, and Labour must have the plan to fully shift power beyond Parliament. This is how you do it.
In the week that the Prime Minister offended small business, unemployment rose to 170,000 and over 6% in the North Island, and the Reserve Bank continues to raise interest rates, Labour showed, again, why the public knows they are better for small business than any other party.
In a 2026 election beset already by bombast and hyperbole, is the big-policy-first approach of the left still working?
The very worst crisis is the one from which you learn nothing. New Zealand has not had an economic stagnation and housing market price decline this bad since the 1970s.
The Green Party’s Kiwipower policy has a lot of similarities to the policy that the Greens and Labour jointly launched in the 2014 election. It will again be major issue in this election.
It is no longer a trivial thing that a person makes their fortune in the world and still chooses to invest and stay in the land of their childhood, New Zealand. For this, and many other good reasons, we can all be proud of Sam Neill.
Minister of Transport Chris Bishop has now finally admitted that National’s 2023 election promises in transport were “very ambitious, ” and pushed many of them into simply future unfunded ideas, at devastating economic cost.
There is growing local opposition to the prospect of open cast mining in the Central Otago approved by the Fast Track process.
Electricity and Data Centres are a major problem and opportunity for New Zealand.
This is simply your space to react to the hyperbole, the outrages, the theatre of this coalition government’s election year budget. Buckle in.
There are still those who pine, from the readership of Jacinda Ardern’s biography, for a state that is perfectly kind, does everything with speed and authority, and brims with patrician wisdom for us all. Her 1.5 terms held many instances in which the state operated on the extremes of control to respond to massive crises.
Wellington is being deliberately targeted by National and it is destroying the third largest region of New Zealand.
Anyone who thinks that New Zealand won’t be touched by the same rapid democratic pessimism as we see in our most comparable democracies, is like those who thought COVID could be stopped from reaching us.
Superannuation is the ultimate Don’t Go There of New Zealand politics. But unless this benefit becomes means tested rather than subsidises rich asset-hoarding old people, it is going to sink every other part of the government.
Following threats against Canada, Greenland, Denmark and engaging in attacks on Iran, Venezuela, Latin America, Nigeria, Syria and Iraq Donald Trump has now attacked the Pope.
What if Donald Trump is right and the West should reopen the Strait of Hormuz?
This government has an appalling record of large scale business closures, which continue to damage the careers of thousands of New Zealand workers.
In absence of a concrete leadership plan from this government to address the impending oil supply crisis, this post is for us to simply note down what actions we are taking ourselves.
In the short and medium term, what should this government do as a plan?
A prime minister who does not understand how vulnerable New Zealand’s economy is to a Middle Eastern war as we have now, is a Prime Minister who should be removed from office.
Trump’s attack on Iran has a high risk of turning into another Afghanistan in which the United States was utterly humiliated.
There is no evidence of immediate improvement in our economy, or of this government improving it.
Ten months to go and there is no political party currently countering the sustained rise of New Zealand First.
The attack on the NZ Reserve Bank is lock step with Trump.
The merger of many functions of the central public sector concerned with cities, the environment, housing and urban development, and transport, was announced in the week before Christmas and is now underway. There’s plenty of good on the face of it.
Tim Shadbolt’s passing shows what it’s like when a bona fide radical activist gets into power for long enough to make a permanent difference.