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6:00 am, December 9th, 2025 - 29 comments
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Open mike is your post.
For announcements, general discussion, whatever you choose.
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Step up to the mike …
Pricks and dicks are political nowadays: https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/04-12-2025/from-jerks-to-dicks-to-tables-the-political-debate-is-really-on-one
I suspect the lord told Heather that he had better things to think about than that. Her righteousness out-performed Seymour’s though, reminding us once again that politics supplies the media with a persistent stream of light entertainment.
Aotearoa has entered summer with a slight shift to the right in public sentiment: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/581219/government-still-has-the-numbers-to-stay-in-power-in-new-poll
I posted here last night to the effect that disgust with the TMP implosion unfortunately contaminated the Greens. Sheeple don't like flakey radicals. Sensible, eh? If Chloe was on the ball, the Greens would already have issued a press release explaining the drop.
or it's an anomaly, which happens, and we should look at the trend instead.
Greens dropping 4 and Labour going up 3 looks like a normal jostling of centre left vote.
also
https://x.com/southstarbrew/status/1997904105860411426
You're right, the shift of around 3% is the stat margin of error size so it may prove ephemeral in the long run. Puts the onus on TMP & Greens to shape up promptly to counter-influence the trend. Framing the poll as a non-event would be a tactical error imo but equally there's no need for paranoia.
Except that it’s not the margin of error for the Greens’ statistic (i.e., 7%), which is ca. 1.6%.
I think that reading is a bit too neat.
These shifts are well within the margin of error for a standard poll, so you don’t want to over-interpret a couple of points either way.
You also have to read polls alongside the fundamentals and the context. We’re heading into Christmas: cost-of-living stress might get more salient for some people, sure, but politics is the last thing on most people’s minds right now.
End of year polling is always a bit iffy. Attention drops, soft voters wobble, and numbers slosh around without signalling any deep realignment.
What this most likely shows is small churn inside the blocs: a bit of Labour → National, and National → ACT. Net result: the blocs are still basically neck-and-neck.
TPM’s dip, on the other hand, does look like it lines up with their internal disarray. But that usually means their voters are switching off or parking in “undecided,” not suddenly jumping to National.
And Greens support nearly always bounces around mid-cycle before firming later. The Greens dip like this all the time between elections. A press release every wobble would be a full-time job for Chloe and Marama.
Worse, it would just validate the exact storyline their opponents want to build.
thoughts on the GP trend, and if they should be recovering yet from the various controversies in the past few years?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2026_New_Zealand_general_election#/media/File:Graph_of_opinion_polls_by_party..svg
I'd say that it's almost impossible to see a real GP trend. The results bounce around a lot (between 7 & 14.5% over the last two polls).
I don't think that the polls are grabbing sufficient representation to reflect the minor parties. Because nothing the GP have done over the last month or so, should result in halving of their vote. [Yes, yes, I know, different polling companies]
They may be losing soft left vote to a more resurgent Labour. But, while that's not great news for the GP – it doesn't affect the left result overall.
I'm talking about the trend since the 2023 election. A few polls isn't a trend and while I'm not a stats person, afaik that's the point of the trend is to even out those outliers. It also accounts of biases in different polling companies.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5c/Graph_of_opinion_polls_by_party..svg/2560px-Graph_of_opinion_polls_by_party..svg.png
Obviously there have been some big changes in that time, a lot of controversy, a major change in positioning/direction with Swarbrick replacing Shaw and the all important issue of perception of competence.
I agree that with the small polling sample it makes it harder to see what is going on, and we really need to be polling voter switch as well, but it's hard not to see the controversies having taken their toll when looking at the 2 year trend.
Apologies for not being clear. I was using the last two poll results as an illustration – that level of variability is present in all of the GP poll results since the last election.
While they have definitely taken some publicity hits over that time – I don't see that really reflecting immediately in their poll results.
And, while Roy Morgan seems to be consistently over-estimating their support (IMO) – other polling companies have also given them highs, as well as lows.
I don't think there really is a trend. I think their level of support is about 11% which is consistent with their 2023 election result.
To be fair, their polling hasn’t fallen off a cliff. So, you could argue the “recovery,” such as it is, has already happened and any damage is now basically priced in.
Depending on the pollster they’ve mostly sat in a band around their 2023 result: Roy Morgan often has them 11–15%, while Verian/Curia tend to run a bit lower, more like 8–11%.
So while there’s a house-effect spread in the numbers, but the broad picture is actually dencetly stable, not a sustained post-scandal slump.
It may still be that 11.6% was a high-water mark: a core 9–10% plus a couple of percent from soft-left voters who thought Labour was a lost cause and jumped ship on the margins. But the fact they’ve weathered multiple ugly controversies without collapsing across all pollsters also suggests that ~10% is starting to look more like a floor than a ceiling.
The more interesting counterfactual is the one you point to: in a term where being out of government, a monumentally unpopular coalition agenda, and a co-leadership refresh should all have been fertile ground, where would they be if they hadn’t spent 2024 and 2025 coping with self-owns.
My hunch is we’d have seen them spending more time in the mid-teens rather than oscillating around their 2023 results.
Fair enough, but you know that sailors tweak trajectory in response to shifts in wind and/or waves, so there's a basic reflexivity applying to all manouvering as a general principle. Shifts in operating context tend to mean participants adapt in response.
Such adaptivity is darwinian, allowing users to evolve in harmony with nature. Same in politics, regardless that any political org may try to retain stasis…
I'd regard this as margin of error stuff – without real meaning.
Of course, it doesn't suit the news narrative to say 'there's no meaningful change' – they have to write up the results as being deeply significant.
Right now, based on this poll, as on virtually all of the others over the last year – I'd pick the result as too close to call.
Agreed. When the times are turbulent, one paddles one's kayak in harmony with the overall flow, and a political party is a boat with much more inertial mass, so momentum will get it through any nexus most of the time.
To close to call is strange in itself. How the heck can this government still be in the race? The mind boggles
ACT party provocateur and deputy PM Seymour has "very little time for the UN", which might seem a bit odd given Article 17 of UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
But but… know your place! Hello, and then kia ora.
Our most trusted political leader is now an aussie. This shows how kiwis are exhibiting lateral thinking: when local options are shit, go for a distant one.
Albo could reflect on this and improvise to develop trans-Tasman relations. Give a public address in our main civic centers every now and then. Since gold is powering Oz up the global economic ranking nowadays, his words could come across like a shower of gold. To deter that, we could challenge him to explain neolib doctrine on the growth economy of homelessness. He ought to be able to cope.
Nicola Willis making a direct challenge to Ruth Richardson as the person behind the Taxpayer Union campaign to fire her is a huge wow on the right.
Fight fight fight.
And bring it on.
The far right lurk in the shadows: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/581282/anytime-anywhere-nicola-willis-challenges-ruth-richardson-to-debate
Dunno if the speaker will allow light entertainment though. I agree that zealots trying to out-compete each other is part of democracy, but televising it with a worm representing the audience collectively on-screen is the best method, which is why programmers have avoided it assiduously during the past couple of decades.
I know I shouldn't but.,.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/581282/anytime-anywhere-nicola-willis-challenges-ruth-richardson-to-debate
Willis isn’t a debater, instead she shouts over other speakers in an undesirable shrill tone.
I'm reminded of the saying about wrestling a pig in the dirt. You both get muddy but only the pig enjoys it.
Knock me down with a feather.
While it is the correct choice for workers, I'm still pleasantly surprised.
https://www.thepress.co.nz/nz-news/360912157/government-declines-permit-swiss-based-cement-carrier
Not the answer I expected.
But credit where it is due.
Now. We will see what Holcim tries to pull, next?
kind of makes RW sense though,
Yes. We will see if they keep an NZ crew?
Can't imagine a ship load of cement ending up in the ocean would be good.
Either turn into a big block of concrete or wash away.
Change the water acidity if concentrated. But the main environmental hazards are in the production of cement. Energy and water use as well as CO2.
Holcim are 'threatening' to truck cement round Te Waipounamu.
Massive cost and effort. Gives Golden Bay a business andvantage.
My buddy, who is a crew member on the Buffalo reckons they are still losing their jobs.
Golden Bay cement is locally manufactured in Portland.
Also uses two NZ crewed ships.
Moana Chief and Aotearoa Chief.
Holcim, imports and is distributed from Timaru.
The tonnage of trucking required to replace one ship, is massive.