There's a particular kind of political theatre that New Zealanders have grown wearily accustomed to over the last few years. It goes something like this: a genuinely damaging story breaks, and within hours, sometimes minutes, a shinier, noisier story is wheeled out to bury it.
This week the Act Party gave us another performance in the genre, the political dead cat, a shocking or attention grabbing announcement thrown onto the table specifically to change the subject from a story the party would rather the public did not discuss.
The term is credited to Australian strategist Lynton Crosby, and it has since become shorthand for exactly this kind of manoeuvre in political commentary from Westminster to Wellington: if you're losing an argument or there are damaging headlines, the trick is to throw a dead cat on the table, because everyone will stop talking about the argument or article and start talking about the dead cat, which in this case is Paul Henry.
Former Act Party Tim Jago president admits fresh historical sex abuse charge
Former Act Party president Tim Jago has admitted to further sexual offending.
The Herald confirmed today Jago has now pleaded guilty to one charge of sexual violation by unlawful sexual connection.
He is due to be sentenced in the Auckland District Court on the historical charge on Thursday.
Readers will recall the disgraced Tim Jago spent nearly four years running Act's organisational machinery before a messy resignation in early 2023. At the time, the Act Party's response to being contacted by a complainant's wife was to provide her with an employment lawyer's contact details instead of directing them to Police.
Jago was subsequently convicted by a jury of indecently assaulting two teenage boys he had mentored through a surf lifesaving club in the 1990s. The fresh charge, relating to offending in 1995, was laid following a new police investigation and comes on top of an already grim record that includes a failed appeal and a third complainant who has separately come forward.
Paul Henry to stand for ACT in this year's election
Speaking later on RNZ's Midday Report, Henry said he imagined he would receive a high list ranking, but was waiting on a decision from the board.
"You'd have to be a fool not to put me right up the top," he quipped.
But asked directly whether he had any leadership aspirations, Henry said he was "absolutely not interested" and had no such discussions with Seymour about his future.
What has had far less attention is how that announcement came together, and how quickly Henry's position on a Crown entity board was unwound to make it possible.
Henry had been sitting on TVNZ's board since June 2025, appointed by then Media Minister Paul Goldsmith. TVNZ is a wholly Crown owned company, and its directors are bound by the standard obligations that apply to Crown entity board members: to identify and disclose interests, to discuss any significant political activity with the chair in advance, and to avoid conflicts of interest, including those arising from political ambition.
Public Service Commission guidance is explicit that board members standing for election should notify their agency early and agree on a management plan, precisely so a transition like this doesn't happen in the space of a single morning.
That isn't what happened here. According to the Herald's Media Insider reporting, Goldsmith said:
"I was told by Mr Seymour just before the announcement"
The TVNZ board chair confirmed he received Henry's resignation at around the same time. In other words, the minister responsible for TVNZ, and the chair of its board, appear to have learned that a sitting director was quitting to stand for a political party only in the hours before it became public.
Henry himself has said he had been discussing the position with Seymour for about a week beforehand. If that timeline is accurate, there was ample opportunity to notify TVNZ's chair and manage the conflict properly, well before a director appointed by the Crown quietly walked out the door on the morning he needed to be standing on a hotel rooftop to help distract from another Act Party damaging headline.
This matters because the whole point of the disclosure and management framework is to stop exactly this kind of last minute scramble, where a Crown entity is presented with a resignation as a fait accompli rather than a managed handover.
The sequence as reported, a week of private conversations with Seymour, followed by a same day resignation announced to the minister moments before a press conference, sits uneasily with the spirit of a framework built on early disclosure and orderly transition.
It also conveniently ensured maximum media impact for Act's candidate announcement, with no advance warning for TVNZ to manage its own position.
None of this erases what Tim Jago did, nor should it. Survivors do not get the luxury of having what happened to them buried beneath a celebrity photo opportunity.
But the Henry resignation raises a separate and legitimate question of governance: did a Crown broadcaster's board get treated as a formality to be dispensed with once its usefulness had passed, and should David Seymour and Paul Henry both be asked, directly, when the chair and minister were actually first told.
It is a fair question for a governing arrangement already labelled by critics as a Coalition of Chaos, one whose junior partner now appears unable to even manage a single board resignation without leaving a Crown entity blindsided on the morning of yet another dead cat press conference.
Brooke van Velden has resigned as Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety, and the occasion demands considerably more than the polite eulogy that ministerial departures typically attract. Her tenure was, by any serious accounting, one of the most regressive periods in New Zealand's modern labour history. To permit it to dissolve into the news cycle without further examination would be a profound disservice to the hundreds of thousands of workers whose livelihoods and legal protections were stripped away while she held the portfolio.
Let's start with the overnight demolition of pay equity protections for working women. In August 2024, the government rushed amendments to the Equal Pay Act through under urgency, extinguishing the legal mechanisms by which workers in female-dominated industries could pursue pay equity claims.
The affected workforce, predominantly women employed in aged care, early childhood education, and health support, had in many cases invested years in building claims through the proper channels. Those claims were voided at speed. Subsequent estimates placed the number of affected workers at well over 300,000, including nurses, teachers, support staff, hospice workers, and caregivers, with warnings of care sector breakdowns and skilled workers leaving for Australia.
How a crucial 45-minute meeting between ministers took pay equity claims away from tens of thousands of women
Those choices formed the backbone of the government's overhaul of the once "world-leading" Equal Pay Act - retrospectively stripping nurses, teachers, carers and other female-dominated workforces of the right to pursue pay equity claims under the existing law.
Within five weeks of that meeting, Parliament had passed the Equal Pay Amendment Act under urgency - a move the people's select committee last month described as "a flagrant and significant abuse of power".
The legislation was announced then passed all stages of Parliament within three days in May, meaning the public had no opportunity to make submissions through the usual select committee process.
Dozens of in-train claims were stopped. The rules governing future claims were significantly tightened. And $12.8 billion originally earmarked to fix decades of systemic gender discrimination was instead returned to the Crown's Budget allowances.
The government's justification, that the framework was too costly and legally unpredictable, amounted to a frank admission: the rights of low-paid women were to be weighed against fiscal convenience and discarded. Van Velden offered this argument with the characteristic breezy confidence of someone who has never had to worry about whether her wages reflected the gendered undervaluation of her occupation.
Van Velden even proudly stated that she had saved the Budget by axing pay equity. She said this as though stripping hundreds of thousands of women of the right to fair remuneration was a sensible line item to balance, rather than an act of deliberate economic harm to the most vulnerable workers in the country.
ACT Party deputy and minister Brooke van Velden retires from politics
On the decisions she's made in government, van Velden said she's proud of all of them, including the highly controversial changes to the pay equity regime.
"I hand on heart believe that the decisions I made and the actions I took were in the best interests of the country, and ultimately I saved the Budget."
This is where the gaslighting becomes particularly galling. ACT has always presented itself as a party of individual freedom and fairness, the great liberators of the citizen from state interference. Yet when working women sought to use a legal framework to secure fair pay, the party moved with extraordinary speed to shut that framework down. The freedom ACT champions is, in practice, the freedom of employers to continue paying women less. Everything else is rhetoric.
That hypocrisy runs deeper still when one examines ACT's own internal culture. In June 2024, reporting by Stuff journalist Tova O'Brien revealed a picture of the ACT Party campaign operation that bore little resemblance to the party's libertarian self-image. At least six staff members and volunteers had quit following the 2023 general election, citing allegations of intimidation and unfair treatment of women.
Sources described a culture of fear, comparing the campaign environment to the Hunger Games. The party's own board faced a vote of no confidence. Candidates and volunteers were left in tears. This is the organisation whose deputy leader was entrusted with protecting New Zealand's workers from exploitation and harm in the workplace. The irony here is profound.
Tears and resignations after ‘train wreck’ ACT Party election campaign, sources claim
Allegations of a culture of fear
Several people close to the party spoke to Stuff on the condition of anonymity.
The divisions between "Mission Control" and "HQ" were at the heart of the ructions, they said.
"HQ became a bit like a military hospital," one source said. "Mission control, were shooting their kneecaps out faster than HQ could patch everybody up.
"It wasn't unusual to be at HQ and see people in tears, be it candidates or supporters, just sitting down saying I can't do this anymore."
Things got worse when problems started arising with candidates - one compared vaccine mandates to concentration camps, another compared the vaccine to drownings and another referred to Covid as "mass hysteria".
"There was a culture of fear in the party when the wheels started coming off around candidates, anyone that stuck their head up above the parapet was seen as dispensable."
Then there is the minimum wage manipulations. For nearly three consecutive years under this coalition, minimum wage increases have failed to keep pace with inflation. In real terms, New Zealand's most vulnerable workers have gone backwards every single year. This isn't economic bad luck. It is the predictable consequence of a government that regards minimum wage increases as an inconvenience.
Van Velden happily presided over each of those inflation-adjusted wage cuts, invoking, as ACT ministers often do, the spectre of small business hardship.
Meet Brooke van Velden – the minister loathed by unions and loved by business
Van Velden has been the most polarising minister of labour or workplace in the past 50 years for unions and workers.
Brooke van Velden's philosophical indifference to the welfare of ordinary people was perhaps most vividly exposed in her now-infamous comments about the value of human life. Appearing on Q&A with Jack Tame, she appeared to reconfirm that New Zealand had placed too high a value on human life during the COVID pandemic, stating that the country completely blew out what the value of a life was and that she had never seen such a high value on life.
The comment was not a gaffe. It was a window into the worldview that animated her entire tenure as the minister responsible for worker safety. That attitude to life ultimately followed her into the significant portfolios her mentor David Seymour attained for her in the right-wing coalition government.
Just like the covid response saving lives was not a bad thing for the economy, the evidence shows that higher minimum wages do not destroy jobs in the way Brooke van Velden and the ACT Party's ideological tradition has always insisted they will.
The rewriting of contractor law sits alongside these failures as a reform that will outlast the headlines. The changes narrowed the tests by which workers could establish that they were employees rather than contractors. In practice, this shifts power decisively toward the multinational platform companies, logistics operators, and labour hire firms that have always preferred contractor arrangements precisely because they eliminate sick leave, holiday pay, and the protections of the Employment Relations Act.
Uber drivers, transport workers, construction workers, cleaners, security staff, and labour hire workers all had protections removed, stripping their rights to minimum wage protection, extended leave entitlements, unfair dismissal protections, and their employer's superannuation obligations. The language of worker choice and flexibility was deployed to obscure what was, in substance, a gift to corporate interests.
Van Velden removed protections for all of these workers by allowing them to be classed as contractors despite their actual work situation. This removed their rights to minimum wage protection, extended leave entitlements, unfair dismissal protections and their employer's superannuation obligations. Her Employment Relations Amendment Bill essentially rewrote employer-employee relationship obligations into a form never before seen in the modern working world.
All of this has occurred against a backdrop of accelerating economic destruction that the coalition has done nothing to address. Heinz Wattie's announced the closure of three factories in Auckland, Christchurch, and Dunedin, affecting around 350 jobs. The McCain processing plant also shut its doors, leaving Buy NZ Made to warn that these closures reflected broader structural challenges facing New Zealand manufacturing, with almost half of surveyed producers citing slow demand.
In Nelson alone, the closures of Kitchen Things, the Eves Valley sawmill, Proper Crisps, and Sealord's coated fish factory saw over 500 jobs vanish in the space of three months. In the first half of 2025, 1,270 businesses shut down, a 12 percent increase on the same period the year prior.
Manufacturing in crisis: Closures hit hard in 2025
It's been a devastating year for manufacturing workers around the motu, with major closures gutting local economies and leaving thousands of skilled workers out of a job.
...
These aren’t isolated incidents, but symptoms of a deeper failure. The Government has no clear plan to protect the country’s manufacturing base. While other countries invest in green tech, domestic supply chains, and set proper industrial strategies, Aotearoa is letting decades of expertise and infrastructure slip away.
This is the economic environment in which van Velden was weakening worker protections, cutting real wages, attempting to gut health and safety regulations that were passed in the wake of the Pike River disaster, and handing legal advantages to employers. Families and survivors of the Pike River tragedy described their meeting with van Velden as a waste of time: She seemed to be focusing all the time on the employers, said Sonya Rockhouse.
One might have expected a Minister for Workplace Relations to ask what impact her policy agenda was having on workers already confronting redundancy, casualisation, and economic insecurity. There is no evidence she did.
Then came the parliamentary theatre. In May 2025, in response to a Labour question referencing a Sunday Star-Times column by journalist Andrea Vance that had used the C word against the female ministers who dismantled pay equity, van Velden became the first MP to use that word in the debating chamber, framing her outburst as a defence of women against misogynistic language.
The performance was characteristic: theatrical indignation deployed to reframe a debate about the stripping of women's rights into one about parliamentary decorum. It succeeded, briefly, in changing the subject, but the 300,000 women who lost their pay equity claims remained without recourse.
I do not agree with the clearly gendered and patronising language that [national affairs editor for the Sunday Star-Times] Andrea Vance used to reduce senior Cabinet ministers to girlbosses, hype squads, references to girl math and c****," van Velden said.
What we are witnessing, and have been witnessing since 2023, is the consequence of allowing ACT's neoliberalism to function as the ideological operating system of a government nominally led by the National Party. National, once a broad church capable of restraint and pragmatism, has been progressively colonised by ACT's worldview, an economic doctrine with a long and distinguished record of failure that stretches from the 1980s reforms Roger Douglas inflicted on New Zealand to its various iterations elsewhere. It treats labour as a cost to be minimised, regulation as an imposition to be dismantled, and workers as mere market actors who need only be freed from protection to flourish.
Van Velden leaves office with a record that should not be quietly filed away. It should be studied, in detail, as a case study in what happens when personally held beliefs outrank evidence, and when the interests of multinational corporations are accorded a higher priority than the dignity and security of working people.
There is a particular kind of dishonesty that often dresses itself up as economic theory. For years in this country, we were told that New Zealand's rental market was simply supply and demand in action, the invisible hand at work, efficiently allocating housing to those who valued it most.
What it actually was, of course, was something rather more tawdry: a system engineered to extract the maximum possible sum of money from anyone unfortunate enough to need to rent a roof over their head.
Let us be precise about the mechanism. When a prospective tenant applied for a rental property in New Zealand, they were routinely required to declare their income. This was presented, with straight faces, as an affordability check. In practice, it functioned as a price-setting instrument. Landlords and property managers could observe what a household earned and calibrate the rent accordingly, not to the condition of the property, not to its size, or whether the plumbing actually worked, but to the upper limit of what the prospective tenants could conceivably be made to pay.
The signal here was not quality. It was vulnerability. Middle and higher-income earners found themselves charged accordingly, regardless of whether they were occupying a warm, well-maintained home or a damp, mouldering box dressed up with fresh paint and a flattering TradeMe photograph. Low-income Kiwis often didn't even get their foot in the door.
The results were entirely predictable. By 2022, some 46 percent of renting households were spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent, compared to just 19 percent in 1988. Since 2003, house prices had increased by 230 percent, whilst median household income grew by only 137 percent. Housing was no longer all about shelter. It had become a very profitable business enterprise.
The insignificant easing of rents we have witnessed recently isn't the result of good governance to remedy this issue. The mean weekly rent in New Zealand for the year to September 2025 was $568, showing a 0.6% decline compared to the prior year. This is welcome in itself, but its cause isn't deregulation or the benevolence of landlords. It is a symptom of a recession and emigration. Net overseas migration slowed to just 13,066 in the year to July 2025, compared to a peak of over 135,000 in late 2023, and the net outflow of New Zealand citizens hit a record high of 47,600 in a single year. People are leaving in their tens of thousands because they cannot afford to live in New Zealand.
That is a grim form of market correction, and it deserves to be named as such. Contrast it with Australia, where sustained migration has pushed rents up by an estimated 43.8 percent over five years, with the typical renter paying around $10,500 more annually than at the start of the pandemic. New Zealand's slight moderation has been purchased at a considerable social cost, the departure of skilled younger workers at a rate that constitutes yet another unsustainable crisis.
Against this backdrop, the Green Party's Renters' Rights campaign proposes a two percent annual cap on rent increases, the reversal of no-cause evictions, a Rental Warrant of Fitness, and the construction of tens of thousands of quality public homes. It represents not a radical departure but a long-overdue acknowledgement of reality.
Greens promise to cap rent rises at 2 percent a year
The 'A home for everybody' policy was launched by the party co-leaders and local MP Tamatha Paul at a rental home in Wellington on Wednesday afternoon.
Co-leader Marama Davidson said with rental costs increasing from 19 percent of incomes in 1988 to 30 percent in 2022, it was time for housing to be treated as a human right.
"In a country like Aotearoa, with our wealth of resources and skills, there is no excuse for people to go without a decent home, let along any home at all."
Co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick said the Greens would build tens of thousands more public homes and support councils and community providers to do the same, stimulating local economies and creating jobs while curbing homelessness and waiting lists.
"This isn't rocket science," she said. "Mass building of public housing almost 100 years ago led to decades of stable, affordable homes for New Zealanders.
ACT Housing spokesperson Cameron Luxton responded by calling the campaign a plan to make more people homeless. This is, to put it plainly, a talking point that serves a specific constituency, and that constituency is clearly not tenants.
Greens Revive Campaign To Make More People Homeless
ACT Housing spokesperson Cameron Luxton says the Green Party’s latest housing policy is a return to the same failed ideas that drove up rents and reduced supply.
“We’ve just seen rents fall nationally for the first time in years after anti-landlord policies were reversed. The Greens now want to take us straight back.
WHO ACTS FOR ACT
The ACT Party was founded on the Rogernomics tradition of Roger Douglas, a disciple of the view that markets, left sufficiently alone, will solve all human problems. Three decades of evidence in New Zealand's housing sector clearly suggests otherwise. Yet the party's institutional memory, and crucially its donor base, remains firmly committed to the proposition that property investors are the real victims of housing policy.
This isn't merely ideological. It is financial, and the money trail isn't difficult to follow. Analysis by RNZ of Electoral Commission records found that people with interests in the property industry donated more than half of their political contributions to National, with ACT receiving 32 percent of the total, and Labour a mere two percent. As Victoria University senior research fellow Max Rashbrooke observed, donors of this scale enjoy a constant level of access to ministers that ordinary voters can only dream of.
The conflicts of interest are not merely financial. They are, in the most literal sense, structural. The 2024 Register of Pecuniary Interests shows that Parliament collectively owns 261 properties, an average of 2.2 per MP. National MPs account for the bulk of this, with 18 of them owning approximately 30 or more rental homes. One does not need to be a committed cynic to ask whether legislators with this much skin in the game are best placed to design fair tenancy law.
THE DAVID SEYMOUR PROBLEM
No examination of this subject is complete without dwelling on the particular and instructive case of David Seymour. For years, Seymour cultivated his public image as the honest outsider who simply could not afford to buy a home, a man of the people standing bravely against the landed political elites of Parliament. It was a compelling narrative. It was also, in material respects, completely untrue.
In 2021, Seymour was forced to correct his Register of Pecuniary Interests to disclose that he was a beneficiary of three trusts, the NN Faithfull Family Trust, the BH and VA Seymour Family Trust, and the Beachcomber Trust, two of which held property including a Northland beach house and a neighbouring section, and his father's house in Whangarei. These interests had not been declared in previous years, in violation of Parliamentary disclosure rules. His return was also filed late, drawing a formal rebuke from the Registrar of Pecuniary Interests, Sir Maarten Wevers.
Seymour called it an honest mistake and claimed he had legal advice saying he did not technically own the properties. That is a distinction the rest of us might find difficult to take seriously. A beneficiary of a trust that holds property stands to inherit or profit from that property. The rules requiring disclosure of such interests are not ambiguous. They are written plainly in Standing Orders, and Seymour is a lawmaker who has sat in Parliament for over a decade... a decade too long some might argue.
What makes this particularly pointed is that in 2017, when he was still falsely presenting himself as property-free, Seymour told RNZ: "The fact that the average National MP owns 2.2 properties of their own might suggest why they have spent a lot of time introducing solutions that you would almost suspect were not supposed to work, because they certainly have not." He was right. He was also, at that moment, a beneficiary of trusts that held the very kind of assets he was criticising his colleagues for owning.
One is entitled to ask what he was really doing when he invoked that argument. He was not speaking truth to power. He was in fact dishonestly presenting himself to the public as just another ordinary Kiwi.
Having now restored interest deductibility for rental property investors as a key plank of the coalition agreement with National, and having championed the removal of no-cause evictions, the right-wing coalition government have ensured that the landlord class which funds their political parties have received a considerable return for their political investment, an investment that is ultimately paid for with globally high rents.
A HOMELESSNESS CRISIS OF THEIR OWN MAKING
The claim that the Green Party's proposals would cause homelessness requires particular scrutiny, because the homelessness crisis is already here. It grew substantially under the very deregulatory settings that ACT champions, and it has worsened measurably under the current neoliberal government.
The number of people sleeping rough in Auckland more than doubled between September 2024 and September 2025. Wellington's Downtown Community Ministry recorded a 25 percent increase in rough sleepers in 2025 compared to the prior year. In Christchurch, the City Mission recorded 270 new clients in just six months to March 2025, up from 156 in the corresponding period prior.
The government tightenning the gateway to emergency housing is partly to blame, a policy that came into force in August 2024. The rate of emergency housing applications being declined rose from 4 percent in March 2024 to 36 percent by June 2025. One social agency reported that in a single month, every one of the 27 people they referred to Work and Income for emergency housing was turned away. The government has also reduced its funding for homelessness support by $79 million compared to the prior financial year.
Emergency housing motel numbers have fallen, from 3,141 in December 2023 to 591 a year later. Associate Housing Minister Tama Potaka declared this a triumph. The Salvation Army described it more accurately as a likely contributor to the rising number of people living on the street.
To invoke the threat of future homelessness as a reason to do nothing about present homelessness is not policy analysis. It is a defunct defence of the arrangement that produced the crisis in the first place.
WHAT ACTUALLY WORKS
The international evidence is available to any government willing to look at it. Vienna has kept housing affordable for over a century through a combination of city land ownership and large-scale municipal development that sets a genuine price anchor for the broader rental market.
Singapore's Housing and Development Board provides affordable housing to nearly 80 percent of the population, combining public construction, grants, and income-sensitive pricing to ensure that shelter is a right rather than a commodity to be speculated on. Finland, through its Housing First policy introduced in 2008, became the only European Union country where the number of homeless people has consistently declined year on year. These nations did not stumble into housing security by removing tenant protections and trusting property investors to be decent humans. They built it deliberately, through sustained public investment and enforceable standards.
WHAT REFORM MUST LOOK LIKE
Any meaningful reform in New Zealand must begin with a centralised rental database, a single authoritative register from which all real estate agents and property managers are required to operate. Every rental property should be assessed and graded by size, condition, insulation, heating, proximity to services, and structural integrity. Rents should be set in relation to that assessed quality, not in relation to the maximum amount prospective tenants can pay.
Properties should be offered to renters in order of quality, at affordable rents calibrated to their actual standard. The practical effect of this would be significant, as better quality houses would be rented first. Owners should also be substantially financially penalised if they leave their properties empty and dilapidated, or demolish houses that are still suitable for human habitation. A substantial proportion of New Zealand's older rental housing stock fails that test. The Healthy Homes Standards are a beginning. A Rental Warrant of Fitness, independently certified, publicly searchable, and tied to legal occupancy, is the logical next step.
The Tenancy Tribunal also requires substantive reform. The procedural and evidential disadvantages facing tenants in dispute with landlords are well documented. The current framework leans heavily toward those with legal experience and resources. Protections for renters need to be strengthened in law, not merely recommended as guidelines, and legal representation support for tenants at the Tribunal must be funded accordingly.
There are genuine risks in any rent control regime implemented carelessly. A blunt national cap, applied without regard for regional conditions, property quality, or supply dynamics, could suppress new construction if designed poorly. That's why the Green Party also owes New Zealand a costed, detailed build programme alongside its tenancy protections. Ambition without logistics isn't a housing policy. It is a press release.
But the answer to that risk is better policy design, not the continued absence of any policy at all.
And New Zealand must build state houses that people actually want to live in. Not cramped, isolated units on the periphery of cities, but well-designed, well-located homes that integrate their residents into communities with genuine access to schools, transport, parks, and employment. Vienna did not solve its housing crisis by building chicken coops. Neither did Singapore.
The lessons are available. The question, as ever in this country, is whether the political will exists to act on it, or whether we will continue to mistake the interests of an asset-rich parliamentary class for the national interest, and simply give up by accepting the resulting misery as a natural consequence of the free market.
In the dim corridors of power, where accountability is meant to be the bedrock of justice, a festering wound has been uncovered. The Independent Police Conduct Authority's (IPCA) 135-page report, released on 11 November 2025 after a protracted battle against suppression orders, lays bare the "significant failings" and "serious misconduct" at the highest echelons of the New Zealand Police.
This is no isolated lapse; it is the latest chapter in a grim saga of institutional protectionism that has shielded predators while revictimising the vulnerable. At its core lies the complainant, known only as Ms Z, whose desperate pleas for justice against a sexual predator and former Deputy Commissioner, Jevon McSkimming, were not just ignored but weaponised against her.
Timeline: How the Jevon McSkimming scandal unfolded over nine years
A Facebook post in 2018. A LinkedIn one in 2023. 105 in 2024. Complaints against Jevon McSkimming surfaced for years but were never properly investigated. 1News traces the timeline of how police failed to act on allegations against one of their own, based on an explosive IPCA report.
The establishment's concerted effort to bury this scandal, through delayed investigations, manipulated protocols, and prosecutorial overreach, demands accountability. The fight to unearth the truth was itself a Herculean struggle. Ms Z's allegations, spanning years of emails and social media posts, documented sexual assaults, threats involving intimate recordings, and misuse of police resources to groom a junior employee, were largely ignored by authorities.
Suppression orders gagged the media and the IPCA, ostensibly to safeguard McSkimming's reputation as he vied for Police Commissioner. RNZ, NZME, and the IPCA opposed these in Wellington District Court, arguing public interest trumped the accused's career ambitions. Only on the report's release day did the veil lift, revealing how senior officers sought to narrow the IPCA probe's scope and timeline to spare McSkimming's promotion bid. This was no oversight; it was a deliberate cover-up, echoing the "culture of scepticism" Dame Margaret Bazley decried in her 2007 inquiry into police sexual misconduct.
Ms Z's ordeal perpetrated by a repeat offender exemplifies this rot. From 2018, she sent police hundreds of communications, emails to McSkimming's work address, anonymous posts, and 105 hotline reports, alleging rape, blackmail, and exploitation. But rather than probe these serious allegations, police dismissed her as a "fixated threat," charging her under the Harmful Digital Communications Act (HDCA) in May 2024.
Jevon McSkimming case: Police defend decision to prosecute Ms Z over alleged abusive emails to the detective who arrested her
Senior police are defending the decision to prosecute the woman at the centre of the Jevon McSkimming scandal for emails she allegedly sent to the detective who arrested her and his wife.
This is despite Police Commissioner Richard Chambers apologising to the woman for how the previous police leadership mishandled her original sex allegations against the former deputy commissioner.
Earlier this week, the Herald revealed that instead of investigating whether the sex claims could be corroborated or not, the anonymous emails were used as evidence to prosecute her for a harassment campaign against McSkimming.
She was arrested and charged under the Harmful Digital Communications Act in May 2024, placed under restrictive bail conditions and silenced by wide-ranging suppression orders.
Crown Law even gave the victim an ultimatum. Discharge without conviction only if she recanted her claims against McSkimming, despite no investigation being undertaken into the alleged crimes at the time. This coercive bargain, tying absolution to false confession, reeks of abuse of process, undermining fair trial rights and natural justice. The charge was withdrawn in September 2025, not from ethical awakening, but because McSkimming balked at testifying.
However, another HDCA case still lingers against Ms Z for sending 10 emails to the detective in charge of her investigation, a vindictive pursuit that Police Commissioner Richard Chambers must halt forthwith. This isn't justice; it is revictimisation, a perversion of the law meant to shield the vulnerable.
Worse, the coverup extended to the Beehive. Police Minister Mark Mitchell's office fielded 36 such emails since December 2023; Prime Minister Christopher Luxon received 10 more in late 2023 and early 2024. Mitchell now claims that then-Commissioner Andrew Coster directed seconded police staff to forward these complaint emails to headquarters, discuss them with no one, including ministers. But is this true?
The IPCA report doesn't explicitly confirm such an instruction. The claim rests on a police memo reviewed by media and Mitchell's own statements. No secondee has publicly corroborated it. No verbatim directive has surfaced. Given the pattern of police secrecy, it may well be accurate, but without independent verification, we must treat the National Minister's claims with scepticism. Regardless, the emails were supposedly not properly escalated, and the No Surprises protocol was once again breached without consequence.
Mitchell claims ignorance until November 2024; Luxon cites "normal" triage. This strains credulity. With explicit subject lines such as "A complaint regarding McSkimming", we are meant to believe that no junior staffer, political advisor, or secondee felt obliged to flag them as important enough to bring to the Ministers attention? The No Surprises doctrine, enshrined in the Cabinet Manual, demands escalation for "matters of significance," especially scandals imperilling public trust. But here we have a government that ignores their directives, particularly when it is politically beneficial.
These emails were clearly not spam; they were screams for help from a systemically silenced young woman who had been abused by a man in a position of power the system was desperately trying to protect. The apparent protocol breach here, as in Mitchell's office, protected McSkimming, at the victim's expense, as well as those who should have acted in her best interests, namely those elected to represent the general public.
This pattern of secrecy is depressingly familiar. Recall the sexual deviant Michael Forbes, Luxon's former press secretary, whose 2024 filming of woman in private places and recording of prostitutes prompted police alerts to executives (including McSkimming) yet there was supposedly no ministerial knowledge until the media reported on details of his serious offending. Ministers feigned ignorance, police helped Forbes clean his devices and dithered on prosecution despite substantial evidence, mirroring the McSkimming inertia. Both cases reek of the old boys club and political insulation, where "no surprises" means keeping things hush hush so there's no inconvenient truths for the top echelon.
Former Police Commissioner Andrew Coster, who failed to disclose McSkimming's affair during his 2023 vetting process was clearly incorrectly appointed. He improperly pressured a rushed "quasi-investigation" to clear promotion paths for McSkimming, and lobbied the IPCA for premature closure of their investigation. Now on leave from the Social Investment Agency, he must be dismissed outright, no cushy payouts for one who subverted justice and the police's integrity. Not to mention his deputy commissioner Tania Kura, who dismissed the claims about McSkimming's impropriety as mere office gossip.
Deeper still, buried beneath layers of institutional denial and public outrage, lies a profoundly historic plague of police-perpetrated sexual violence that has scarred New Zealand's law enforcement for generations. The infamous Louise Nicholas saga stands as a harrowing centerpiece: in the 1980s, she endured repeated rapes at the hands of serving officers Clint Rickards, Brad Shipton, and Bob Schollum, crimes that were systematically covered up for decades through a web of complicity, intimidation, and fabricated alibis among colleagues. This long-suppressed scandal eventually erupted into the public eye, triggering the damning 2007 Bazley inquiry, which laid bare "systemic flaws" in police handling of complaints and a deeply entrenched "culture of scepticism" that routinely dismissed and discredited victims, prioritizing the protection of officers over justice.
More recently, the 2022 conviction of Whangārei officer Jamie Foster, who was jailed for six years and nine months for raping a vulnerable female colleague in a secluded Northland motel room, serves as a stark reminder of the persistent “bad apples” rotting within the New Zealand Police. The victim, a fellow constable seeking safety after a work event, endured a “gross breach of trust” (as Judge Greg Davis ruled), yet the case exposed institutional failures: delayed suspension, a flawed internal probe, and a defence plea for home detention that echoed past leniency toward officers. Despite IPCA oversight and reform pledges, such abuses continue to fester, underscoring how judicial reluctance and police self-protection still shield predators and silence victims.
After McSkimming was found to have been accessing child and bestiality pornography on his work computers, the NZ Police were forced to conduct a wider investigation, but have been silent on how many other officers have been found to be exploiting vulnerabilities in internal systems to view objectionable material. The discovery of McSkimming's sexual deviancy, which emerged during Operation Jefferson, a probe into Ms Z's allegations of his sexual misconduct, uncovered thousands of pornographic searches on his police-issued iPhone, including 68 images of child sexual exploitation and 812 of adult bestiality material, spanning at least five years.
This led to an internal review of internet access controls, which revealed systemic weaknesses: unmanaged devices, limited monitoring, and the potential for staff to bypass filters and "exploit vulnerabilities to access inappropriate content." Documents from the review, obtained by RNZ, highlighted "urgent need" for policy changes, yet as of November 2025, Police Commissioner Richard Chambers has not disclosed exactly how many other officers the audit has implicated or if it has resulted in further disciplinary actions beyond McSkimming's admission of guilt and resignation. The opacity raises troubling questions about the extent of a wider culture of impunity within the force, where senior leaders' devices go unscrutinised until scandal forces accountability, potentially shielding numerous Officers at the expense of public trust.
Speaking of public trust, we cannot ignore the case of disgraced ex-ACT chair Tim Jago, who evaded charges for 1990s assaults on teen boys until a 2024 conviction, specifically delayed by the courts in 2023 until after the election to avoid political fallout for David Seymour and the ACT Party. Police's initial inaction also suggested political deference over justice. These are not anomalies; they signal entrenched corruption within our justice system, and give rise to a culture of indifference to sexual assault and a blame the victim mentality. Is it any wonder that many victims simply don't come forward?
This type of institutional corruption ensures most sexual assault victims, disproportionately women and Māori, find no justice. Only 9% of sexual assault offences are reported; of those, a mere 31% reach prosecution, with 42% convicting, yielding an under 5% rate for overall imprisonment for sexual assault. In New Zealand, lifetime prevalence of being a rape victim hits 23% for adults, yet systemic bias, doubting "desperate" complainants like Ms Z, still perpetuates impunity, and fosters an increased prevalence of offending.
How many more scandals simmer unseen? The IPCA's call for an Inspector-General is a good first step, but insufficient to clear the deep rot within the force. A widespread investigation and purge is imperative: mandatory reporting, independent probes, and leadership clean-outs to remove the old boys club mentality are clearly required.
Ms Z's bravery, commended by survivors like Louise Nicholas, has forced somewhat of a reckoning. But until the establishment prioritises victims over vested interests within the police and government, trust in our so-called guardians will erode even further.
New Zealand’s education system is in a slow-motion crisis, with student achievement sliding relentlessly. PISA 2022 results reveal a grim picture: mathematics scores plummeted to 479 (down 15 points from 2018), reading to 501 (down 4), and science to 504 (down 5), marking a 20-year decline equivalent to a year of lost schooling. The National-led government, in power since late 2023, points fingers at cell-phones, curriculum woes and truancy, but these are sideshows. The real culprit, child poverty, is being ignored, and National’s policies are once again making things worse.
Education Minister Erica Stanford on raising writing achievement
Education Minister Eric Stanford is announcing the government's new Writing Action Plan to supercharge writing achievement and better set Kiwi kids up for success
The announcement comes the same day as a new study shows only a quarter of children at the end of intermediate school were writing and doing maths last year at the level expected by new curriculums introduced this year.
The Curriculum Insights study tested children in Years 3, 6 and 8 last year and results were released on Tuesday.
The study found children were doing about as well as in previous years.
But it found few were performing at the level expected by the incoming maths and English curriculums.
Just 22 percent of Year 3 children, 30 percent of Year 6 children and 23 percent of Year 8s were doing maths at the expected level.
And in writing 41 percent of Year 3s, 33 percent of Year 6 children and 24 percent of Year 8s were at the level expected of their age group.
Until poverty is tackled head-on, our kids will continue to struggle, no matter how many curriculum tweaks or attendance crackdowns we see. Poverty’s impact on learning is undeniable. Hungry children can’t focus; insecure housing breeds stress and illness. Research shows 14% of students skip meals weekly due to financial hardship, leading to score drops of 42–76 points across subjects, equivalent to 2–4 years of lost learning.
In 2024, child poverty metrics worsened: material hardship rose to 13.2% (152,000 children), up from 12.5% in 2022/23, with Māori and Pasifika children hit hardest. National’s austerity measures, slashing minimum wage growth and freezing welfare adjustments, have deepened this crisis.
Real-term cuts to benefits amid rising costs have left many families scrambling, with 20% of households with school-age kids unable to afford healthy food. The government’s policies, significantly skewed toward high earners, and cuts to school lunches, that have largely become inedible, offer no relief to struggling families, ensuring more children are hungry, unable to learn.
🚂 In today’s gift that keeps on giving, otherwise known as the train wreck that is the school lunches programme, Minister in charge David Seymour continues to minimise the ongoing problems, Minister of Education Erica Standford enters the fray demanding answers and instead gets… pic.twitter.com/Yzir0aGXYa
Poor housing is another anchor dragging down children's achievement. Overcrowded, damp homes, common across New Zealand, lead to health issues like respiratory problems, with hospitalisation rates for poor children 2–3 times higher than their peers. These conditions lead to students missing school, disrupt sleep and study, compounding stress and reducing focus. Limited access to resources, like internet or school supplies and uniforms, further isolate low-income students.
The current neoliberal government in New Zealand has also made housing for anyone who rents less secure, scaled back social housing investment and made it harder to attain emergency housing. This retreat from housing support entrenches instability, leaving many thousands of kids in environments hostile to learning.
National’s apparent indifference, prioritising landlord tax breaks over beneficial housing reforms or housing programmes, signals a disregard for the conditions that shape educational success. In particular, the National-led government's archaic policies appear to be largely targeted at Māori children, with a return to the bad old days of banning te reo Māori from school literature, even though it's a proven effective tool for learning.
Why is the New Zealand government cutting Māori words from some school books?
A shake-up of New Zealand’s curriculum has resulted in Māori words being scrapped from a selection of books used to teach five-year-olds and a decision not to reprint a well-loved book for young readers because it contained too many Māori words.
The changes have sparked widespread criticism from academics, teachers and authors, who have called it “an assault” on Māori identity and the latest in the coalition government’s efforts to prioritise English over the Indigenous language – criticisms the education minister has strongly rejected.
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Why have the changes sparked criticism?
Principles, academics and authors have criticised the decision, saying it undermines the place of the Indigenous language and children’s ability to learn both English and Māori.
“It’s not only harmful from a cultural identity perspective, but it also gives very little faith in our children that they can grasp these very few, simple words,” said Dr Awanui Te Huia, associate professor at Victoria University of Wellington’s Māori studies department, Te Kawa a Māui.
Curriculum reform and attendance policies, while not irrelevant, are secondary to the social conditions required to provide effective learning. The current curriculum’s lack of clarity in subjects like science and outdated literacy approaches do need fixing, and low attendance (only 58% of students attended school more than 90% of the time in 2024) is a concern. But National’s obsession with structured literacy mandates and penalising poor families with truancy fines entirely misses the point.
A child who’s hungry or sick won’t learn, no matter how rigorous the curriculum or how often they’re dragged to class by parents afraid of further financial penalties. These measures distract from the root issue: poverty inhibiting children's potential to learn.
The coalition of chaos’ policies betray a wilful blindness to what matters. Instead of investing in things that work, like school lunch programmes, proven to boost engagement and achievement, they’ve slashed funding for Ka Ora, Ka Ako by $107 million annually, reducing per-student lunch budgets from $6.99–$8.90 to as low as $3, compromising meal quality for over 244,000 students in 2025.
Instead of expanding health services or social housing, they’ve cut social housing investment and restricted access to numerous social services, while funnelling $153 million to charter schools with no proven benefit. This isn’t just neglect; it’s a deliberate choice to let inequality fester while wasting taxpayer money on pet projects already proven to be failures.
Following the appalling results of his school lunch cuts, his ineffective school attendance strategy & his hated Treaty Principles Bill, charter schools are set to be yet another significant failure for David Seymour.
Charter school agency staff paid average salary of $158,889
The new charter school agency is paying its staff an average salary of $158,889 - much higher than Ministry of Education staff and more than 50% higher than the public service average salary.
The agency has 18 staff members and sits within the Ministry of Education. But it pays more than staff there, where the average salary is $112,300, according to the public service commission. Charter school agency staff are also paid 56% more than the average public service salary, which is $101,700.
Charter schools: David Seymour defends $10 million for 215 students
David Seymour is defending the $10 million budget for charter schools when seven have been operating since February this year with only 215 students enrolled in them.
By averaging the cost across the 215 students, it equates to roughly $46,500 per student and is significantly higher than the core funding per student at a state school, which is just above $9000.
The evidence is clear: poverty drives educational decline, and the coalition of chaos' austerity policies are only making the situation worse. If we want kids to thrive, we need a government that ensures they’re fed, housed, and able to be healthy, not one that punishes them for their circumstances. Until then, no amount of classroom tinkering will close the gap.
In a move that's akin to cultural erasure, Education Minister Erica Stanford’s Ministry of Education has banned a Māori book, At the Marae, from classroom use for the absurd reason that it contains “too many Māori words.” This book, designed specifically to support the teaching of te reo Māori, is a vital tool for fostering bilingualism in Aotearoa’s classrooms. To deem it unsuitable because it embraces the very language it seeks to teach isn't just ludicrous, it’s a deliberate attack on Māori identity in an attempt to undermine the revitalisation of an official language of New Zealand.
Fury as ministry cans kids book for too many Māori words
The Education Ministry has canned a reader for junior children because it has too many Māori words, infuriating Te Akatea, the Māori Principals' Association.
The association's president Bruce Jepsen said the decision not to reprint At the Marae was racist and white supremacist.
The ministry told schools At the Marae, did not fit the sequence that young children were now taught to decode words using the structured literacy approach.
Te Akatea, the Māori Principals’ Association, rightly called this decision “an act of racism,” with president Bruce Jepsen decrying it as a step toward recolonising education. Unfortunately, this isn't an isolated incident but part of a broader, insidious pattern under an authoritative government to strip Māori language and culture from public view. The removal of “Aotearoa” from passports, the planned erasure of Māori names from road signs, and the renaming of government agencies to exclude te reo Māori are all symptomatic of a racist agenda, which is costing taxpayer's millions of dollars with no quantifiable benefit, to diminish Māori presence in our literature and shared spaces.
These are the seven words in the Māori book that was removed by Erica Stanford's Ministry of Education for having "too many Māori words"#nzpolpic.twitter.com/v3UdB0dnsj
Take the Electoral Commission's renaming of the Rongotai electorate to Wellington Bays, an act devoid of any rationale beyond a clear intent to erase Māori nomenclature. No consultation, no justification, just a blunt rejection of a name tied to Māori heritage obviously undertaken at the behest of the current racially motivated government. The coalition’s track record on Māori language extends to other shameful decisions. The redirection of $30 million from the Te Ahu o te Reo Māori programme, which trained teachers to deliver te reo Māori, to fund a maths curriculum refresh plagued with problems is a stark example.
Experts have debunked Stanford’s claim that the programme failed to improve student outcomes, labelling it misleading and a pretext for defunding Māori education. Sadly, government ministers aren't adverse to lying in order to further their racist agenda. This follows the coalition’s decision to review Treaty of Waitangi clauses in education and other legislation, a move critics argue is designed to undermine Māori rights and co-governance. However, Stanford’s leadership has been equally disastrous when looking at her broader education policy direction.
'Wouldn't overblow it' - Education Minister on maths book errors
The Education Minister has thanked "keen bean" students for picking up errors in Ministry of Education-funded maths resources.
Eighteen errors were spotted and fixed in new maths resources, including incorrect sums, a wrong number labelled in te reo Māori, and incorrectly saying "triangles" instead of "rectangles" in an answer.
In one case, an answer to a problem in a Year 4 workbook was listed as 1024, and had to be changed to the correct answer of 19,875.
Standford's casual dismissal of 18 errors in Ministry of Education-funded maths resources, errors as egregious as incorrect sums and mistranslations of te reo Māori (e.g., “rua” written instead of “whā” for the number four) is emblematic of a government prioritising haste over quality resources that teachers can actually use. Stanford’s flippant “I wouldn’t overblow it” response, thanking “keen bean” students for spotting mistakes, downplays a systemic failure likely exacerbated by an overbearing racist agenda and over-reliance on artificial intelligence in resource development.
School curriculum rewrite had serious problems, managers considered using AI to help
Internal Education Ministry documents sighted by RNZ reveal serious problems plagued the rewrite of the school curriculum earlier this year and managers were considering using AI to help with the work.
The latest leak from the organisation shows only a few months ago it lacked a clear definition of the core concept underpinning the entire rewrite - "knowledge rich" - even though it had already published primary school maths and English curriculums by that time and had nearly completed draft secondary school English and maths curriculums.
It was also struggling with repeated requests for changes.
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The latest leak followed a series of disclosures of internal documents that prompted the ministry to hire a KC to investigate where they were coming from.
A "programme status report" sighted by RNZ said the introduction of a new process for developing the curriculum posed an "extreme" issue to the work.
"The new delivery process is adding complexity to both internal and external delivery and review procedures as we do not have a clear definition of a knowledge rich curriculum and what it looks like in a NZ context," it said.
"There is no international comparison we can pick up and use."
The hasty rewrite of the school curriculum, driven by a ministerial advisory group appointed in late 2023 by Erica Standford, has been marred by inadequate due diligence, resulting in a litany of errors that undermine student learning. In fact the coalition of chaos has failed the education litmus test spectacularly. Since taking office, student attendance has plummeted, with only 67% of schools engaging in the government’s Stepped Attendance Response (STAR) programme by April 2025.
NCEA literacy and numeracy pass rates also expose the National-led coalition’s abject failure, with Māori students achieving a dismal 22% pass rate in 2024, compared to 67% for non-Māori, leaving 78% of Māori learners without equitable outcomes. But instead of helping the 45,000 Māori students struggling under a system starved of resources, the government instead plans to get rid of NCEA to try and hide their systemic education failures. Worse yet, they are undermining education for Māori students further by cutting $30 million from Te Ahu o te Reo Māori programmes, which previously supported 1,200 teachers annually, and a $15 million reduction in culturally responsive education initiatives, deepening the systemic neglect that perpetuates Māori underachievement.
The National-led coalition government’s systematic erasure of Māori words from public spaces, such as road signs, passports, and government agencies, coupled with new financial burdens like the doubled $100 International Visitor Conservation and Tourism Levy (IVL) for some visa categories in 2024 and additional charges of up to $35 per person for access to popular walking tracks like the Tongariro Alpine Crossing, threatens to derail New Zealand’s tourism industry, which generated $37.7 billion and supported 318,000 jobs (14.4% of the workforce) in 2023.
The truth of the matter is that nobody wants to visit a racist country. Māori culture, including te reo Māori, is a cornerstone of the tourism appeal, with 68% of international visitors citing cultural experiences as a primary draw. The government's openly racist policies and suppression of Māori language risks alienating this market, especially as competitors like Australia and Canada bolster Indigenous tourism programs.
The IVL hike and new track fees, impacting 1.9 million annual visitors and 200,000 track users respectively, have already contributed to a 7% decline in arrivals from key markets like the UK and USA in 2024 compared to pre-COVID levels. Together, these policies could stall tourism’s recovery, with long-term economic losses projected at $20-$30 billion over the next decade, as New Zealand’s unique Māori cultural identity, a global brand asset, is undermined by ignorant government policies.
Education Minister Erica Stanford’s tenure has been a cascade of blunders, exposing her incompetence and disregard for accountability. In May 2025, Official Information Act releases revealed she used her personal Gmail account to handle sensitive government business, including pre-Budget documents and visa policy changes, breaching the Cabinet Manual’s explicit rules against such practices. This “untidy” conduct, as Stanford admitted, risked cybersecurity breaches, with Labour’s Willow-Jean Prime slamming it as a “welcome sign to threats to national security” affecting millions in taxpayer-funded decisions.
“I’m very relaxed about it”
⚠️ Another day, another demonstration of weak, ineffective leadership from Prime Minister Christopher Luxon as he gets grilled by 1News Maiki Sherman over Education & Immigration Minister Erica Standford using her personal email to carry out official… pic.twitter.com/Sp8i9E2JTW
Standford's failure to properly oversee Associate Minister David Seymour’s free school lunches programme has been equally disastrous, with 124,000 daily meals from subcontractor Libelle Group (liquidated in March 2025) marred by delays, nutritional shortfalls, contaminated and inedible food. Stanford only learned of Libelle’s collapse through media reports, further highlighting her detachment from critical oversight. Her apparent inability to grasp NCEA’s complexities has also drawn scorn, particularly in regards to her rushed six-week consultation for sweeping NCEA changes, which critics called inadequate for reforms affecting generations of learners. Stanford’s downplaying of 18 errors in Ministry-funded maths resources and her defense of a hasty curriculum rewrite riddled with inaccuracies, further erode confidence in her ability to get things right. These numerous missteps, alongside her dismissal of Māori education concerns, cement Stanford’s record as one of reckless negligence and cultural insensitivity, failing New Zealand’s students and taxpayers at every turn.
Despite all the evidence, the coalition of chaos' actions betray a deep-seated aversion to Māori culture and a reckless approach to education. Banning a book like At the Marae for embracing te reo Māori isn't just an administrative blunder, it’s a calculated nod to the government's never ending war on indiginous rights and another step toward cultural erasure. The National-led coalition’s legacy is one of division, incompetence, and a shameful disregard for the Treaty of Waitangi. Aotearoa deserves better than a government that fails its children and disrespects its indigenous heritage. New Zealand therefore deserves a change of government.
In a move that reeks of further disdain for democratic accountability, New Zealand’s National-led government is making moves to implement a four-year parliamentary term, a proposal that would further erode the public’s ability to hold governments to account. This audacious bid, championed by Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, comes at a time when the coalition is railroading through a slew of socially destructive policies that no one voted for.
Govt announces four-year parliamentary term legislation to be introduced
The Government has agreed to introduce legislation that would allow the parliamentary term to be extended to four years - subject to a referendum - Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith says.
Previously, coalition partners New Zealand First and ACT have both voiced support for four-year political terms, and the proposed Bill was modelled on the ACT Party's draft Constitution (Enabling a 4-Year Term) Amendment Bill.
The current three-year limit is entrenched — meaning it can only be overturned through a supermajority in Parliament or a referendum.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has previously indicated the Government planned to propose a referendum for four-year Parliamentary terms at the next election, and has been critical of the current three-year term which he said pushed governments into short-term decision-making.
NZ Government allocates $25m for referendum on four-year parliamentary terms
The Government has set aside $25 million for a referendum on four-year parliamentary terms, pencilled in to run alongside next year’s election.
The three-year term is a vital check on power, allowing voters to reverse course before ill-conceived policies wreak havoc. It’s a mechanism that can keep governments honest, or at least, as honest as they can be. Extending the term to four years would not only shield government's from scrutiny but also entrench their reckless agenda, leaving Kiwis to bear the consequences of decisions made without any mandate.
Why the rush to reduce oversight? Perhaps because this coalition knows their policies lack legitimacy. From tax breaks for tobacco companies to slashing essential services, the National-led government is implementing measures that were conspicuously absent from their campaign promises. The electorate didn’t vote for this economically damaging agenda, they voted for vague assurances of “getting back on track,” not a wrecking ball through our social fabric.
Take the tax breaks for tobacco companies, extended to three years in a move that blindsided health advocates and the public alike. This wasn’t a policy National, ACT, or NZ First campaigned on; it was a backroom deal that prioritises corporate profits over public health. The repeal of smokefree legislation and $300 million worth of tax breaks to increase cancer rates is a stark example of this government’s priorities.
Meanwhile, essential services like healthcare, education, and social housing are being gutted. The 2025 Budget saw $11 billion redirected from pay equity, KiwiSaver, and Best Start to fund tax cuts that disproportionately benefit landlords and multinationals. These cuts hit the most vulnerable hardest, with low-income earners, Māori, women, and the self-employed bearing the brunt, as highlighted by Retirement Commissioner Jane Wrightson.
The coalition’s disdain for voters is palpable, and further highlighted by their often negative rhetoric. Luxon’s infamous quip referring to New Zealanders as “bottom feeders” betrays a corporate arrogance that views the public as mere “customers” rather than citizens with rights. ACT leader David Seymour’s dismissal of those who missed voter registration as “drop kicks” further reveals the coalition’s contempt for the electorate and people's right to vote.
Finance Minister Nicola Willis had the gall to even suggest Kiwis should be grateful that unemployment, now at 5.2%, hasn’t climbed higher. This patronising rhetoric underscores a government that sees itself as above the people it serves, pushing policies that serve narrow interests while ignoring the broader public good.
She’s arrived at the ‘bitching about the ungrateful punters’ stage already, and that doesn’t usually appear until the third term. https://t.co/TRGJglEuRl
The coalition’s socially destructive agenda extends beyond tobacco and tax cuts. The dismantling of the Māori Health Authority, the minimisation of te reo Māori in public services, and the push to reinterpret the Treaty of Waitangi through ACT’s controversial bills are moves that inflame division and undermine decades of progress. These policies, driven by David Seymour and Winston Peters, were not endorsed by voters but are being foisted upon the nation under the guise of coalition necessity. Talk about the tail waging the dog.
The result? A deepening recession, rising unemployment, higher inflation (CPI 2.7% compared to 1.8% forecast), and growing public discontent, with polls showing National’s support plummeting. A four-year term would only embolden this type of neoliberal government to double down on its unmandated agenda, with the passage of time and lolly scrambles towards election time somewhat shielding them from the electoral consequences of their negative policy decisions.
Adding insult to injury, the proposed referendum on a four-year term is itself a waste of taxpayer money, a waste of taxpayers money that only a paywalled article is reporting on. Talk about a complete failure of the fourth estate. Nobody asked for this vote; it’s a pet project of a government already haemorrhaging public trust and money. At a time when essential services are being significantly cut and cost-of-living pressures are squeezing households and closing businesses, funnelling resources into an unrequested referendum is yet another example of this coalition’s skewed priorities.
The three-year term ensures that voters can relatively swiftly correct course when governments veer into chaos. Luxon’s coalition is banking on an extra year to entrench policies that prioritise corporate mates over ordinary Kiwis, all while dismissing public discontent as the grumblings of “bottom feeders” and "drop kicks". If this government truly believed in its vision, it wouldn’t fear facing the electorate every three years.
The push for a four-year term isn’t about stability, it’s about evading accountability. New Zealanders deserve better: a democracy that listens, not one that lectures.
In a political landscape increasingly defined by distraction and dysfunction, the National-led coalition has descended into a quagmire of trivial pursuits and economic neglect. The latest offerings from Winston Peters and David Seymour exemplify this trend: Peters’ pointless push to legislate the countries name as, well, New Zealand, and Seymour’s obsession with deregulating the placement of backyard sheds. These aren't the actions of a government focused on the pressing issues facing Aotearoa; they're the desperate ploys of government MPs scrambling to stay in the headlines while the economy teeters and ordinary Kiwis bear the brunt.
Making ‘New Zealand’ country’s official name added to NZ First’s ever-changing list of bills
New Zealand First’s stack of publicly announced Member’s Bills has grown yet again, with the party today proposing legislation to make “New Zealand” the official name of the country in law.
The legislation – which still needs to be picked from the ballot of Member’s Bills – comes in response to the party’s unease over the use of “Aotearoa”, including in Parliament.
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It’s the eighth Member’s Bill the party has announced this year, but due to the rules of Parliament, NZ First is only able to have four in the ballot at any one time.
Only MPs who aren’t ministers – NZ First has four backbenchers – can have Member’s Bills and they can only have one in the ballot at a time.
This has meant the party has had to shuffle out several of the bills it has previously announced, but which remain on NZ First’s website as “Our Member’s Bills”.
For example, the “Conscience Acts Referendums Bill”, which was revealed in March to remove conscience votes in Parliament and instead require some particular legislation to go to a national public referendum, no longer appears on Parliament’s website.
Let’s start with Winston Peters' bungling, whose proposal to enshrine “New Zealand” as the country’s official name is another play for the bigoted vote. The name is already codified in law, used globally, and etched into our national identity. This legislative stunt serves no practical purpose and diverts parliamentary resources, which could be better utilised to try and fix the countries more pressing issues, such as homelessness and the cost of living crisis. It reeks of Peters’ trademark populism, a distraction from the coalition’s inability to address substantive issues it appears to have no intention of actually solving.
Similarly, David Seymour has championed easing rules on shed placement, arguing that shrinking section sizes justifies this change. While Seymour frames this as a win for homeowners, it’s a policy so niche it barely registers against the backdrop of people's economic hardship. There's no record of any New Zealander ever being fined for having a garden shed in the wrong place, leading one to wonder: is this really the best use of ministerial time when 112,496 people face severe housing deprivation? These trivial policies are part of a broader pattern of headline-grabbing stunts designed to mask the coalition’s lethargy on substantive issues such as Gaza. They're trying to distract you from their economic mismanagement as well.
Furthermore, the government’s decision to overhaul the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) is another knee-jerk reaction, rushed through without robust research or consultation in an attempt to take the focus off of the consequences of their policies, such as declining achievement rates, a decline that's largely the result of our reduced living standards. But instead of actually doing anything to make sure children and young people are in a position to actually learn and reach their full potential, the coalition is more concerned with saving money by providing inedible school lunches.
Education Minister Erica Stanford’s plan to replace NCEA, a system in place for over 20 years, with a new framework lacks evidence of its efficacy. Only 56% of students passed NCEA literacy and numeracy writing tests in June 2023, and 64% passed reading, yet the coalition offers no data to suggest their overhaul will improve these figures. They're again using the opportunity to blame Labour for unworkable NCEA changes brought in by the John Key led National government. This move appears less about educational reform and more about diverting attention from the cost-of-living crisis, where consumer inflation remains stubbornly high and domestic price pressures show no signs of easing, which is having a detrimental effect on young people's ability to learn.
The coalition’s economic mismanagement is also starkly evident in the escalating wave of business liquidations and mounting mortgage stress. Since the National-led government took office in November 2023, business liquidations have surged, with 2,976 companies entering liquidation in 2024 alone, a 27% increase year-on-year, driven heavily by the downturn in construction, hospitality, and our retail sectors. Non-performing loans have also risen, with 485,000 consumers in arrears as of May 2025, including 21,900 mortgage holders behind by over 30 days. With New Zealand’s GDP contracting by 2.1% in the year to September 2024, despite a population growth of 1.2%, and net core Crown debt reaching $175.5 billion (42.5% of GDP) in June 2024, the economic outlook is grim. Treasury forecasts debt to climb to $192 billion by mid-2026, and economists warn that ongoing austerity and global trade shocks, such as Trump's 15% tariffs, could push liquidation rates higher, with small-to-medium enterprises (97% of New Zealand’s businesses) particularly vulnerable to further closures.
Meanwhile, mortgage holders face mounting pressure as interest rates, which rose sharply from 2.58% in August 2021 to a peak of 7.5% by January 2024 under the previous Labour government’s tenure, have only modestly declined under the National-led coalition. As of July 2025, the average one-year fixed mortgage rate sits at 4.97%, a drop of about 170 basis points since the Reserve Bank began cutting the Official Cash Rate (OCR) from 5.5% to 3.25% since August 2024. It's little wonder that the major banks are making record breaking profits ($7.22 billion in 2024) given they aren't always passing on the Reserve Bank's monetary stimulus. This relief is marginal for many, as debt-servicing costs remain elevated.
The National-led government’s trickle down economics and tax cuts, which disproportionately benefit higher earners, have failed to stimulate any meaningful economic recovery. Wage growth, slowing to 3.7% in June 2025 from 6.9% in June 2023, lags behind living costs, with inflation at 2.7% in June 2025 (up from 2.1% estimates) and essentials like rent, food, and utilities consuming 62–98% of disposable income for many low-income households. This mismatch exacerbates financial strain, as the coalition’s focus on fiscal restraint over investment stifles demand and deepens hardship for ordinary Kiwis.
David Seymour’s rhetoric about “saving” even more money (read less money in your back pocket), through further cuts and policy tinkering, such as his Regulatory Standards Bill, is a hollow promise that threatens to deepen New Zealand’s economic woes. Far from delivering efficiency, the bill imposes $50–60 million annually in administrative costs, as estimated by MBIE, due to mandatory Consistency Accountability Statements and a new Regulatory Standards Board that duplicates existing oversight mechanisms. Seymour and other coalition MPs have falsely claimed that the holy grail of artificial intelligence will somehow magically streamline these processes to reduce costs, yet experts like Victoria University’s Andrew Lensen has categorically debunk this claim, noting AI’s need for human oversight limits cost savings. Even if AI had the ability to streamline the government's processes, their failure to adapt is in stark contrast to their dishonest rhetoric, especially in respect to the National led government slashing $1.5 billion from public sector budgets, including innovation and digital transformation programmes. There's no question that since taking office in November 2023, the coalition has stifled AI development critical for economic resilience. By cutting and deregulating without researching long-term impacts, Seymour’s latest iteration of an already defeated bill undermines worker protections and environmental standards, standards that are there to ensure that taxpayers don't always foot the bill for things like the extractive industries environmental pollution. This reckless approach pulls money from an already struggling economy, money that could be going towards more productive sectors such as business innovation and housing security.
Westpac’s senior economist Satish Ranchhod warns that domestic inflation pressures will persist, yet Seymour’s policies seem poised to deepen hardship for the 120,000 already deprived children struggling to get by amid the cost-of-living crisis. It's becoming more aparent with every press release that this “Coalition of Chaos” government thrives on distraction, not delivery.
From Peters’ name game to Seymour’s shed obsession, their policies are an excercise in irrelevance. Meanwhile, the real issues, rising homelessness, the cost of living crisis, hungry children, business failures, and mortgage stress, go unaddressed. With 65% of New Zealanders believing the economy is rigged for the rich, the coalition’s focus on trivialities only fuels discontent. Aotearoa deserves better: a government that tackles the cost-of-living crisis head-on, not one that rearranges the deck chairs while the economy continues to burn.
