New Zealand Centre for Political Research

The election is on a knife edge. On one side is a coalition that wants to encourage people to get ahead through lower taxes, less regulation, stronger economic growth and more freedom. On the other side are parties that want to penalise success. Labour, which proved itself to be not only incompetent at managing our country but downright destructive, wants to tax us more.

All electoral systems can be gamed to a greater or lesser extent. First Past the Post invites gerrymandering, for example, where electorate boundaries are drawn to concentrate the supporters of one party in a single district, to minimise the number of seats that party’s candidates win. The manipulation of MMP is more complicated, but we’ve seen degrees of gaming from the very start. An obvious early example is Jeanette Fitzsimons in the Coromandel electorate back in 1999.

All electoral systems can be gamed to a greater or lesser extent. First Past the Post invites gerrymandering, for example, where electorate boundaries are drawn to concentrate the supporters of one party in a single district, to minimise the number of seats that party’s candidates win. The manipulation of MMP is more complicated, but we’ve seen degrees of gaming from the very start. An obvious early example is Jeanette Fitzsimons in the Coromandel electorate back in 1999.

Last week I received an email from a colleague expressing outrage over his experience with the Electoral Commission. The Electoral Commission is, of course, the independent Crown Entity tasked with running New Zealand’s General Elections. Since most of us are aware of the agency through the quirky antics of the “orange man” and his “orange dog”, let’s take a deeper dive to examine how they operate.

My wife is concerned about my mental health. Ever since I retired 5 years ago my brain has been undergoing a steady process of atrophy, in her view, and I need to find ways of engaging it other than the latest computer city-building game! She urged me to apply for a job with the Electoral Commission for the upcoming elections.

With the 2026 General Election only three months away, let’s examine what the polls are telling us about who’s going to be running the country after November 7 and what the key issues are. New Zealand has four main political polls.

Recent events On the night of Monday, 27 July the peak demand was not abnormally high, solar power was nonexistent, wind power was low and the DC link was fully loaded feeding hydropower from the South Island to the North Island. The system was close to its limits. If the lakes had been lower or the DC link or a major generator tripped off, the System Operator would have had to resort to forced load shedding. The same thing happened on 4 August.

The Coalition’s proposed shakeup of local government is well underway. Time is now running out for councils to decide on the shape of their mergers. This is not the first time local councils have undergone major structural reform. Let’s see whether any lessons have been learned. In the 1980s, New Zealand had around 850 separate elected local authorities serving our 3.3 million population.

For all the noise about “simplifying” local government in Northland, one question remains unanswered: where has bigger ever proven better? No one can point to a single example in New Zealand where amalgamation has delivered lower costs, better services, or stronger communities. What we can point to are the failures — and Northland is being pushed down the same path.

One of the things we’ve learnt about climate change politics over the years is that their predictions are always wrong. Remember Al Gore’s 2006 film “An Inconvenient Truth” which frightened audiences worldwide with apocalyptic predictions that rising seas would inundate low-lying nations creating millions of climate refugees, that melting sea ice would lead to mass polar-bear drownings, that Lake Chad would completely dry up, and all the snow on Mount Kilimanjaro would disappear?