The Reserve Bank announced:

The Monetary Policy Committee today voted 4 – 3 to hold the OCR at 2.75 percent. …

Global events are adding to near-term inflation pressures in New Zealand. Fuel prices have risen further because of ongoing disruptions in global energy markets, and the exchange rate has fallen by around 3 percent since early September. Annual inflation is expected to increase to 4.4 percent in the December quarter, largely reflecting current futures prices for fuel. Near-term inflation forecasts are uncertain given volatility in prices for oil and refined fuels.

The New Zealand economy continues to recover, although conditions remain uneven. Export-exposed parts of the economy are benefiting from high commodity prices, strong demand for goods exports and increased tourist numbers. But domestic demand remains subdued outside of exporting centres.

It’s a reasonable decision to wait and see, but for my 2c I would have voted with the minority to raise now. I do love the fact we know what the vote was, and even who voted each way.

Prasanna Gai and Anna Breman attached material risk to the possibility that the global environment could shift abruptly. It was therefore appropriate to account for such risks when judging neutral rates and the stance of monetary policy rather than relying on most likely or mid-point measures.

So let’s see if Trump attacks Iran again, or if there is a peace deal, and also possible the impact of the US midterms on markets.

There is a risk that inflation becomes entrenched before conventional expectations measures respond, despite the previous two OCR increases. In addition, the world economy could tip abruptly into a downturn causing weaker inflation over the medium term. 

As I said, I would have voted to raise as I think entrenched expectations is a bigger risk than a global downturn. Hopefully we get neither.

The Herald reports:

Former Opportunity Party board members have spoken out about internal disarray and tribal politics as polling suggests the party may hold the balance of power after November’s election.

Speaking exclusively to the Herald, the former insiders have described a party plagued by a “toxic” and “nasty” culture, with sources feeling they were excluded, blocked from discussion and treated like outsiders when at odds with a “cliquey” faction of the party.

The plural means more than one.

“I’ve had insights into whānau, hapū and iwi politics and it can be quite nasty, but the nastiness I personally saw from the managerial, woke Pākehā class within Top [Opportunity], it supersedes any of the nastiness I’ve seen in Māori politics,” Parata said.

That’s some comparison.

Worth reflecting that any government of the left that forms will need both Te Pati Maori and Opportunity to govern. Does it looks like serious stable government?

For the third election in a row, Curia has done polls in the Māori electorates for Whakaata Māori (Māori TV). The results can all be found here. In four of the electorates TPM leads, in two Labour leads and in one, Greens lead.

I thought it would be useful to caution that electorate polls, and especially Māori electorate polls, should not be seen as predictive of the election outcome as party vote polls.

There are six reasons why these polls are less predictive.

1. They have a smaller sample of 500, and hence a larger margin of error of 4.5%. A gap between candidates of less than 7% is not statistically significant at 95% confidence.
2. People are less certain about their electorate vote. Most people have a fairly good idea of parties they will vote for, or not vote for. But they keep their options open on candidates until closer to the election. There is always a much higher level of undecideds with electorate vote than party vote.
3. Māori electorates are harder to poll than general electorates. As it is not cost effective to call random households hoping that 1 in six may have a Māori adult, you target areas more likely to have Māori respondents. This makes the poll less random.
4. Māori households tend to have higher levels of poverty, and those with the highest levels of deprivation can be harder to contact.
5. In most seats the electorate contest is primarily between a centre right candidate and a centre left candidate, making the decision more binary. In Māori electorates all the leading candidates tend to be centre left, so respondents won’t be as guided by their party vote choice.
6. Most electorate polls are done a month or two before the actual election, so can’t be seen as predictive as a poll taken the week before the election.

So the results from the polls are very very interesting, and can tell us a lot about how party and candidates are doing. But unless there is a huge gap between candidates, they should not be seen as particularly predictive of the outcome.

Israel will have results in a few hours. The Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIPAC) has produced an excellent fact sheet on the election, which is very comprehensive.

This is the first Government since 1973 to last the entire four year term.

The threshold to gain MPs is 3.25% so who makes the threshold is critical. It looks like 11 to 15 of the 38 parties will make it.

The parties that support the Government currently have 64 seats out of 120. The current polls project they will get 55 seats.

The opposition parties look to be on target for 49 seats.

Again this will vary based on who makes the threshold.

There are two Arab party lists, and between them they are projected to get 14 seats.

It is unclear what happens if the Arab parties hold the balance of power, as both main parties have said they won’t bring them into a coalition. Either some sort of grand coalition, or some sort of confidence and supply agreement with one of them.

It will be an extremely consequential election.

The hysteria of the left continues to grow. Trevor failed to check where the advance voting places are, and claims that because his usual site was only open for 12 days, instead of 13 days, this is voter suppression.

If had checked he would have seen he could have voted at Queensgate on Monday, or voted at the Wainui Hall on Tuesday.

I am married to a gorgeous lady – Luciana Soares Ramos – who came to NZ to live 18 years ago.

Two years ago we traveled to Brazil to meet and spend time with her parents. Her mom is in her late 80s and her dad is 95. Both are extremely astute and policially engaged.

Brazil only returned to democracy in 1985 after 21 years of military rule. While in the country we chose to watch this series about exposing corruption under “Lula”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mechanism_(TV_series)

As most will know, yesterday was the Presidential run-off election in Brazil. All polls indicated a narrow win for Flavio Bolsanaro.

From a economics statisticians point of view – far more significant was https://polymarket.com/ leading up to the day. With approx. US$70m being wagered you would expect the people staking their money to do their research. On the day before the election Bolsonaro was favoured strongly at 81%.

As soon as a voting extention was announced from a 5pm close to a 7pm close – the numbers flipped.

The result has already been challenged.

Luciana operates accommodation for international tertiary level students in Auckland. The one positive she notes is that she can expand her business and more students seek a better education outside of Brazil.

As an aside – Polymarket has Luxon only at 51% to become PM. My 5 cents worth is that the 300,000 not enrolled and the approach of young and disengaged voters on the day … would make that a very good bet.

[email protected]

As I have said on multiple occasions, I regard any attempts to deliberately engineer overhang seats as semi-undemocratic. MMP is designed to let the bloc with the most votes to form Government. Overhang strategies undermine the concept of equality of suffrage where all votes have equal power, and lead to outcomes that are unproportional.

There is only one party that is seeking an overhang strategy – Te Pāti Māori. They are unique in that they are actively discouraging people from giving them their party vote. All other parties are working hard to gain party votes.

There are activists who are promoting an overhang strategy on the right. This is not new. I have had people propose a variant of this since 1996.

The question is what to do is overhang results in a government that received fewer votes than the opposition?

I have considered whether the two major party leaders should refuse to form a Government if it is only possible due to overhang. The problem is that you can’t ignore the facts you actually have those overhang MPs (if there are any). You would have to have some of your MPs voting to keep a Government you oppose in power, and that simply isn’t feasible.

A gallery journalist has suggested a second election should be called. That would be ridiculous though. It would cost a huge amount of money and could produce the same outcome.

A sensible thing for any Prime Minister who only holds the job due to overhang would be to treat their mandate as somewhat limited, and where possible try to only pass laws when they can get some support from at least one non-Govt party. So that could mean PM Hipkins getting support from National, ACT or NZ First; or PM Luxon getting support from Labour or Opportunity. This would only apply if overhang is responsible for the Government being possible.

The focus for me is how to prevent overhang in future, so that a Government is only possible if it wins more votes than the opposition parties in Parliament. There are four main ways to do that.

1. Increase the size of Parliament. If you had say 150 MPs, 80 list and 70 electorate, then overhang is far far less likely to occur. But the public won’t want a larger Parliament (ironically overhang will deliver that anyway)
2. Change the ratio of electorate to list seats. If you had say 70 list seats and 50 electorates, overhang would be far far less likely to occur. However some already huge seats like West Coast – Taman would become even larger. Also unpopular.
3. If a party gains more electorate seats than its party vote share, then other parties get additional list seats so the proportions are proportional to the party vote. This would remove the incentive for overhang, but could result in a larger Parliament when you get accidental overhang. If TPM wins four seats and it is entitled to two, Parliament would have to almost double in size.
4. The German solution where if a party wins more electorate seats than its party vote share, then their most marginally won seats goes to the second place getter. This would make the electorate’s choice secondary to the party vote which would be less than ideal, but is still the best solution. It would 100% ensure all parties go all out for the party vote, so TPM would not try to repeat their overhang strategy, and people could no longer advocate that not giving your party vote to National actually helps National.

My hope is that there are no overhang seats, or if there are they don’t determine who can form Government. And that Parliament after the election gets a bipartisan consensus to amend the Electoral Act in line with option 4.

Had to laugh at the spin by the Ministry of Justice about the new digital court management system. After Law News reported on it, they sent in an op ed which claimed:

LawNews’ September 30 article stated that the MoJ considered scrapping [the programme] in February 2025. This is incorrect.

Law News points out:

a workshop was conducted on February 4 that year to consider five options for the programme’s future. The fifth option was “Change to a Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) solution and change provider”. In other words, sack DXC and scrap the work done so far in favour of adopting a ready-made solution from another supplier. Ditching the work done so far was not only considered, it was actually ranked second best of the five options

The MOJ op ed continues:

The LawNews article also states that there have been budget blowouts. The programme’s cost profile has evolved over time, reflecting increased certainty as the programme progresses from procurement, through design and build. It is why contingency is part of the funding. Te Au Reka continues to operate within its financial approvals.

The statement “The cost profile has evolved over time” should win a prize for spin of the year.

Law News points out:

Te Au Reka is operating within its financial approvals, but those approvals needed to be increased by 15% in April 2025 because costs were higher than originally envisaged.

Inconvenient facts.

To be fair a 15% cost blowout is fairly minor when it comes to Govt IT projects, but one shouldn’t still try to spin it as not being a blowout.

The Herald reports:

The Green Party has lodged a formal complaint against the Sensible Sentencing Trust (SST), accusing the lobby group of impersonating the party with its latest election attack ads. …

The party said the SST was a Taxpayers’ Union “astroturf group” – that is, a fake grassroots organisation supporting the same cause.

I don’t know whether to conclude whether Chloe is stupid, ignorant or just deceitful?

The SST was established in 2001 – 12 years before the Taxpayers’ Union. Now Chloe was only seven years old at the time, so maybe she missed the huge impact they had on law and order issues back then.

And here’s what Wikipedia says about their support:

Membership quickly grew to 135,000 by 2002. In addition, the Trust attracted 3,000 donors and chapters were established across New Zealand. …

By 2009, McVicar claimed that the Trust had over 150,000 members

The left hate grassroots activism on the right. They always claim it is fake and astroturf to the point that the term has become as meaningless as claims of genocide. The reality is that pretty much every group they hate such as Taxpayers’ Union, Free Speech Union, Hobson’s Pledge, Sensible Sentencing Trust, Groundswell etc has a supporter list bigger than the combined membership of Labour and the Greens.

UPDATE: The SST has responded:

The Sensible Sentencing Trust has slammed Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick and her party for dismissing New Zealand’s longest-standing and largest victims’ rights organisation as an “astroturf” group or a spin-off of a taxpayer group.

Trust spokesperson Louise Parsons said the claim is either ignorant or deliberately deceitful.

“The Sensible Sentencing Trust was founded in 2001 – more than a decade before the Taxpayers’ Union even existed. Within a year we had 135,000 members. By 2009 that number was over 150,000. We are the organisation built by and for the families of murder victims, rape survivors, and those left shattered by serious violence. Swarbrick’s slur is a cheap attempt to erase those voices.”

This is a good time to remind people the Green Party policy is:

• End life sentences for murder
• End preventive detention for repeat paedophiles
• End prison for parole breaches
• End prison for bail breaches

Last week on my post ‘Who might be an MP?‘ one reader commented: 

“Unless Labour, ACT, Green and NZF as well as National voters in the Hutt [South] electorate vote for Chris Bishop and party vote for their own parties then Chris Bishop may not make it back.”

There are two paths back into Parliament for Chris Bishop – a win in Hutt South, or the National Party having at least two list MPs. Both of these paths are looking far from certain right now.

Yet at number 12 on Labour’s list, Labour’s Hutt South candidate Ginny Anderson looks assured of a place in Parliament.

This leaves voters with a classic ‘two-for-one’ deal in Hutt South, where an Andersen win leaves the seat represented only by Andersen, while a Bishop win sees both Bishop and Andersen returned.

Whatever your politics, it’s hard to deny that Bishop has been a fierce and effective voice for the Hutt since he was first elected in 2014. He’s a hardworking and well-liked local MP despite a seriously heavy ministerial workload. I’ve never seen a more effective local MP in terms of what he does and achieves. Just reading his weekly newsletter often leaves me tried!

Bishop became the first ever National MP to win the previously safe Labour seat in 2017. The seat flipped back to Labour in 2020, despite Bishop outperforming National’s party vote by a staggering 41.59% (Bishop) to 21.99% (National). Bishop took back the seat in 2023 with a slim margin of just 1332 votes.

Bishop has beaten the odds before and I think there’s every reason to think he can do it again. I certainly hope so, because Hutt South deserves an MP like him.

UPDATE: Ani O’Brien has a great piece on Chris Bishop today, and how Parliament (not just National) would be much worse off without him.

Matthew Hooton reports:

They’re called the “bureaucratic priesthood” – powerful officials in Wellington who ministers must work with to deliver their promises but who think they, not democratically elected politicians, should be the judge of what the public wants and what it’s going to get.

The priesthood is only a minority of officials, according to a new study by the free-market New Zealand Initiative to be published after the election. It’s designed to help new ministers and MPs, on either side of the political divide, deal with barriers officials could put up to stop them doing what they have been elected to do.

Across officials surveyed for the study, about 30% appear to meet the Initiative’s “bureaucratic priesthood” definition. That includes those in operational roles who can’t really influence policy and whose jobs are more about serving the public directly.

More important are the 20% of policy advisors and their managers who apparently aren’t prepared to accept voters’ verdict two weeks from now, or the coalition agreements thrashed out afterwards. That suggests one in five of the most important mandarins don’t really support some of the most fundamental tenets of Westminster democracy.

This is a stunning finding. Now let’s be clear, 20% is a minority of public servants, but it is not a minuscule fraction. It is 1 in 5 policy advisors and managers.

It worries the Initiative that only 60% of those surveyed agreed with the statement that “because ministers are democratically elected, they should decide policy and tradeoffs”. That suggests two out of every five public servants think someone else should decide the elected government’s policies – presumably public servants themselves. Three out of five of those who write advice also think ministers aren’t as well suited as them to determine what the public wants.

This should be of huge concern to the next Government, regardless of who makes it up.

Advance voting has started for the general election, and enrolment has closed. Left parties, supported by the media have been wailing about this being some sort of massive voter suppression device. This is nonsense, and here is what they never mention.

• The deadline to enrol for the upcoming Victoria state election in Australia is 25 days before the election on 28 November
• The deadline to enrol for the Tasmanian local government elections is 47 days before the last day to vote
• The deadline to enrol for the last Australian Federal Election was 26 days before the election
• The deadline to enrol for the 2026 UK election was 17 days before the elections and for the last general election was 16 days
• The deadline to enrol before an Irish general election is 17 days

Has any media story reported the above? How does 13 days for NZ compare?

Also did you know you are legally required to enrol within 30 days of turning 18, and can enrol any time after your 17th birthday? You are liable for prosecution and a fine, if you do not enrol within one month. So every person still unenrolled, is actually in breach of the law.

Enrolment rates go up and down. The 2026 enrolment rate is currently the same as in 2017, and will probably exceed it.

Paul Goldsmith announced:

A re-elected National Government will make it a crime to remain silent and not disclose information relating to a child being murdered, National’s Justice spokesperson Paul Goldsmith says. 

“New Zealanders will remember numerous high-profile examples throughout our history where children have been brutally murdered, and Police have been unable to identify the attacker because people have chosen not to share critical information with them. 

“The right to remain silent is a fundamental principle, however, it should not be absolute when a child has lost their life and, for example, there are only three people in the house, but no one is talking. 

“If re-elected, National will make it an offence under the Crimes Act to not disclose information to the police, when a person has been present at a location where a child 12 years and under has been killed. We will work with legal experts to create an exception to the general right to silence only in exceptional circumstances, involving the death of a child.

“It will carry a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison. It will apply when a child under 12 dies, and at the time of death, or leading up to the death, it is unequivocal that one or more adults were present.

People who murder children should be jailed. People shouldn’t be jailed for saying nothing. Those two concepts are in conflict. I think the acceptability of any policy would come down to how tightly they can define the offence so it is truly only in exceptional circumstances.

Of course what would be even better is if people don’t cover up for child murderers.

A guest post by a reader:

I remember the final time my father descended into madness.  It happened several times in my life.  The last time was when I was 24.

When it became clear he would slide completely into paranoid schizophrenia, I signed a committal order and watched the cops kick in both doors of the home I grew up in – they went in hard and fast.

“Where did you last see him?” They had asked, just after I signed the order and before they went in.

“In the kitchen,” was my solemn reply, scarcely believing what was happening.

“Are there knives around?”  They asked.

“Errr… It’s a kitchen…” After a pause, I then confirmed, “yes, there are knives”.  Hence the door kicking.

But I digress.

A few days before that, we had celebrated my younger brother’s 18th birthday at my parents’ house.  Dad was well on his way into madness by then, pacing back and forth in the lounge.  I was on one side of the room, my little brother on the other side, Dad pacing in the middle.  He was talking furiously. Not babbling, but not making much sense either.  I looked across at my brother and said “Happy birthday” and smiled.  It was a ridiculous situation.  To properly understand, you’d need to hear a few backstories: a childhood of police raids, drug use and chaos turned a corner when Mum and Dad quit heroin/methadone and petty crime.  My teenage years were more stable, albeit Dad traded being a drug addict for an alcoholic.  It was surreal that we were heading back into the chaos of madness again.

I vividly remember a phrase my dad repeated many times that night.

“Gotta, gotta, gotta be reality.  Is it reality? Is it?  IS IT?  HAHAHAAAAHAHHAH”

He was grappling to hold onto reality, trying to figure out what was real and what wasn’t.

But that phrase has always stuck with me.  It’s a lens that can be applied to many things in life. Learning to distinguish between what is real vs what you want, or fear to be real is enormously useful. 

I enjoy watching politics.  I’ve dabbled in policy – it was considerably harder than I realised!  Political parties have many policy ideas.  They sometimes SOUND amazing.  They are well intentioned.  The problem policies often encounter is rational human behaviour.  Reality.

There is an excellent series on “Unintended Consequences“.  It lists many examples of well-intentioned local or central government policies that resulted in completely opposite outcomes.  It’s pretty funny, but also sad.

Wealth taxes are a good example of unintended consequences. Your opinion on the merits of a wealth tax is irrelevant.  When a wealth tax is implemented, tax revenues decrease.  This is because people act rationally.  History proves it.  Many times.  It won’t work.

So when you evaluate the policies of the various political parties this election, spare a thought for the most likely outcome of those policies. A policy you like can be innovative, ideologically appealing, or compassionate.   

But in the end, for it to work, it’s gotta be reality.

[Try this for the Unintended Consequences link: https://reason.com/tag/unintended-consequences/ holy. mod]

By Lucy Rogers

I felt a sense of discomfort recently when in the comments section of a Good Oil post I wrote about the police someone referred to the police as a “big blue gang” or words to that effect. C’mon, guys. You know that’s unfair. While there are legitimate criticisms to be made of police tribalism, the police and the Mongrel Mob are not interchangeable institutions. Whatever one’s criticisms of policing, police officers perform essential public functions and often bear significant personal costs in doing so, and describing them as a gang does not recognise that distinction and the human cost of their work.

Over the past three years since my arrest I have made a serious effort to better understand how police see the world. Not being a police officer myself, I’m not sure I’m the best person to explain their perspectives: I think there would be significant value in a police officer writing a series of blog posts expositing that rather than me. However, officers have shared stories of their experiences in anecdotes shared for the Repay The Risk campaign for better police pay over the last few months which I found really interesting and thought were worth resharing.

An officer described how after a few years of being a serving police officer in small town New Zealand, every road junction or landmark accumulated different traumatic associations: fatal road crashes, suicides, homicides. Driving around off-duty meant constantly being triggered by old memories. I’m not sure that’s something a lot of Kiwis can relate to.

Another officer described being called out to investigate a woman’s disappearance at a rural property, only to find her decomposing corpse on the floor from where she had died some weeks earlier. The smell was obscene. There weren’t any cops in the surrounding area because it was rural, so he had to stay there for a few hours while backup arrived. When he was relieved by other officers, he was required to move on to the next job as if nothing had happened.

Other stories for example involve missing birthdays or Christmas dinners, or partners lying awake at night having heard on the radio that an officer was hurt elsewhere in the country, or hypervigilance in an officer’s own kitchen because it was hard to switch from work mode to family mode. One officer described regularly standing outside his front door in silence composing himself after work so that his family would get the best version of him when he came home.

A newbie officer described attending five sudden deaths on his first three days on the job. He went out expecting a routine day of speed training when he came across a car/ truck collision on a bridge. The truck had crushed the entire engine bay of the car into the front seats. The vehicle was hanging halfway off the bridge, one shift away from dropping 15 metres into the river below.

The car driver was dying and the officer could hear the death rattle. Meanwhile, the truck driver was sitting alone with his head in his hands at the end of the bridge. The officer walked over and sat beside him: no notebook, no statement, just presence. The truck driver explained that it was him or the other driver, and he had nowhere to go, and he had a family. Later, his dashcam told the truth: the car driver deliberately committed suicide by crossing the centre line.

Then came the next part: telling the parents of the teen driver. And then, before the shift was even over, he was called out to a suicide via hanging.

My feelings about the police are complicated, but at the end of the day cops are human beings. They pay a high price to play an important social function. I deeply appreciate their mahi (work), and I invite people who hate the police to think about what a society which abolished its police force would actually look like. While I am determined to make complainants’ perspectives known (and that is my priority given the power discrepancy between an organisation with a multi-billion dollar budget and complainants) the cops’ side is worth knowing too.

Having said that, none of this of course is intended for one moment to justify the actions of the likes of dishonest evil bastards like Senior Sergeant Vaughan Perry and Inspector Rākana Cook. The point is not that VP has a difficult life and therefore his decisions have “context”: it’s that describing the police as a “gang” does not recognise the importance of what the police do and the personal cost of doing so. It’s easy to forget that not all cops are like VP.

The Post reports:

Labour has unveiled a fresh batch of policies promising to fix overcrowding at emergency departments, with more nurses, faster access to hospital beds and care before patients reach crisis point.

It is useful to compare rhetoric to record.

Under the Key/English Government between 90% and 95% of people at ED were dealt with in under six hours.

Labour’s record speaks for itself. It was a total disaster for emergency departments. Before they took office only 8% of ED patients waited more than six hours. When they left office it was 33%, so four times as many patients were waiting over six hours.

Why would you want to give them a second chance?

The Herald’s 2026 Mood of the Boardroom is out. How were the MPs rated this year by the CEOs?

1. Erica Stanford 4.38 (nc)
2. Todd McClay 4.12 (+0.38)
3. Mark Mitchell 4.00 (+0.34)
4. Chris Bishop 3.71 (-0.09)
5. David Seymour 3.44 (+0.28)
6. Brooke van Velden 3.40 (+0.15)
7. Winston Peters 3.39 (-0.43)
8. Barbara Edmonds 3.39 (+0.19)
9. Simeon Brown 3.34 (-0.27)
10. Kieran McAnulty 3.31 (+0.46)
11. Nicola Willis 3.17 (+0.08)
12. Louise Upston 3.10 (-0.01)
13. Chris Luxon 2.93 (-0.03)
14. Ayesha Verrall 2.33 (+0.26)
15. Chris Hipkins 2.25 (-0.03)
16. Carmel Sepuloni 2.21 (+0.17)
17. Vanushi Walters 2.00
18. Willie Jackson 1.79 (+0.01)
19. Willow Jean Prime 1.73 (+0.20)
20. Cushla Tangaere-Manuel 1.72