The Spinoff’s winners and losers of the week.

• It was another bad week for… Christopher Luxon, who is facing fresh media speculation he could be pushed to resign as National leader, as polls continue to show National under 30%. The prime minister insists that he doesn’t worry about polls other than National’s internal polling, which is way better, but no you can’t see it, because the poll goes to another school. And it lives in Canada.
• It was a good week for… anyone worried about the fuel crisis. Petrol and diesel hit record high prices and there is less than a month’s worth of fuel left in the country, but prime minister Christopher Luxon reassured the country that “we have no risk of disruption to our future fuel supply”. So chill out, everything is fine. 
• It was a bad week for… Nicola Willis, who jetted off to Washington DC to ask US officials when things would return to “normal”. Oh, my sweet summer child…
• It was a good week for… Kiwi MMA fighter Carlos Ulberg, who won the UFC light-heavyweight title and appears to have grown a second leg. 

• It was a bad week for the Five Eyes relationship. A former CIA spymaster told RNZ that New Zealand is “probably” withholding intelligence from the United States. For example, no one will explain why the Australian spies keep calling him “Seppo”. 
• It was a good week for… Simeon Brown, who announced a nationwide expansion of community cancer infusion services. It’s a genuinely good policy that will help a lot of people and he managed to announce it without attacking any opposition MPs. Good on you, Simeon. 

• It was a bad week for… Wairoa mayor Craig Little, who kickstarted an impressively stupid discourse about whether it was “woke” to prepare for Cyclone Vaianu. True anti-wokesters refuse to call it Cyclone Vaianu and insist on using its deadname: “Tropical Disturbance TD11F”. 
• It was a bad week for… New Zealander of the Year Sir Rod Drury. An investigation by Stuff’s Paula Penfold revealed that he was investigated for inappropriate workplace conduct during his time as CEO of accounting software company Xero. Shareholders are advised that goodwill previously attributed to the founder has been reclassified from an asset to a liability.
  
• It was a good week…. for New Zealand First, which announced that former All Black captain Taine Randell will run for the party in the 2026 election. He should help the party win the all-important demographic of men who peaked in the ‘90s. 

Former prime minister Jacinda Ardern and her onetime deputy, Grant Robertson, spoke about their close friendship at a Dunedin event. Tara Ward was there. 

“I cried last night in Wellington, so it’s only fair to have a cry here too,” Dame Jacinda Ardern said last night, just moments after being welcomed onto the stage of Dunedin’s Regent Theatre. The sold-out audience had just given Ardern and her close friend and former political colleague Grant Robertson a long and emphatic round of applause, cheering as they sat down together on a brown leather couch in the middle of the stage. The city of Dunedin had always been a warm place to visit, Sydney-based Ardern told the crowd, and she was happy to be back home.  

Ardern was in Ōtepoti to promote her autobiography A Different Kind of Power, and had teamed up for a special one-off conversation with “South Dunedin boy” Robertson, whose autobiography Anything Could Happen was also published last year. Hosted by Stacey Morrison (Te Arawa, Ngāi Tahu), the event was presented by Dunedin Writers and Readers Festival, and was Ardern’s only South Island stop in her national book tour. 

The night was billed as a chat between two old mates, but Ardern and Robertson aren’t just friends. They’re also the former Labour prime minister and deputy prime minister who led New Zealand through one of its most tumultuous periods, which included the Covid-19 pandemic, the Christchurch mosque shootings and the Whakaari disaster. The crowd was a friendly one, but security for the event served as a reminder that their political era still has strong critics. There was a visible police presence, bag searches, and metal detecting wands in use to scan ticket holders. As the crowd queued to get through the security check, three protestors stood silently on the Octagon footpath, holding signs that read “Wef puppets release Pfizer contracts”.

Inside the theatre, however, there was a lot of love. Ardern and Robertson began by discussing the nice things they’d said about each other in their books, with Robertson saying his proudest moment was when Ardern asked him to be her wedding celebrant (the ceremony was delayed by an hour, thanks to a Daily Mail helicopter flying overhead). They shared colourful insights into the early days of their friendship, when they were both advisors to then-prime minister Helen Clark and shared an office where Robertson swore a lot and left piles of paper strewn across the floor and Ardern was tidy and preferred low light. 

Their conversation flowed with warmth and ease and there was plenty of humour and self-deprecating jokes, but there were few big revelations beyond what’s already been said in their autobiographies or Ardern’s international press tour. Understandably for a writers fest event, Ardern and Robertson’s books were the launchpad for discussion. The importance of empathetic leadership and imposter syndrome were big book themes, and were discussed here too, with Ardern saying that imposter syndrome actually made her a better leader. It shouldn’t be considered as a toxic, exclusively female trait, she reckoned. “Wouldn’t we be better if we had more humility in leadership?” 

The process of writing their autobiographies gave Ardern and Robertson the chance to reflect on both their friendship and careers, and it seemed this Dunedin stage was having the same effect. Having been in each other’s lives for decades, the pair spoke about how well they worked together, but Robertson admitted that there were moments when they disagreed. “This sounds like couples counselling,” Ardern joked. “Don’t fight in front of the kids.” Later, as they both reflected on their decision to retire from politics, Robertson welcomed the audience to their therapy session. “Just talk among yourselves,” he suggested.

The mood grew undoubtedly more sombre as they looked back on the weight of governing through the Covid-19 pandemic. Ardern mentioned how sad she’d felt while she was writing the Covid-19 chapters of her book, given her government had two goals: one was to save lives, and the other was to keep people together. “I’m not sure we did that,” she said. “But I feel proud that even the people who don’t like our response are alive.” 

But whether they were talking about the positive impact of the Covid-19 wage subsidy or joking about Robertson introducing ex-Mormon Ardern to the restorative power of a hangover sausage roll, the duo had the audience soaking up every word. The crowd consistently broke into applause – even when Ardern and Robertson brought up the thrilling topic of tax reform – and the sound of agreeable “mmmm”s kept echoing around the theatre. There was a thoughtful and relaxed intimacy that the audience clearly responded to, and Morrison expertly steered the ship, knowing when to gently push the conversation forward and when to let it run.

To wrap up the 75-minute chat, Morrison asked some pre-selected questions from the audience. What advice would Ardern give to someone who wanted to go into politics, but was scared of being labelled an “angry woman”? “Persist, and don’t reframe who you are,” she replied. Finally, Morrison asked, what did each friend wish for the other? “I want my friend to be free of back pain,” said Ardern, before proving that she’s ever the diplomat by saying that she wished that same thing for Grant that everyone wants for their friends: joy, happiness, fulfilment. “My big wish is for you to move home,” Robertson told Ardern, inspiring the biggest round of applause of the night.

“That will happen,” Ardern promised, once the clapping had eased. “You can’t get rid of me.”

The top 10 sales lists recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington.

AUCKLAND

Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie promised they’d put more practice in for the rest of their tour. Let’s hope they don’t.

Few things are more Wellington-coded than the folk-comedy singing locals selling out (in eight minutes) a four-night run at a church-turned-music-venue in the city. Eight years since their last performance, Flight of the Conchords made their comeback at the capital’s Meow Nui on Thursday night in the messiest fashion possible. There were missed cues, forgotten lyrics, restarts on songs, off-tempo drum machines, an entire song skipped because it felt too hard – making for a shambles of a show which ultimately struck all the right chords.

An opening night full of snags where almost no song is performed perfectly would typically described anywhere between a bit bad to completely oh-my-God-these-people-should-quit-forever awful. But even when fumbling through openers ‘Father and Son’, ‘A Kiss is Not a Contract’ and ‘Mutha’uckas’, Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie’s ability to breeze through the awkwardness and brush over the bumps with banter only amplified the comedic charm.

Within the first 15 minutes, Clement had to assure the crowd that “this is hopefully the worst we’ll ever be”. Mckenzie quipped that “this band has a lot of potential,” and both singers pledged to put in a bit of work before they return for the rest of their tour, which will eventually take them to the US. Let’s hope they don’t; the show works perfectly as just two dudes doing some band shit.

Now, I say all of this while openly admitting this was my first real exposure to Flight of the Conchords. I’ve never seen their hit HBO show, nor have I ever really listened to their music at all, except for ‘Feel Inside (And Stuff Like That)’ because I was 12 when that song came out so it was absolutely my shit. But you didn’t need to be a die-hard fan to recognise the missteps, because the duo were adept at pointing it all out, providing for a solid hour-and-a-half of that good old sardonic and self-deprecating New Zealand humour that they wear so well.

Maybe it works because I’m hearing all of the jokes for the first time, too. Or maybe it was the energy from the hometown venue, where punters laughed at every gag, sang along to the hits and were generally the politest crowd I’ve ever experienced in this piece of shit dumbass mean spirited country. Some were already here two weeks ago, to watch McKenzie perform a solo show. The band couldn’t have asked for a better comeback crowd; hundreds of clearly die-hard fans who didn’t need a production of Sabrina Carpenter proportions – it’s enough to watch the local jokesters take too long to tune a guitar and drop the same jokes they’ve been dropping for about two decades.

As well as the classics (‘Business Time’, ‘The Most Beautiful Girl (In The Room)’) the band reached back into the archives to deliver deep cuts like ‘Frodo, Don’t Wear The Ring’, ‘Jenny’, ‘Think About It’ and ‘Bus Driver’. One of the things you must worry about as musical comedians rehashing jokes from the 2000s is whether or not they’ll withstand the test of time. By McKenzie’s own admission, “some of the stuff’s dated quite badly, but that’s cool.”

‘Robots’ had a few lines updated to reference artificial intelligence, which would have seemed like proper sci-fi shit when the song was originally released way back in the distant past of 2008. They kept “were you ever called a homo in school because you took drama?” in ‘Hurt Feelings’, mostly because McKenzie wasn’t quick enough on his feet to think of something else. And when the duo performed ‘Carol Brown’ and Clement got around to singing that “Bruce turned out to be a man,” he immediately corrected himself: “We’ll change that.” And for “Britney” who “hit me”, as well. “If you wait long enough, your jokes will become edgy, too,” McKenzie assured the crowd.

When the set ended, they returned only a few minutes later for an encore which included ‘Ladies of The World’ and ‘Hiphopopotamus vs Rhymenoceros’. Across the hour and 40 minutes that Flight of the Conchords were on stage, they served up a pretty heft chunk of their discography, striking a good balance between the old fan favourites and the big hits like ‘Hurt Feelings’.

It’s clear that this run of four hometown shows is meant to work as a warm-up for when the duo takes the stage at Los Angeles’ The Greek Theatre for the Netflix Is a Joke Festival in May. It’s hard to say whether the shambles experienced in Wellington would go down as well with an American audience at the world’s biggest comedy festival. But bugger them – if it takes Flight of the Conchords until their fourth and final New Zealand show to finally get everything right before they head overseas, they will still have saved the best of themselves for us.

Clement and Mckenzie will return to the sold-out Meow Nui stage again tonight (Friday). Expect to see Wellingtonians, from the Gen Xers to the Gen Zers, queuing along Ghuznee Street and spilling over to Taranaki St. Envy them: they’re about to experience the best musical comedy set of their lives, from New Zealand’s fourth most popular folk-comedy duo and the capital’s most beloved musical dorks.

In photos, the steel beams above the pitch look tantalisingly kickable. We asked Dan Carter and a physics professor if they think it’s possible.

It’s the 80th minute of the Super Rugby final. Scores are tied between the Crusaders and Hurricanes. With the home side on the attack, Richie Mo’unga decides to defy all conventional rugby logic and kick a towering bomb. The 30,000-strong crowd at One New Zealand stadium holds its breath. The ball spirals high into the air. Up, up it goes, so high that it hits one of the big metal beams holding up the roof and bounces back to the ground. 

What the… this has literally never happened before. What happens now? Nobody seems to know. Where is the referee? You are the referee. Oh god. The stadium feels like it’s closing in on you. The crowd is booing so loud you can feel it in your chest. You try to ask the TMO for assistance but all you can hear through your earpiece are panicked screams. You collapse to the ground near the 22 and close your eyes. The last thing you hear before you black out from stress is the voice of Grant Nisbett: “Babe,” he murmurs, “wake up…” 

You were having that dream again, weren’t you? The one where the ball hits the roof of Christchurch’s new stadium?

That’s understandable. The roof has been one of the most commented upon features of One NZ Stadium ever since we got our first sneak peek inside. Of specific concern are the big steel beams that hold it up, and how they look – in photos, at least – way too low.

These images can leave the viewer with a sense of cognitive dissonance. On one hand, you have to assume the engineers and architects who designed the stadium thought about this and knew what they were doing. On the other… well, just look at it. Are we sure the ball won’t hit it any time someone does a big kick?

According to designers Mott MacDonald, One NZ Stadium’s trusses are 32 metres above the pitch level at their lowest point. Venues Ōtautahi has confirmed this number, adding a couple of decimal points to make it 32.29m. That’s actually two metres higher than the curved roof at Dunedin’s Forsyth Barr Stadium at its lowest point above the sidelines. 

It doesn’t sound that far. Indeed, kicking a ball 32m downfield is more or less a piece of piss. But vertically it’s a different story. One way to conceptualise it is to picture the goal posts at an All Blacks or Super Rugby match. They typically stand around 17m tall. To hit the roof, then, you’d need to be able to kick approximately twice as high as the posts.

“It’s harder than it looks,” says Dan Carter, one person who seems uniquely qualified to answer this question. Not only is the former All Black a world-renowned expert in the art of kicking a rugby ball, he’s had a chance to gaze up at the One NZ Stadium roof in person. Speaking to The Spinoff, he admits it was “tempting” to have a go at hitting it during his visit a couple of weeks ago, but he’s tried and failed to kick similar heights in the past.

The roof at Principality Stadium in Cardiff is 33m above the pitch at its lowest point, and has proven a tantalising target for past All Blacks teams playing Wales. “Pretty much as soon as the captain’s run finished we would just be out there trying to hit it,” Carter says. “It looks so close.” Despite his teammates’ best bombing efforts, he estimates they still came up four or five metres short.

Why is it so hard to kick a rugby ball over 30m in the air? In a word: gravity. For a more detailed explanation, University of Auckland physics professor and former club rugby referee Geoff Willmott recommends taking a “simple kinematic approach”. For the ball to go 32m high, he calculates, it would need to be travelling at 25m/s when it left the kicker’s boot. If you kicked downfield with the same speed, it’d travel around 64m on the full.

“That’s a big kick, but not impossible.”

Realistically, though, the air resistance factor means you’d probably need to kick it even harder than that. “Someone punting the ball downfield usually uses a spiral punt, which reduces the drag on the ball,” Willmott explains. “It’s really hard to do that if you’re kicking the ball straight upwards.”

While even the best kickers struggle to clear the 30m barrier, there is one exception: Matt Burton, who plays for the Bulldogs in the NRL, is a master of the “torpedo bomb” (aka the “Burto bomb”). In a 2024 game against the Eels, one of his kicks went so freakishly high it inspired the Sydney Morning Herald to solicit the services of scientists from the University of New South Wales, who measured it at 33.68m. Earlier this year, he produced a similarly monstrous punt to hit the roof of the Las Vegas Raiders’ NFL training facility, which measures 33.5m high.

“He’s the first person that sprung to mind,” says Carter. “If anyone’s gonna hit it, it’s him.” The Warriors are due to play the first NRL game at One NZ Stadium in June, but sadly it won’t be against the Bulldogs. “I’m gutted, because I know that when they did a walk through that’s exactly what he would be doing.”

In the unlikely event the ball does hit the roof in a rugby game, it’s covered by law 6.9f of the IRB’s rule book, which states that the ball is dead when it “hits anything above the playing area”. This law was invoked when the ball hit the spider cam in a test between England and the Springboks in 2022. The restart is a scrum to the team that last played (ie kicked) the ball.

Carter doubts there’s ever going to be a threat of that happening during a game at One NZ Stadium. But after the captain’s run? “[Beauden, Jordie] Barrett, [Damian] McKenzie… I just know they’ll be trying,” he says. “So I hope they report back.”

Additional reporting: Duncan Greive

Seven moments across the coming days that may prove pivotal.

A devastating scoop from Thomas Coughlan this morning suggests a fuse has been lit for the prime minister. The NZ Herald’s political editor reports multiple sources confirming that the chief whip, Stuart Smith, was in effect “ghosted” by Christopher Luxon in the sitting week before parliament went into recess a fortnight ago. Smith – who as whip serves as a critical interface between the wider caucus and the leadership – had reportedly been seeking “to contact Luxon about ructions in the caucus”.

The coming fortnight, as parliament returns for its final sitting block before being swept up in the budget focus of May, accordingly looms as “the most difficult two weeks of his leadership”, writes Coughlan, who suggests that a group of MPs set upon a change at the top will make their move. 

“Speculation and mischief” was minister Todd McClay’s assessment of the story on RNZ this morning. He is “one thousand per cent confident” Luxon will lead National into the election.

That accuracy of that prognosis will be tested soon enough, and the crunch time could be in the first chunk of the fortnight to come. Over the next 100 hours, seven potential hazards will hurtle towards Luxon. If he can survive that gauntlet largely unscathed, the case for a change ahead of November will largely evaporate.

12.15pm, Friday: media standup

Shortly after midday in Waikato, Luxon will face reporters for a short press conference that will unavoidably feature questions about this morning’s revelations, specifically relating to his discussions with the whip and caucus insurgency. 

9am, Sunday: Q+A with Jack Tame

Top billing on New Zealand’s only longform political TV programme goes to Chris Bishop, who has been booked to appear live. A star performer in Luxon’s cabinet, Bishop – who was relieved of his responsibilities as leader of the house and National campaign chair in an Easter reshuffle that was widely regarded as a slapdown for perceived insubordination – has been both ebullient and ubiquitous across media this week. He told ZB this morning that he’s not plotting against Luxon, but “everyone wants us to do better”. Who knows what he might tell Tame?

Luxon could, of course, pull rank and require that Bishop withdraw, but that would only fan the flames. He could, even, determine that with a fuel crisis ongoing he will personally appear on the programme in Bishop’s stead. The odds on that are as long as the eye can see, however, especially when you consider Luxon has not accepted an invitation to sit down with Tame on Q+A since December 2024.

Evening, Sunday: Kitchen cabinet

At some point on Sunday, Luxon’s most trusted lieutenants typically catch up to get their ducks in line for the week to come. This “brains trust” as Luxon has called it, includes Bishop, Simeon Brown, Paul Goldsmith, Louise Upston, and, of course, Nicola Willis. Deputy National leader and finance minister, Willis will be returning from a week in Washington attending spring meetings of the IMF and World Bank.

If Luxon wants a frank discussion, this could be the moment. 

7.15am, Monday: Media round

The prime minister begins the working week with back-to-back media interviews. Encounters with Mike Hosking on Newstalk ZB and John Campbell or Ingrid Hipkiss on RNZ will be closely watched, but not as closely as Breakfast on TVNZ, where he’s set to catch up with Tova O’Brien. In two largely amiable conversations with O’Brien since she joined the programme, Luxon has flubbed: first in cheerfully declaring himself the CEO of New Zealand, and second in appearing to forget who was in his cabinet.

4pm, Monday: Post-cabinet press conference

On most sitting weeks, the prime minister rolls into the Beehive theatrette just after 4pm for an interrogation by the ladies, gentlemen and animals of the press gallery. After a debacle on the first Monday in March, which capped a day during which Luxon struggled to articulate New Zealand’s position on the war that had just begun in the Middle East, he has notably upped his game. But this promises to be an enthralling grilling. 

6pm, Monday: 1News

We’re about due a poll from Verian for 1News. It could even emerge on Sunday. The last such survey, in February, had National on 34%. More recent polls, from Curia for the Taxpayers’ Union and Talbot Mills for commercial clients, have National under 30%, albeit in a position where they could return to power with the existing coalition. But for many National MPs, senior and junior, a poll number of 30% or, God forbid, below that, would have them wondering what they might do for work come 2027. 

And it’s not just the party support result that intrigues. How will Luxon personally look in the preferred PM stakes? And what if another National MP – Nicola Willis, say, or Chris Bishop, Erica Stanford or Mark Mitchell – gets a bump?

10am, Tuesday: Caucus

The full suite of National MPs, usually accompanied by the National Party president, Sylvia Wood, will gather for the first time in April. Envy any fly on the wall.

The NZ-founded company that once sold Silicon Valley its favourite sneaker is now trying to sell it computing power, writes Catherine McGregor in today’s excerpt from The Bulletin.

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From wool to silicon

A shoe company with no background in technology is pivoting to artificial intelligence. Allbirds – the NZ-born sneaker brand co-founded by former All White Tim Brown in 2015 – announced yesterday it would rebrand as NewBird AI and use US$50 million in new investment to buy graphics processing units (GPUs), the powerful chips at the heart of the AI boom. The plan is to lease that computing power out to companies struggling to access AI infrastructure, positioning the company as a “GPU-as-a-service provider”.

The announcement came just weeks after Allbirds sold its intellectual property and assets for a mere US$39 million – less than 1% of its peak US$4 billion valuation. As the New York Times’ Livia Albeck-Ripka reports, investors responded with immediate enthusiasm: Allbirds stock surged more than 700% on the news, from around US$3 a share to over US$21, establishing itself as the market’s new meme-stock du jour.

‘A hail Mary’

The pivot has triggered reactions ranging from bafflement to alarm. “At first it read like a really well-executed April Fools’ joke”, AI infrastructure expert Bill Kleyman told the NYT. “Every company wants to be an AI company…. The underlying business is struggling; AI presents itself as a compelling narrative reset, and off we go.” Investment firm William Blair dropped its coverage of Allbirds entirely, calling the plan “by any measure a Hail Mary” and flagging “deep uncertainty” around the GPU pivot. Bloomberg TV called it “the most 2026 move ever”. Business Insider ran a piece rounding up the best social media jokes about the news – none of which, sad to say, are actually funny.

Not everyone was so sceptical. New Zealand futurist Paul Spain told RNZ’s Corin Dann NewBird AI faced an uphill challenge, given the cost of accessing computing power from giants like Amazon, Microsoft and Google. But there were “good people at Allbirds”, Spain said, and while it wouldn’t be easy, they “might be able to make it work”.

A fall from grace

In February, The Spinoff’s Emma Gleason traced the arc of Allbirds’ spectacular rise and fall. From a 2014 Kickstarter campaign that reached its target in five days, Allbirds grew into a cultural phenomenon, worn by Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey and, as recently as Waitangi Day this year, Chris Hipkins. At its IPO in 2021, Allbirds was valued at US$3.52 billion. But the company never turned a profit. After going public, it expanded aggressively into brick-and-mortar stores and television advertising, betting it could find a market beyond its Silicon Valley bubble. It couldn’t. Revenue peaked at US$297 million in 2022, then fell sharply. By 2024, its market cap had crashed to US$4.5 million – a fall of 97%.

Earlier this year the company closed all remaining full-priced US stores. As part of the AI rebrand, shareholders are being asked to approve the removal of all “references to the company being operated for the environmental conservation public benefit” from its founding documents – a poignant coda for a brand that until recently promised “sustainability in every step”.

The crypto pivot

Allbirds is not the first struggling company to try reinventing itself by going all-in on that year’s most hyped tech – nor the first with a New Zealand connection. As The Register’s Matt Rosoff recalls, in December 2017, American soft drinks company changed its name from Long Island Iced Tea Corp to Long Blockchain, despite having no background in technology or crypto. Its shares more than tripled, giving the tiny firm a market cap of over $90 million. The bubble burst, of course: the SEC delisted Long Blockchain in February 2021 and charged three people connected with the company with insider trading. One of those people? Former NZ rich-lister Eric Watson, who stands accused of passing to a friend non-public information about the impending business pivot, just before the company’s stock price skyrocketed.

Speaking to Keall, Herald NOW business host Garth Bray said he was “not suggesting anything dodgy” about Allbirds’ own tech pivot, “but it would be one heck of a comeback story”. The Financial Times (paywalled) summed up the business world’s dubiousness: “We’d suggest running away as quickly as possible, if anyone can suggest a suitable brand of footwear for the task.”

As the ranks start filling ahead of November 7, here’s a handful of candidates parties will consider good gets. 

There are plenty of impressive candidates, new and old, getting their names in lights as we approach the November election, and various electorate races (eg West Coast) shaping up nicely. But below are four contenders who, so far, have arrived with a shimmer of surprise.

(Let me know who I missed, in the comments.)

Taine Randell for NZ First in Tukituki

There was some speculation that the promised big reveal at last weekend’s New Zealand First meeting in Hawke’s Bay might be Stuart Nash, returning from a brief exile after a spell of mind gloop. As it happened, instead we got a storm, followed not by a hurricane but a Highlander. Ta-da: the surprise candidate, came the reports midweek, was Taine Randell. 

In 2023, Randell had flirted with the idea of taking up a Labour invitation to stand in Ikaroa-Rāwhiti, before having a moment of clarity and deciding, “Politics, no thanks”. But now, after “a long dance” with New Zealand First, he has updated that to: yes, please. Or, at least: OK, then. 

And so the All Black captain of the late 90s has packed down alongside another former representative rugby player, Winston Peters. Asked what motivated him, he muttered “immigration”, before championing, with more obvious enthusiasm, the glories of renewable electricity. 

Randell, who has been involved in business pursuits – from Ngāti Kahungunu asset management, including lobster exports, to the Highlanders Super Rugby franchise – since returning from a post-rugby stint in the UK, has proved an insightful and affable presence in recent months on Morning Report’s Friday sports panel and, though he might find the questions a bit thornier as a political candidate, it’s a real boon to a New Zealand First Party on the ascendant. 

Can he win? He’ll almost certainly get a position on the list that will put him in parliament, but winning in Tukituki is a seriously long shot. National’s Catherine Wedd is sitting on a 10k majority and New Zealand First won just 6% of the party vote in 2023. Still, boilovers do happen – by which I mean, obviously, the French comeback in the second half of the 1999 semi-final against the All Blacks. 

James Christmas for Act in Tāmaki

To be clear: James Christmas has not yet been selected to contest the plush Auckland electorate. Act is selecting from a “torrent of talent” comprising eight individuals, including another exponent of the formidable apostolic-first-name-plus-day-of-celebration-surname formula, Mr Paul Wedding. 

The decision will be announced on Monday but it’s already beginning to look a lot like Christmas, especially when you consider the praise heaped upon him by David Seymour in the Herald story that broke the news he was “switching allegiance”. Christmas stood in 2023 as a list-only candidate for the National Party. He came close – had he been three places higher he’d be in parliament now; he might even be attorney-general and minister for treaty negotiations. 

Christmas worked as a staffer in the previous National government, in the offices of Chris Finlayson, John Key and Bill English. He co-authored with Finlayson an important book about Treaty Settlements, He Kupu Taurangi. A tad un-Acty, you say? Well, Christmas appeared on The Platform this week to disabuse listeners of any perception that he might be a “Manchurian candidate” for the wokerati, adding: “I’m not a co-governance guy, I’m a Treaty-settlements guy.”

Tāmaki is a fun seat. It had been pure National from 1960, when a thirty-something called Rob Muldoon seized power, until Brooke van Velden impetuously ripped it from the most conservative crevasse of the National Party, Simon O’Connor, in 2023. Van Velden would have retained the seat, but decided to chuck it in to spend more time with the private sector.

And then along came Christmas. The way the MMP maths works, National stands to win very, very few list places, so despite the frustration among many in the party at losing someone that seems universally to be described as freakishly intelligent, it could provide a cabinet-ready MP should the current coalition be reinstalled.

Can he win? Yup. He’ll surely get a good list position, and he may not even need it. The National candidate, Mahesh Muralidhar, is no pushover, however. He has some experience under his belt after running in Auckland Central in 2023, has already been knocking on doors, and boasts an impressive tech entrepreneur backstory. Labour, meanwhile, has selected Max Harris, an admired activist, lawyer and the author of The New Zealand Project. He won’t win Tāmaki but he likely will make it on the list, and he will certainly make the electorate race a fascinating and brainy one. 

Tania Waikato for the Greens in Waiariki

Another accomplished lawyer, Tania Waikato impressed in acting for Te Pāti Māori at the Privileges Committee following the debating chamber haka during the Treaty Principles Bill debate. She has also represented Toitū Te Tiriti, organisers of the hīkoi protesting that legislation. 

So what drew Waikato to the Green house? The urgings of ancestors. “My tīpuna push me to the Greens – I’m just going to be blunt about it,” she told the Herald in December. “There were tohu popped up regularly to the point that I couldn’t ignore that that was where I was being pushed.”

As for the TPM meltdown, “I love all my friends and colleagues in Te Pāti Māori and I have spent time with them throughout the year,” she said. “It’s been really sad for me to watch from the sidelines.”

A busy and effective presence on social media, Waikato has been ranked 15th on the Greens’ initial list, which members are currently voting on (the party currently has 15 MPs).

Can she win? It’s a tall order against TPM co-leader Rawiri Waititi and the Greens have never won a Māori seat, but – depending who Labour put up – it could yet be a three-way tussle. Based on the most recent polling, and if Waikato remains ranked 15th, she’d be touch and go for a list seat.

Sophie Handford for Labour in Kāpiti

Eight years after she founded School Strike 4 Climate, Sophie Handford remains deeply green, but is standing for parliament with the red team. In 2019, Handford was elected at the age of 18 to the Kāpiti Coast District Council, where she served two terms. 

Handford, whose other accomplishments include running the Vote Climate 2020 campaign and sometimes looking like The Spinoff writer Alex Casey, was born in Paekākāriki and now lives just up the coast in Waikanae. “I’m really proud to be standing for Labour here at home,” she said when selected in November for Kāpiti. The seat is a product of the latest redrawing of electorate boundaries; its northern half used to be part of Ōtaki, its southern half was Mana.

Is it a surprise she’s standing for Labour? She went a bob each way in 2023 by volunteering for both Labour and the Greens but perhaps there’s a clue in the fact that, when a student at Kāpiti College, she participated in the youth parliament for Mana in the stead of Kris Faafoi.

Can she win? Tim Costley won Ōtaki for National in 2023 with a majority of more than 6,000. He’ll be the favourite for 2026 but Handford is in the race – there are strong red pockets in the southern part of the new electorate, currently part of Mana, where Labour’s Barbara Edmonds is the incumbent. That and a swing left could make for a fascinating contest. And she’s likely to be in the mix for a decent list spot. 

When Moana Pasifika goes, the relationship between Pacific communities and New Zealand Rugby will be strained.

Ardie Savea is crying. It’s July 2024 and World Rugby’s 2023 player of the year is sitting down reviewing video messages congratulating him on his decision to play for Moana Pasifika. When his mum comes on, followed by his wife and children, the floodgates finally open. There he is, the 70th All Blacks captain, soon to be All Blacks player of the year for the fifth time, quite possibly the greatest Pacific player of his generation, weeping on camera. 

“What people don’t see is the quiet time and the struggle. I know in my heart it’s the right decision.”

The video is pinned at the top of Moana Pasifika’s Instagram account. The subtext is simple: if Savea is safe enough to be this vulnerable, then any player can be. It’s what the team wants you to know about it first; that it’s both a place for Pacific athletes to feel at home, and that it’s a place for Pacific community support to gather. 

Remember, in New Zealand teams, over 40% of Super Rugby players are Pacific. Our representation on rugby boards and in front offices comes nowhere close to that. Moana Pasifika and the Fijian Drua are the obvious exceptions. 

When Moana Pasifika debuted in 2022, it was more than a team for the Pacific diaspora, it was also a gateway for Pacific players directly from (primarily) Samoa and Tonga into professional sport that was somewhat closer than Europe, the UK, or Japan. 

Moana lost its first match, but the team was given a pep talk by one of the club’s board members, New Zealand Rugby legend Sir Bryan Williams: “25, 26 years of heartache because Pasifika was left out of the mainstream rugby. And these guys have had 25, 26 years on us.”

I interviewed Williams back then for a series called Fair Game: Pacific Rugby Against the World, which looked at the infrastructure issues Pacific nations were facing.  

“It’s not a fair game now because it’s obvious that, certainly, the island nations haven’t got any money.”

What we learned while making that podcast was that the driver for the inclusion of the Drua and Moana Pasifika in Super Rugby wasn’t so much a change in attitudes as a change in economics for New Zealand and Australian rugby, driven partly by the pandemic. Support funding from World Rugby was seen as helping to develop Pacific talent that would then feed back into its national teams, and help showcase rugby on the world stage. 

As Bill Beaumont, former chairman of World Rugby, said in 2021: “The investment in the Fijian Drua team and the benefits that will bring, and Moana Pasifika, what’s happening there…  all these things are major contributions to help the region and help rugby develop in the region because it is such an important area for us in the world game.”

This seemed to be paying off at the 2023 World Cup where, despite a lack of wins, the Samoan and Tongan teams produced competitive games far beyond what had been seen in recent times. Tonga gave eventual champions South Africa a gruelling 65 minutes (unfortunately in an 80-minute match), while Samoa, delightfully, had English fans in a panic. 

With the next World Cup in Australia, there was genuine optimism that a Pacific rugby renaissance was on the cards, particularly in light of Fiji’s success, which was in no small way linked to the Drua’s participation in Super Rugby. 

The fans still felt that optimism until the announcement this week that Moana Pasifika is to disband at the end of this season. There are now only a few weeks and scant matches left with the team.

Comedian and Moana Pasifika super fan Tofiga Fe’apuleai sums up the community feelings to The Spinoff: “We don’t just lose a team, we lose a village, a movement that brings our people together. Moana Pasifika is a team that allowed Pasifika players to express themselves as Pasifika unapologetically on and off the field.”  

There is some small hope a funding angel could come to help, but it shrinks by the day. In the coming weeks, questions need to be asked, again, about this country’s relationship with Pacific rugby. The way in which Moana Pasifika was celebrated right up until it began drawing strong Pacific talent away from larger organisations (domestic and international) echoes the way in which Pacific teams were thrown together for tier one nations to have competition, only for those teams to be blown away and then chided patronisingly.

The relationship between Pacific communities and New Zealand Rugby will be strained by the demise of Moana Pasifika, especially with the Blues. They won’t have forgotten that Moana Pasifika coach Tana Umaga accused the Blues of undermining his club, indicating the Auckland team didn’t like having a second club based in the city. Some Auckland Moana fans might even end up Chiefs supporters for at least a year. It won’t help that Moana Pasifika is folding right as the Blues start seeking a new home – that timing is lost on no one.

That’s not to accuse the organisation, only to say that the Pacific community, in grief at the absence of Moana Pasifika might direct their feelings towards the Blues. Still, the Blues might want to make sure there’s no bad taste jokes at their Hall of Fame ceremony next month. Or at the very least call up some Pacific alumni to stand behind CEO Karl Budge next time he’s in front of media. Although maybe not Michael Jones… or Bryan Williams. 

The Spinoff’s top pick of events from around the motu. Here’s the best for the week April 16-23.

Welcome to The Spinoff event guide, your weekly, curated selection of gigs, events and exhibitions happening across Aotearoa. If you want to pitch your event for future guides then please use this handy form.

Paihia

Film: Whale Rider – under the stars

Paihia Village Green
6.3opm Sat, April 18
Free

Bring a picnic and settle in for an outdoor screening of the award-winning film adaptation of Witi Ihimaera’s classic novel.

Tāmaki Makaurau

Theatre: A View from the Bridge by Arthur Miller

Q Theatre
On until May 3: Tue–Fri 7pm; Sat 2pm & 7pm; Sun 4pm
$30–$80

“This is an exciting and polished production. This is brilliant theatre of an interntional standard that cannot fail to resonate with us all. I have never seen space so superbly crafted. As Stacey Lailua notes, it ‘showcases the depth possible for brown productions.’ It champions diversity, and the acting is beyond superb. You will be disappointed if you don’t go and see it. DON’T MISS IT.” – Glenda Pearce, Broadway Review.

Silo Theatre’s latest production directed by Anapela Polata’ivao – and Sophie Henderson’s first as artistic director – is receiving standing ovations and rave reviews. Don’t sleep on it.

Te Whanganui-a-Tara

Literature: Global Book Crawl

Various bookshop locations
April 20 – 26
Free

A bunch of bookstores in Wellington (and Auckland, Featherston, Canterbury too) are participating in the Global Book Crawl. The premise is that readers self-guide themselves around participating bookstores, getting involved with events put on for the occasion (Newtown’s Book Haven is throwing a reading party), and generally appreciating book-loving spaces and the people who run them and frequent them.

Ōtautahi

Theatre: Wahine Mātātoa: The (Mostly) True Story of Erihāpeti Pātahi by Cindy Driver

Court Theatre
On until May 9
$17–$59

“A hilariously daring journey through time, ancestry, and adventure, where dreams, decisions, and tupuna guide the way.

A comedy of consequences, Wahine Mātātoa: The (Mostly) True Story of Erihāpeti Pātahi tells the story of our wahine Kāi Tahu across time and space, where the protagonist, Elizabeth, navigates how to balance decisions that could potentially end her dreams of adventure. This all takes place as she visits the (mostly) true stories of her ancestor Erihāpeti Pātahi, a high-born, high-spirited wahine, a force as untameable as the sea.”

Wānaka

Literature: Queer Quarterly Reads

Wānaka Library
6.30pm Thurs, April 23
Free

“Queer Quarterly Reads is held four times a year at the Wānaka Library. Reading of the featured novel is recommended but not vital to enjoy the discussion as we will discuss and draw on the queer cannon as a whole. The event is designed for anyone, no matter your gender or sexuality.” The book for this week’s discussion is The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers.

The country’s northernmost council is facing criticism for the makeup of one of its advisory councils, with allegations of racism and requests for Crown intervention.

A large crowd gathered outside the Far North District Council chambers in Kaikohe yesterday. Inside, councillors held an extraordinary meeting to vote on the appointment of 10 non-elected representatives to a council committee.

While the resolution passed with only one vote opposed, the bigger issue of unelected members sitting on a council committee – and having full voting rights – has caused a stir among local ratepayers and the wider public.

Councillor Davina Smolders has requested central government intervention, asking local government minister Simon Watts to send a Crown observer to engage with the council.

“We’ve got a huge problem in the Far North District Council,” deputy prime minister David Seymour recently said on Duncan Garner’s Editor in Chief podcast.

What’s the problem?

The “huge problem” Seymour is referring to is the fact local hapū and iwi have representatives sitting on a council committee called Te Kuaka. According to the council’s website, the committee’s purpose is: “To provide strategic leadership and guidance that strengthens te ao Māori perspectives within council decision-making, ensuring genuine te Tiriti-based partnership and leadership between the council and iwi/hapū.”

For Smolders – a first-term councillor who ran under the Act Party banner – the representation of unelected hapū and iwi on the committee is “undemocratic and extremely concerning”.

Also speaking on Garner’s podcast, Smolders claimed there were six elected councillors on the committee and 15 “unelected representatives, all with votes”. She spoke about the committee making decisions that cost ratepayers money, saying it lacked “understanding” of the council’s financial obligations.

“They don’t understand the whole big picture… They’re shaping, forming and directing all the decisions,” Smolders said.

Why is it an issue?

Despite having existed for decades, particularly through treaty settlement legislation, co-governance has become a contentious political issue in recent years. Specifically, debate has centred on the role of Māori in decision-making over public resources, services and whenua. Recent co-governance arrangements in broader public services like healthcare, freshwater management and local council representation have caused the issue to bubble to the surface.

Those opposed to co-governance argue the arrangements provide separate rights based on ethnicity, which they say is undemocratic. Smolders and Seymour say the inclusion of hapū and iwi representatives on Te Kuaka is “racist”.

“They appear to be inventing a new form of local government which is half elected, half unelected,” Seymour said.

Why is the council appointing unelected members to a committee?

Te Kuaka is the council’s committee for Māori strategic relationships. The members appointed to the committee represent local hapū and iwi in the district. They speak for the people with whom the council is hoping to engage and develop meaningful relationships. According to mayor Moko Tepania, the decision to include these representatives on the committee and in council processes is reflective of “the realities” of the Far North district, where over half the population identifies as Māori.

“All governance arrangements and decisions are transparent and publicly available. There are no hidden agendas and decision making has not been handed to unelected parties,” Tepania said in a statement.

Are Māori the only unelected members allowed to sit on a council committee?

No. All councils have the power to allow unelected members to sit on committees, and Far North District Council is just one of several around the country that has chosen to exercise it.

In May 2022, the council resolved to allow external appointments to committees, recognising the appointment of external non-elected persons “can enhance the available skills and expertise around the decision-making table”.

Councils commonly appoint independent experts, community board members or representatives from other organisations to specific committees, none of whom are elected by the general public. Generally, these people have expertise in matters relevant to the committees they join. Sometimes – as is the case with some of the hapū and iwi representatives on Te Kuaka – there are internal democratic processes that organisations follow to select a representative.

What powers do they really have?

“Our Te Kuaka committee, and most of our committees, do not make final decisions. They provide advice only. All binding decisions, be it financial, statutory or strategic, are made by your elected council,” Tepania said in a statement.

The powers council committees can have vary, but the Local Government Act prohibits certain powers from being delegated to committees. This includes core, high-level governance decisions like setting rates, borrowing money and adopting bylaws. Only elected councillors can do these things, ensuring democratic accountability.

According to the council, a key part of what Te Kuaka does is oversee implementation of Te Pae o Uta Te Ao Māori Framework, developed to help improve “inclusivity and responsiveness” in the council’s work. It also provides advice to the council on strengthening partnerships with iwi and hapū, including representing Māori interests in key strategic documents like the long term plan.

At its last committee meeting, Te Kuaka recommended the council adopt an environmental management plan submitted by local iwi Te Patukeha, approved a bilingual name for Far North District Libraries, and received a number of reports.

What has the government said?

Smolders says she has made repeated requests for a Crown observer to be appointed to the council. There is a high threshold for such an intervention, which is usually made to support a council facing significant issues. So far, Watts has declined to appoint a Crown observer to Far North District Council.

“I am advised that the council’s current actions do not constitute formal ministerial intervention at this time,” Watts said in a statement to The Spinoff.

However, he said he had “asked officials to talk to the council and report back should they identify any concerns that warrant further investigation”. Watts highlighted that this was “standard practice” and a spokesperson from his office told The Spinoff it was “not a big deal”.

Meanwhile, Seymour said on the podcast: “We’re now seeing political authority that comes from ancestry.”

Act MP Cameron Luxton has drafted a private member’s bill barring non-elected appointees from having voting rights on council committees and launched a supporting petition that has gathered more than 3,000 signatures so far.

What happens now?

The council carried the motion to appoint the representatives to Te Kuaka. Previous attempts from Smolders to request reviews of mana whakahono ā rohe agreements under the Resource Management Act and memorandums of understandings with local hapū and iwi have all failed, as have her attempts to remove the rights of unelected committee members.

“It’s not about excluding anyone – it’s about ensuring we get the structure right. And this structure is not right,” Smolders said during the meeting.

Following the announcement that the Crusaders beloved horses can’t be accommodated in the new stadium, Alex Casey assesses their career options in a challenging job market. 

Many across Ōtautahi are bereft following the news that the Crusaders are retiring their beloved horses, due to limited space on the One NZ Stadium field “compromising safety” and “creating potential injury risks”. It marks the end of a tradition first established in 1996, back when Christopher Luxon was just a 25-year-old little boy, whereby six horses would gallop around the field to ‘Conquest of Paradise’ to represent the six provincial unions that make up the mightiest Super Rugby franchise of them all. 

This is not the first time the Crusaders brand has been forced to pivot. In 2019, the Christchurch mosque attack reignited the debate over the Crusaders name, a reference to religious wars between Muslims and Christians in the Middle Ages. In response, the team kept the name but changed the logo from a sword-wielding knight to “the tohu”, reflecting the natural landscape from the “Southern Alps to the depths of our moana”. The knights on horseback were also swapped out for blokes in Swanndris on horseback as part of the pre-game ritual. 

Despite the Crusaders brand and traditions evolving with changing times – and with some commentators arguing they didn’t evolve enough – losing the horses altogether has sparked uproar among many fans this week. “Such a shame. They were the best part of the whole evening,” wrote one social media commenter. “We have lost our identity,” said another. Others said the decision would jeopardise their allegiance altogether, with Press readers going as far as to say “the horses are as important as the players” and “no horses, no fans”. 

But through all this equine angst, won’t someone think of the horses themselves, mercilessly turfed out of a cushy, steady decades-long gig in this economy? The Crusaders have said in their extensive Horses Decision FAQ document that they are currently working on a way to “appropriately acknowledge and thank them for the three decades of service” while also working “to determine what the next chapter looks like for them”. Here are six career prospects for the six now-jobless Crusaders horses in 2026.

6. New VIP Court Theatre seating

With much unrest about the Court Theatre seating being too cramped and with bad sightlines, simply take the seats out and bring the horses in! From the powerful vantage point of horseback, you’ll never have to worry about missing a moment of The Importance of Being Earnest again. Also, think of the casting opportunities. Remember when Daniel Radcliffe bared all in horse play Equus? Imagine Christchurch’s most famous Dan (Carter), who also happens to be our most famous torso, treading the boards alongside the Crusaders horses in a controversial exploration of sexuality, religion and societal mores?

5. Get involved in local body politics

Look, there hasn’t been a problematic Horse on council anywhere in the country for over a decade now.

4. Souvlaki delivery mule

The One NZ stadium has a plethora of local eateries including Glizzys Hot Dogs, Arbour Pizza, Bacon Bros and Sheffield Pies, but where in the bloody hell is our beloved Dimitris Souvlaki in the lineup? I propose the horses start an illegal racket sprinting the 850 metres between the stadium and Dimitris (should take them roughly 45 seconds each way) to deliver Christchurch’s best bite to Cantabrians when they need it the most (AKA when no Crusaders horses come out).

3. Become the horses of the apocalypse

Look, we’ve got climate catastrophes every other week, the fuel crisis seems really not good, and the doomsday clock is now set at 85 seconds to midnight which is not even enough time for my souvlaki mule to get to Dimitris and back. Why don’t we take control of our own destiny and start to stage manage the apocalypse the right way, beginning with casting four of the six Crusaders horses and their horsemen in the coveted roles of Conquest, War, Famine and Death? The other two can work on the costumes. 

2. Public transport to the One NZ stadium

Despite a lot of talk about shuttle services and the “Crusaders Express” train, modelling suggests that the vast majority of punters will still travel by car to the One NZ stadium. Combine that with mayor Phil Mauger’s own admission that he has “no idea” where people are going to park, and we’ve got a Four Aves clusterfuck on our hands. Enter the horses operating a new “Park and Ride” situation – Park and Bridle? – delivering fans straight to the stadium, complete with a dubstep megamix of ‘Conquest of Paradise’ playing from a tinny Bluetooth speaker and mostly everyone saying “thank you driver” because that’s what we do here. 

1. Frolick in a field

Something we could all aspire to in this life.

As part of our series exploring how New Zealanders live and our relationship with money, a government department team lead lays out their financial situation.

Want to be part of The Cost of Being? Fill out the questionnaire here.

Gender: Female.

Age: 33.

Ethnicity: Pākehā.

Role: Team lead in a government department.

Salary/income/assets: $130,000ish per year, $480 a year from a small side gig and I own a house.

My living location is: Suburban.

Rent/mortgage per week: Around $1600 a fortnight between two people. I live with my husband and my cat.

Student loan or other debt payments per week: Paid off my student loan in my 20s – only debt is a car payment, around $200 a week. Splurged on a brand new car this year.

Typical weekly food costs

Groceries: $200 per week for two people.

Eating out: $30-40 per week.

Takeaways: $50-60 per week.

Workday lunches: None, I bring from home.

Cafe coffees/snacks: I am dedicated to my coffee – $7 a day, five days a week! I couldn’t face the day without it. On a Friday I get myself a sweet treat from a bakery as a reward.

Savings: Around $5,000 currently. It has been wiped out as we just paid all of our debts off – including a $20,000 loan from my dad to buy our first home.

I worry about money: Rarely.

Three words to describe my financial situation: Grateful, careful, optimistic.

My biggest edible indulgence would be: Not even for me, my cat needs special food. I spend about $300 a month on wet and dry food. She is a princess!

In a typical week my alcohol expenditure would be: $0 – only drink a few times a year at social occasions.

In a typical week my transport expenditure would be: I budget $120 a fortnight for petrol between two people, but have recently purchased a hybrid so expecting that to go down. I cringe to say we spend about $100 a week on parking.

I estimate in the past year the ballpark amount I spent on my personal clothing (including sleepwear and underwear) was: I would say around $1000 – I am really bad for buying dresses. I try to have a one-in-one-out policy, by selling my older dresses on Facebook Marketplace, but it doesn’t always work in practice.

My most expensive clothing in the past year was: I brought three dresses in a Farmers sale on Boxing Day. I hate paying full price and try to wait for sales.

My last pair of shoes cost: A pair of leather Birkenstocks brought in France for around 180 Euro – I didn’t even pay for them; they were a birthday present. I love them.

My grooming/beauty expenditure in a year is about: Around $700 – I get my hair done two or three times a year and my eyebrows done every six weeks – I don’t buy expensive skincare and don’t wear makeup.

My exercise expenditure in a year is about: $150 for a good pair of shoes – I love walking for exercise and have a kettlebell for at home workouts.

My last Friday night cost: $30 – takeaways on the couch and going down weird YouTube rabbit holes. Bliss!

Most regrettable purchase in the last 12 months was: Not regrettable in the cost, but more the need – vet bills to diagnose my cat with kidney disease. Not a fun time!

Most indulgent purchase (that I don’t regret) in the last 12 months was: A doorbell camera – we don’t get many visitors, but I just like to be nosy!

One area where I’m a bit of a tightwad is: Most things that aren’t a need or a habit (leave my coffees alone!). I try not to buy bigger items full price and will generally always pick the cheapest version of something I can.

Five words to describe my financial personality would be: Dual Income, No Kids, Cat.

I grew up in a house where money was: Tight and a stressful topic. Raised between single parents with my mum on the benefit. I appreciate how hard it would have been to raise three kids in that environment.

The last time my Eftpos card was declined was: Can’t recall this happening (what did we do before internet banking?)

In five years, in financial terms, I see myself: Having a bigger saving account.

I would love to have more money for: Overseas travel – saving for a few trips this year.

Describe your financial low: Brought my house in 2021 at the height of the “bubble” and paid way too much for it. I was very fortunate to have family help with a loan for our deposit. In the years after we got smashed with 7-8% mortgage rates on top of paying back the family loan, so things sucked for a few years. Still really grateful and would love to do the same for my kids or nephew if I ever get the chance.

I give money away to: I volunteer my time to charity. This has reminded me to set up something longer term.

He moved on in the blink of an eye, and I’m still picking up the pieces.

Want Hera’s help? Email your problem to helpme@thespinoff.co.nz or fill out this form.

Dear Hera,

Almost three years ago, I met the love of my life. Today I don’t think he was a real person and I’m hopelessly hung up on him. After a run of pretty bad luck in love, I was introduced to a friend of a friend who I instantly hit it off with. It was chemistry like I hadn’t felt with anyone before, and as our relationship developed over the months, it felt as if he was made for me. 

He was exactly my kind of funny, sweet, thoughtful, understanding, sexy. My mum adored him, which she very much hadn’t done for any past partners. He made me feel so loved, had an amazing skill for pulling me out of a bad mood, and next of all he started improving other parts of my life besides the relationship itself. He helped me move out of home into my own place and get career guidance. After two years together the whole thing felt pretty much storybook perfect. We rarely if ever fought, and talked through any issues that did arise. He was incredibly excited for me to go to university this year and offered to financially support me through it. I went on holidays with his family. He bought me a ring.

Then last October, he called me out of the blue to say we were breaking up. I didn’t get a sign or a warning that it was coming, and he wouldn’t give me a straight answer as to what he happened – only that he couldn’t commit to a relationship right now. I was left heartbroken without closure and, of course, a short month later he was publicly launching his new relationship with one of his close girl friends.

I want to be clear I have no delusions about my ex. No part of me blames myself or excuses him. The whole situation leaves me thinking there is no way he could have seriously loved me or respected me. I spent two years in a relationship with someone’s best performance of the character of a good partner, telling me only whatever I wanted to hear. My problem is that it was a very good performance and I fell for it completely. Given how abrupt our breakup was, it’s hard for my mind to not still view the relationship as essentially perfect up until the last 30 minutes. It’s hard to express really how loved and in love I was. And I know it was basically a fantasy relationship, but now I’m worried reality is never going to live up to that fantasy. That no one I meet could measure up to someone who was trying as much as possible to seem like my perfect person.

I’ve done everything I can to try and move on. I’ve blocked him, moved cities and changed jobs in an attempt to give myself a fresh start. I’ve filled my calendar with every hobby and social event I can to keep busy. And six months later, the character this man was playing is still all I can think about. Wherever I am and whatever I’m doing, I’m being constantly mentally bombarded with images and memories of my “perfect relationship”, and at this point I’m scared it’s never going to stop. I’m sure I won’t be interested in dating anyone new for a long time, but I want to become OK with not being with him. I know for certain he’s not at all the person I thought he was, but no matter how much I logically understand it, emotionally it won’t go in. I don’t want to spend the rest of my 20s pining after the illusion of someone who turned out to be a pretty basic fuckboy, but I’m at my wits’ end how to even begin to move on. 

Reality Check 

Dear Reality Check,

I’ve read over your letter several times, and in the end, I don’t know if I have anything more constructive to say than this situation profoundly sucks and if there were such a thing as justice, your ex would be in for a well-deserved wedding altar jilting in a few years.

“Love of my life” is a strong way to describe someone whose behaviour is best described by the “God watching you fall in love with someone he’s gonna use to hurt you for character development” meme. At best, this experience should be written up as a painful statistical anomaly. I wouldn’t even call this a cautionary tale, because as far as I can see, there is absolutely nothing to be learned from this – at least, not by you. You didn’t do anything to deserve this random allotment of pain, and any attempt to use this as a justification for increased romantic caution or developing a thick emotional carapace around your heart is a bad lesson, because most people do not behave like this, and I would hate for this to make you paranoid about all future relationships, based on this one corrupt, emotionally devastating data point.

Not all sudden breakups are categorically evil. Sometimes people have an epiphany that the relationship isn’t working for them, and no amount of protracted emotional negotiations will fix it. Sometimes it’s psychologically advantageous to vanish into the mist. What is cruel is offering no meaningful explanation as to what happened, especially when the other person is completely besotted and has no prior indication that anything was wrong.

If I had to guess, it sounds to me the most likely explanation for your ex’s behaviour is that he crossed the line with the friend he is now dating, and was so terrified of facing the consequences of his actions and being perceived as the bad guy, he simply jumped ship as a way of protecting himself from having to witness your pain, and incurring any reputational damage. Whatever the reason, it was a profoundly immature way to end a three-year relationship, and is the emotional equivalent of leaving your wife by shouting “look over there” and then vanishing down a convenient storm drain.

You will drive yourself insane if you try to eke any sense of closure out of this experience. He obviously isn’t brave enough to give you a real explanation for what happened. On the other hand, I don’t think believing your whole relationship was a lie, and he never really loved you, is honest or helpful.

Perhaps he was a good performer, and I’m sure there were many parts of himself he kept hidden. But nobody is that good at acting for that long. Even Tom Ripley couldn’t have kept the perfect relationship running for three years straight. I don’t say this to absolve him. But I think the worst thing that could come out of this is you not feeling like you can trust your instincts when someone next tells you they love you.

I’m sure he did love you, and I’m sure it’s also going to be really hard to trust the next person who says that. But as for respecting you – I think it’s much more likely that he doesn’t respect himself. He probably knows he behaved like a coward, and the reason he acted this way has more to do with his relationship to shame than his opinion of you. His actions were completely selfish, but this doesn’t strike me as the behaviour of someone who doesn’t care about people. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think this reads more like the actions of someone who cares way too much about what other people think, and that’s why he wasn’t able to offer you the honesty you deserve (and chose to break up with you over the phone) because he was too afraid to look you in the eye.

As for worrying someone else won’t live up to the fantasy, I’m sure in the depths of heartbreak, it feels like nobody else will measure up. All I can offer you in the way of hope is supreme confidence that at your age, you haven’t even scratched the surface of the wealth of love there is to be had in this life, and that not only will you meet other people who feel just as “right”  – you will eventually meet people that you love so much they entirely upend your sense of what “right” is, and introduce you to new kinds of love you didn’t know were possible and it hadn’t even occurred to you to hope for.

Obviously, this is a crazy thing to promise someone. But the world is a rich and mysterious place, full of fascinating and wonderful people, and I can guarantee you that, unless you get hit by a truck tomorrow, this relationship will not represent the peak of your romantic experience. I know “just trust me” isn’t very helpful from an advice perspective. But in this specific instance, just trust me.

This was not your failure to spot the obvious warning signs. This was a shitty, knee-jerk decision made by someone who doesn’t have the emotional maturity to take accountability for his actions, is probably terrified of real intimacy and will do anything to avoid “looking bad” – character traits that will continue to haunt him in every future relationship.

At the moment, it may feel like he’s “got away with it” and you’re left picking up the pieces, but I genuinely think people who behave like this don’t “get away with it” in any meaningful sense, because the call is coming from inside the house, and until he sorts his shit out, he will do this again and again in various ways, torpedoing happy relationships when they get too serious or painful or he makes a mistake, which is genuinely no way to live. That may not seem like justice, but ultimately, it’s better to have the capacity to trust another person and risk getting hurt along the way, than to constantly be on the run.

It sucks, but I think you just have to give yourself time to grieve, know that this had nothing to do with you or your judgment, and try to move on. Six months is a long time to feel like shit, but it’s definitely not an outlandish amount of time to be getting over a foundational love, especially one that ended in such a confusing and abrupt way. It won’t last forever, and you will move past him. Unfortunately, there’s nothing you can do but give yourself time to metabolise the pain.

Be patient. Put your energy into improving your life in small, material ways. Go for lots of long walks. Watch lots of prestigious and miserable movies. Spend time with your friends and family. Go on dates, if you can eventually stomach it. Listen to music. Read books. Put your energy into creating things, learning a new skill or language, and having new experiences. It sounds like you’ve already been doing this. Keep doing it, and little by little, the pain will fade.

Try not to overthink it. I cannot emphasise enough how little this seems like it has to do with you, so there’s no point in getting out the string and evidence board. You will fall in love again, and when you do, try not to let this experience stop you from trusting the evidence of your own heart.

Australia has halved its fuel tax, moved to level two of its response plan, and sent its prime minister on a fuel-security tour of Asia. New Zealand has done none of these things. Does that matter, asks Catherine McGregor in today’s excerpt from The Bulletin.

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Willis at the White House

Yesterday’s fuel stocks update showed levels dropping for the second week running – down three to four days across each fuel type, leaving New Zealand with less than three weeks of diesel. The government is staying at phase one, with MBIE advising that the decrease in stocks does “not raise any immediate concerns”. Simplicity chief economist Shamubeel Eaqub was less relaxed. He believes phase two is warranted, and told RNZ the government’s failure to provide any detail on how rationing would work was “extraordinarily flat-footed”, adding: “We’ve had so much time to prepare. It really quite reeks of limited competence in terms of how they could communicate in a state of quite heightened uncertainty with the public.”

Overnight, finance minister Nicola Willis met with officials at the White House. The meeting was arranged, she told Henry Cooke at The Post, to put New Zealand’s fuel dependency “on their radar” and ask the US administration how long it expected the economy to take to return to normal. She’s in Washington DC for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank spring meetings.

How Australia’s approach differs

The decision to stay in phase one has renewed comparisons with Australia, which is already at level two of its national fuel plan. Anthony Albanese has halved the excise tax on fuel, removed the heavy-vehicle road user charge and personally flown to Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei for discussions on securing fuel. Christopher Luxon has provided a $50-a-week payment to around 143,000 families, raising mileage rates for home support workers, and is increasing diesel storage.

In his paywalled Post column on the topic, Cooke notes some key factors to take into consideration: Australia entered the crisis with an economy growing roughly twice as fast as NZ, substantially lower government debt as a share of GDP, and the advantage of being a major net energy exporter through coal and gas. Where on the political spectrum the two leaders sit also matters, Cooke writes. “Albanese appears scared of being seen to do too little… Luxon seems scared of doing too much.”

Food for fuel

One area where Luxon has moved decisively, and the reason he likes to say Australia is “playing catch-up” with NZ, is a trade agreement with Singapore that an official describes as “possibly unique in the world”. As Fran O’Sullivan writes in the NZ Herald (paywalled), the agreement  – to be formally signed when Luxon visits Singapore in early May, though both sides are already treating it as in force – sees both countries waive their right to impose export restrictions on the other in a crisis. “Under World Trade Organisation rules and most free trade agreements, countries can suspend obligations and block exports to protect domestic needs,” O’Sullivan explains. “Under this deal, Wellington cannot do that to Singapore – and Singapore cannot do it to New Zealand.” Each side has identified critical products it fears running short of: New Zealand’s include medical supplies and fuel; Singapore’s are food products such as seafood and dairy.

“For Singapore, the logic is simple: if New Zealand cannot get fuel and diesel, it cannot produce food,” O’Sullivan writes. “For New Zealand, tying itself into Singapore’s highly connected energy and logistics hub vastly improves its chances of staying supplied when markets seize up.”

The free transport question

Victoria and Tasmania have already scrapped public transport fares in response to the fuel crisis. Should New Zealand follow suit? The Spinoff’s Emma Gleason lays out the case on both sides. The pro argument rests largely on speed: University of Auckland transport expert Timothy Welch calls it the fastest available lever for getting people out of their cars and notes that once people start using free or cheaper public transport, studies show a portion tend to stick with it after fares return to normal.

One of the main cons is that it’s simply unlikely to work. Waka Kotahi data shows cost isn’t even in the top five barriers to using public transport: availability and access rank far higher.

The government keeps telling us not to panic. On the other hand, maybe we should panic.

Matthew Hooton conjured visions of people roaming the desert in leather undies as he described the potential outcomes of the Iran fuel crisis. “Thought Covid was bad? If New Zealand runs out of diesel, Covid will look like the rehearsal,” wrote the Herald commentator in the tone-setting opening stanza for his March 27 column. He forecast a possible future beset by food shortages and disruptions to essential services; where rules give way to realpolitik and states use threats to secure fuel. “In a Mad Max world, it’s always a race to the bottom,” he said.

Hooton implored the government to implement immediate diesel restrictions to minimise the damage. His pessimism was such that the Herald editor who put the column online gave up entirely on civilisation surviving intact, venturing only that restrictions may delay social collapse. 

As this was being published, the government was desperately trying to assure people that everything was going to be fine. “There is currently no need for fuel restrictions, the public can be assured that the government is planning carefully, acting early and making sure New Zealand is well positioned to respond, whatever the global environment brings,” said finance minister Nicola Willis in a joint statement with associate energy minister Shane Jones that day. 

If anything, the messaging has become more chilled out in the weeks since. “I want people to carry on as per normal as much as possible,” said Luxon in an interview with Newstalk ZB’s Mike Hosking on April 10, adding “it’s not Covid – it’s not life and death”. He rejected the idea of pulling an Anthony Albanese and addressing the nation, saying he didn’t see any need for that.

Who’s right here? Nathan Surendran wouldn’t go as far as Hooton, insisting we aren’t in imminent danger of having to deal with Immortan Joe and his army of War Boys. But the engineer and sustainable energy advocate told The Spinoff he still didn’t think the government was taking the crisis seriously enough. “The government seems to be saying ‘the market will supply. It’s not a problem, there’s nothing to see here, move along’, and I don’t think that’s wise,” he said.

Roughly half the fuel our government is counting on is still on the water and Surendran just doesn’t trust it will arrive in the country. He noted that 30 to 40% of the Gulf’s oil refining capacity has been damaged or destroyed and restoring it could take three years. Making matters worse, much of the supply that’s got into New Zealand so far was ordered before the crisis began, meaning it’s possible some of its most severe effects still haven’t been felt. “This global shortage will worsen,” he said.

As it does, he suspects countries will flex their political or military muscle to secure their oil supplies, short-circuiting our government’s ability to source fuel on the market and sending us careering toward crisis. Economist Shamubeel Eaqub has echoed that assessment, describing our four-stage national fuel plan as “do nothing, do nothing, do nothing, and then, oh fuck”.

Those dangers might be alleviated by the US-Iran ceasefire, but Surendran is sceptical it will hold. He pointed out Israel has repeatedly bombed Lebanon, which is arguably in breach of the spirit of a ceasefire agreement. The US’s last negotiation with Iran ended with it killing many of the country’s senior leaders and the current one appears to have broken down, with the superpower now threatening its own blockade of the strait it spent the last month desperately trying to open. 

Surendran sees a case for moving up our fuel alert levels and introducing diesel rationing, mainly because running out could result in some of the social breakdown forecast by Hooton, as supermarkets run out of stock and vital public services struggle to source the diesel they need to keep running. That’s not a risk worth taking, he said. “The downsides of not taking precautionary measures are so severe that we should be taking a precautionary approach. If we outright run out of diesel at some point for a period of time, it will be disastrous to New Zealand.”

The fuel industry doesn’t seem to share his concern. “Not for one second,” said Waitomo Group’s revenue manager Tim Beasant when asked if he was worried about securing enough oil to supply his stations. Beasant and his boss, Waitomo chief executive Simon Parham, have a lot more faith that fuel tankers will keep making their way to New Zealand even if the crisis worsens, they told The Spinoff.

Parham pointed out that it has been more than 50 days since the Iran war began and supply has remained steady, with the government continuing to secure shipments. He doesn’t see much risk of oil suppliers reneging on those deals as that would jeopardise the sustainability of their business. “Ships aren’t going to turn around, because then all of sudden they lose credibility,” he said. He pointed out the companies placing fuel orders are powerful and able to exert pressure of their own. “Those orders are getting placed by the sort of three majors here – Ampol [owner of Z Energy], BP and Exxon Mobil. So they’re committed to bringing those ships.”

Beasant said fuel was so important that countries would find workarounds even if the Strait of Hormuz remained under a double blockade. He noted there was enough crude oil to supply the world even without ships navigating the strait and local companies are already finding ways to source product from places like Angola, Nigeria, Colombia, Mexico, Canada and the US. “It’s a logistics issue to be solved. But at these prices, the world will solve it for long enough,” he said.

Parham said New Zealand’s fuel importers have already placed their next three months of orders and he’s confident they’ll come through. But that doesn’t mean the crisis will be easy to navigate for New Zealanders. Prices at the pump are going to stay high for the foreseeable future even as the petrol market goes through what he believes will be an abrupt rebalancing act. “It’s going to be a bumpy ride,” he said. “This isn’t ‘sweet, let’s all move on’. There’ll be ups and downs and twists. But I think the general direction now is hopefully the right direction.”

No matter which way you cut it, the future is going to come bearing pain. It may or may not come in the form of supermarkets running short on food or a leather-clad Australian shooting you with a grappling hook. But you’re certain to feel a world of hurt in the region of your wallet.

Advocates in the teaching space are calling for the age of consent be raised to 18 in situations involving trusted adults. 

Advocate Carmel McGill Wright spent much of her time as a student unknowingly in the orbit of men who would abuse their teaching positions. At high school, she was taught by two teachers who would later be struck off the teaching register for having sexual relationships with their students. Later at university, her lecturer resigned amid allegations of sexual misconduct involving his students, and was also found to have targeted a number of teenage students in another teaching position over two decades prior. 

“It’s all stayed with me for years,” she says. “You just feel so gross.” That discomfort only grew when she trained to become a teacher herself, and became “devastatingly” aware of the power dynamics at play between teachers and their students. “I would look out at these young people that so desperately need love and protection and just feel so horrified by the fact that someone could ever think it was appropriate to have a sexual relationship with them,” she says. “It just felt like such a deep betrayal of the ethics of being a teacher.”

Now, McGill Wright is leading the charge on calls to amend consent laws in Aotearoa, starting with a petition. Currently, the age of legal consent is 16 years old, which she says is “deeply inadequate” when it comes to safeguarding young people in situations involving trusted adults like teachers, coaches, pastors and counsellors. “Supposedly you can legally consent at the age of 16, but when you have a power dynamic involving someone like a teacher, it’s obviously different,” she says. 

While teachers, doctors and others can face professional disciplinary tribunals that may see them stripped of registrations or licences, they cannot face criminal charges for sexual relationships with over-16s. “There is quite a bad loophole here, and everybody else has fixed it,” says McGill Wright. 

Just last month, the NZ Herald revealed that there have been 125 instances of inappropriate relationships between teachers and students found by the Teachers’ Disciplinary Tribunal over the last two decades in Aotearoa. 

Overseas, many countries have already raised the age of consent in situations involving trusted adults. In 2003 the United Kingdom made it a criminal offence for an adult in a “position of trust”, including teachers, coaches, social workers and doctors, to participate in sexual activity with someone under the age of 18. In Australia, every state has now criminalised sexual activity between 16 -and 17-year-olds and trusted adults, and Canadian law states anyone under 18 “cannot consent to sexual activity if their sexual partner is in a position of trust”. 

The team behind Tika, New Zealand’s first legal charity dedicated to fighting sexual harm, are supportive of legislative change to amend the age of consent involving trusted adults. Former journalist and Tika co-founder Alison Mau investigated a number of cases of sexual misconduct by teachers while at the helm of #MeTooNZ for Stuff, and tells The Spinoff she found consistent evidence of grooming tactics. “All of the students were vulnerable in some way, which made them particularly susceptible to the teacher’s predation,” she says. 

After almost every story of this nature was published during the #MeTooNZ project, Mau says other survivors of the same teacher would come forward. “That knowledge can weigh heavily on a young person – they often feel a sense of responsibility that others might also get hurt. But fear, shame, isolation and the power imbalance makes it impossible for them to speak up,” she says. “We have seen the same pattern with others who hold a position of power and influence – sports coaches, youth club leaders, church and community leaders.”

Zoë Lawton, Tika co-founder and chief legal counsel, says that the definition of “trusted adult” in the Crimes Act would be crucial should an amendment be made in the future. “That definition would need to be crystal clear to prevent unnecessary delays in proceedings, via an argument that the the defendant does not fall within the definition of ‘trusted adult’, or opening up an avenue to appeal,” she says. 

Another advocate calling for change is Jeni Little, a music teacher of nearly four decades and the founder of Safer Spaces in Music Education, a hub of resources for both teachers and students to assist in the prevention of sexual harm. She tells The Spinoff that Aotearoa is “falling behind” the rest of the world. “When I think back to all the harmed people that I know of, so many of them landed in that 16- or 17-year-old space. It is incredible that the age of consent here is still 16, done and dusted, without any consideration of the imbalance of power.”

Particularly in the music education space, Little says the learning can often happen in smaller spaces and groups, leading to a sense of intimacy that can be exploited. “The lines can easily get blurred, especially if you’re getting special attention from this person that you massively respect – it’s very flattering,” she says. “People need to understand that power imbalance is huge and there’s lots of leverage that people in positions of trust can use, whether it is marks, or favours, or getting a certain role in an ensemble or production.” 

Beyond the “absolutely urgent” law change, Little would also like to see more robust child protection training measures in place for teachers. “I think it should be mandatory for all teachers to do some Safer Spaces training [about preventing sexual harm]. It’s as important as having your first aid certificate.” McGill Wright agrees, so much so that she is now designing a safeguarding training program as a part of her master’s. “Duty of care is in our teaching standards, but there’s nothing else. I’m so horrified that it doesn’t exist.” 

The Spinoff approached justice minister Paul Goldsmith for comment on whether the government is planning to review the age of consent, and is awaiting a response. In the meantime, Wright’s petition has nearly 500 signatures. “At least it’s started the conversation, because this is the last loophole that is left, and it’s not preventing the terrible number of incidents reported to the Teaching Council,” she says. “We need to combat it more, and we need to help people understand power dynamics. 

“You just have to think: 40-year-old teacher, 17-year-old girl. Doesn’t that feel gross to you?”

Get your Connecticut Sun merch because a New Zealander has made it into the WNBA! But you know why we’d never heard of Charlisse Leger-Walker until this month, eh?

“Fuck yeah” is what I thought when the Connecticut Sun selected Charlisse Leger-Walker at yesterday’s WNBA draft. And then the pride, warmth and hope flooded in.

Leger-Walker is the first New Zealander to be drafted and only the second to play in the WNBA in 30 years.

The news came just days after the 24-year-old Hamiltonian became the first New Zealand woman to win an NCAA title with UCLA during March Madness.

So, I did what every self-respecting women’s sports fan does: I hunted out a piece of kit on the team’s official website. It’ll sit alongside my merch for the Black Ferns, Kiwi Ferns, Silver Ferns, White Ferns, Football Ferns, and even Wellington women’s ice hockey.

But the orange Connecticut Sun singlet is more than just a piece of fabric. It carries the weight of everything that came before it, every “no, you can’t”, every eye roll, every moment women’s basketball was dismissed, diminished, or ignored.

And it carries the weight of every girl who’s ever picked up a ball and wondered how far it could take her. 

Well, young one, lean in close: it can take you as far as you want to go, just ask Leger-Walker. But it will take hard work, and you will face challenges – sometimes simply because you’re a girl.

The WNBA is a big deal. It’s gone from overlooked to undeniable, and Leger-Walker is arriving at a pivotal time. For years it sat in the shadows of the men’s NBA, battling underfunding and limited media coverage and sponsorship investment. Women, like in most sports, were told to just be grateful for what they had. And yet they kept showing up.

On the court, players like Caitlin Clark, the 24-year-old Indiana Fever guard, are pulling in record crowds, driving sponsorships and forcing the world to pay attention. 

Off it, the conversation is changing too. The work of Harvard and Nobel Prize-winning economist Claudia Goldin has helped shape the case for investing properly in women’s sport. It makes good business sense.

And the money is starting to flow. Commercial deals are increasing and for the first time, WNBA athletes will be able to thrive, not just survive, financially. Base salaries for the 2026 season are reported to have increased from US$66,000 to US$300,000. It also means Leger-Walker could, almost overnight, become one of New Zealand’s highest-paid women athletes. 

There has also been rolling coverage and breaking news alerts around Leger-Walker’s drafting.

Megan Compain has watched the moment play out and noticed how much things have changed. When she made the WNBA in 1997, there was barely any coverage. Now, she says, we’re finally starting to understand the importance of visibility, not just for the athlete, but for what it represents. “It wasn’t until we started this conversation about women in sport and valuing the achievements … that I started owning the success,” she says.

But she says we’re not there yet. “If she hadn’t won [the NCAA], we wouldn’t have heard anything until her name was called [when she was drafted].” That’s how little attention we pay to women athletes. 

That is exactly why this moment matters. Not just because Leger-Walker made it, but because, as Compain puts it, we shouldn’t “let the opportunity pass for the next wahine”. Before the moment the next New Zealand makes the WNBA “we better know her name”.

Rachel Taulelei, co-owner of the Tokomanawa Queens, says this moment matters. “[Teenage] girls drop out of sport at a more rapid rate. One of the reasons is the lack of role models,” she says. “[With Leger-Walker] you instantly have a new superhero. You can point and say, ‘look at that girl, she’s from New Zealand’.”

But inspiration alone isn’t enough. “Those moments are very few and far between,” she says.

If we want more Leger-Walkers, we need pathways. Right now, the clearest route to the WNBA still runs through the US college system. “Imagine if we really leant into that,” she says. 

She hopes Leger-Walker might want to play in this year’s Tauihi pro basketball league starting in September. “Maybe for the Queens,” she laughs.

Basketball NZ (BBNZ) chief executive Belinda Edwards is thrilled for Leger-Walker and her whanau. “She’s an incredible person on and off the court. She’s shown that with belief and hard work, anyone from Aotearoa can make it. And that’s powerful for boys and girls across the country,” she says.

Leger-Walker is one of 170 Kiwis currently in the US college system; 90 are women. With a new BBNZ initiative set to better connect athletes with colleges and scouts, it won’t take another 30 years to see the next Kiwi in the WNBA, Edwards says.

On home soil, basketball is experiencing a rapid rise in participation amongst girls, with more than 13,000 girls nationwide participating in the 2degrees Girls Got Game initiative. The future is looking bright for the next Leger-Walker.

In the meantime, the BBNZ team is decking out the office with Connecticut Sun orange in time for Leger-Walker’s first game in a couple of weeks. 

Megan Compain hopes other organisations might do the same to celebrate the important milestone, because moments like this shouldn’t live in a dark drawer. “Let’s hope that there’s singlets hanging up in Rebel Sport, just like there were for Oklahoma City when Steven Adams joined the NBA.”

We’ve waited a decade for this railway. Here’s what it will actually be like.

When they shut down Auckland’s train network to test the City Rail Link back in January, things didn’t go smoothly. Transport advocates whispered about trains backing up at stations. They murmured about problems with the network’s proposed timetable. Worried that our carriage of public transport triumph may be derailed by the locomotive of official ineptitude.

Auckland Transport fessed up to some of the teething troubles, with its public transport manager Stacey van der Putten calling the testing a “valuable learning curve”. She promised to make changes to ensure the CRL would provide reliable services from opening day, whenever that is.

At Te Waihorotiu station on Tuesday, it sure looked like the tweaks had paid off. I’d been sent down into the still-unopened station by Aotea Square with a gaggle of reporters to see the CRL running through a simulation of its rush-hour peak. Trains turned up with almost alarming regularity. Each time they stopped, crew members would disembark onto the platform and set a stopwatch. They waited for 75 seconds to tick by, mimicking what the CRL’s operators think will be the actual dwell time when dozens of passengers are entering and exiting the carriages. Then they’d get back in and signal to the driver to leave. As their engine slid away, the white lights of the next train to arrive at the station were often already visible in the tunnel behind.

It seemed, at least to non-expert eyes, to be running like clockwork. If it wasn’t, the CRL’s operators were keeping a poker face. Auckland One Rail will be charged with staffing and running the new network. Its chief executive Martin Kearney grinned and chirped cheerfully for the entire 40 minutes we spent at the platform. When a journalist later brought up Port of Auckland boss Roger Gray’s assertion that far from being a game-changer, the CRL will be a “disaster” for the city, he seemed almost incredulous. “Did you see the trains down there?” he asked. “In my personal opinion, that’s going to be a massive game-changer for Auckland.” 

The train tsunami did seem pretty game-changey. It was also, at least to my slow-moving and occasionally misfiring neurons, a bit overwhelming. The upside of Auckland having a stunted rail network that ends in a bottleneck is that it’s easy to tell where you’re heading. Trains shuttle from Waitematā station (nee Britomart), along the western, southern and eastern lines and back again. The CRL will upend the network’s timetable, rearranging it so trains zip from Manukau, through the eastern suburbs, into the city centre and all the way out to Swanson on one East-West line and from Manukau, around the city centre stops and back out on the South-City route.

It should make for a much more fluid and free-flowing network, particularly on the western line, where trains will no longer have to stop at Waitematā and reverse out via Newmarket. But the changes will make the in-station mental arithmetic more complex for passengers. Standing at Te Waihorotiu as trains hurtled past every few minutes, I received visions of a future me boarding on the wrong side of the platform and miserably traipsing my way to Meadowbank by mistake, instead of my intended destination of Spinoff HQ in Morningside. 

There’s nothing I dread more than accidentally ending up in east Auckland, and the spectre of a visit to Panmure is deeply troubling. But KiwiRail’s CRL programme director Bevan Assink thought people, including senior writers from The Spinoff, would get used to the new system. “We do put where the trains are going on the sign on the front of them,” he said, reassuringly.

OK, and the upsides of the CRL are pretty numerous. Te Waihorotiu will open up midtown Auckland to heavy rail for the first time, while the new Karanga-a-hape station will allow passengers to disembark on the doorstep of the Karangahape Road shopping strip. Journey times will halve for many people heading into the city from out west. According to Auckland Transport, the extra capacity will be equivalent to 16 extra traffic lanes heading into the city at peak times.

Then there’s the literal, physical structure of the three new stations built for the CRL. When it came time to leave, reporters were herded along the length of Te Waihorotiu station. At 15m deep, it’s not as far underground as Karanga-a-hape, but it’s still a feat of engineering with its 300m platform spanning the Aotea Square arts precinct. Kearney, Assink and Auckland Transport’s CRL manager Mark Lambert delivered a media conference at the station’s Wellesley Street entrance, standing beneath a whakairo designed by Auckland University student Paraone Luiten-Apirana (Ngāti Hikairo, Ngāi Tūhoe, Te Arawa) and 4,000 golden rods that Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei’s Graham Tipene hung on the station’s ceiling to evoke the rippling of the Waihorotiu stream that once ran down the Queen Street valley.

The trio’s enthusiasm was so palpable, it was almost sweet. When bureaucrats front the media, it’s usually because people are complaining. Here they were spruiking a product a decade in the making, and they seemed genuinely excited. Strangely they were stoked because the CRL at rush hour was, for the most part, pretty uneventful. The trains came and went without much fuss. There were no emergencies, no obvious scheduling failures. After all the drama and debate of the last 10 years, they were basking in a morning of mundanity. On Tuesday, the arrivals and departures were notable. But Kearney looked forward to a point, hopefully soon, when they would just be the norm. “What we actually want is a boring railway,” he said.

Nocturnalists are spirited members of Auckland’s nighttime scene, and in this series they take us on a tour of their favourite spots in the city after 5pm. Today: Tracy Grant Lord. 

Photos by Sophie Miya-Smith shot on location at Auckland Town Hall and Ground Wine Bar.

Award-winning, internationally renowned set and costume designer Tracy Grant Lord has worked with everyone from the Royal New Zealand Ballet to Singapore Dance Theatre and has staged shows across the globe. But when she’s not creating magic in some far-off city, she calls Tāmaki Makaurau home. Working on both costume and set design helps to give Tracy’s work a sense of synchronicity: “That’s one of my strengths as a designer; I have a very holistic approach to world-building,” she says. Emma Gleason sat down with Tracy at a hidden-gem bar on O’Connell Street (more on that later) to discuss her own world: the Auckland city centre. 

What does a normal work week look like for you?

It depends what I’m working on. It could be research, it could be drawing, it could be model making, it could be buying… When shows are in production, I’ll be attending rehearsals, I’ll be attending fittings.

And where’s home for you?

I live just above the city – it’s the area that includes the art gallery, the library, the university, the theatres. I work at the Town Hall, I work at the Aotea Centre, I work at The Civic. When I’m in Auckland, that’s my stomping ground. I walk to get around.

How long have you lived in the city?

My husband and I moved in at the beginning of 2023, coming from a property in South Auckland that we’d been in for 23 years.

Was the move much of a change for you?

We feel incredibly connected here, socially and culturally. We just feel like we’re inside our community. It’s been life-changing for us both. I can’t tell you how well-timed it all has been. It’s given us both a life force, a rejuvenation. And it’s been a beautiful transition into our next 20 years. It was sad to leave the old place, but also, I never thought I’d be embracing city life. It’s great.

You picked such a good part of town. 

I love it. It’s really beautiful. The parks [Albert Park and the Auckland University grounds] are great for walking.

And there are always people around, workers and residents and students. It makes for such a lively, late-night neighbourhood and it’s really interesting seeing how that’s impacted the city. What do you enjoy about Auckland after dark?

There’s something magical about dawn and dusk in the city. I just love light. Because we do a lot of storytelling with light on stage, I’m very aware of where light is coming from – the angles of light, colours, the time, what different weather patterns do to light. And because there’s so much glass in the city, mirror glass, dawn and dusk are reflected and go a completely different colour in those moments… And then, of course, we get the illumination of the city… At pavement level, it’s fabulous.

Let’s talk about the Auckland Town Hall. You’re very familiar with that venue. What’s your personal history with it?

We had a photograph of my mother on the stage of the Town Hall with the organ behind her, that’s my earliest memory. I was taken there as a child to hear the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra (NZSO) for the first time. I just fell in love with the orchestra and the sound they were making in a space like that. I must have been 10 or 11. And now, my husband and I have been going to the Auckland Town Hall to listen to the NZSO for around 28 years. It’s sort of my regular.

Does the Town Hall still have magic for you, or does it feel like a second home by now?

It feels incredibly familiar. It’s a special place. It’s a good design… it’s kind of an Edwardian horseshoe, and it was built like that because they are seriously phenomenal [for acoustics].

Given your line of work, you must get to attend a lot of shows?

Yes, of course… I do see a lot and I like to see a lot.

What are some of your other favourite venues around the city? 

I adore The Civic. And I’ve done a few shows there. The musical I’m doing at the moment, & Juliet, is the biggest show I’ve done in there. My other shows are generally in the KTK – the Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre – which is the main stage of the Aotea Centre. The ASB Waterfront Theatre is also really fabulous… I think the relationship between the audience and the format there is really, really good, and as a designer, you can do some really big, epic looks – it’s got a really big stage. The Q Theatre is great too, it’s also sort of that horseshoe shape and a really flexible space… I did my apprenticeship at the Mercury Theatre. So I have incredibly fond memories of that too.

Wow! That’s an Auckland icon.

They’ve just done a beautiful refurbishment… I hope that I will get to work in there.

And it’s going to open again!

Yeah. It’s really exciting.

What is it about going out at night to the theatre, ballet or a show that’s so magical for people?

We get to engage with the community. There is something quite spiritual about congregation. As we all know, there’s a reason why we all congregate together and have a kind of collective experience.

Do you think that the performing arts industry, particularly at night, influences or changes the fabric of Auckland’s central city?

Of course! It brings people into the city that would never normally come in. They have a reason to come to the city and they are excited about that. And as the city gets more and more attractive, and transport gets so much easier, they’ll be able to get off that train on Queen Street outside those venues.

When I see people dressed up and walking down Queen Street, I always wonder ‘what have you been to see?’ Where would you go after a show?

Ground is very good.

Ah yes, where we are now. How did you find out about this spot? It’s so intimate and subterranean.

The wine shop upstairs, Cahn’s. [Ground is in the same building, on the lower floor.] It’s been open since December 2024. You can come here after a show, have a nice wine and some antipasti.

And debrief.

Absolutely. You want to be able to do this. Especially if you’ve got guests or people in town. It’s such a nice place.

What about if you were to take someone out for a nice meal, where would you go?

Alma! Or Kingi for a special occasion. Gilt is very good. I like that bistro, European vibe. Again, it’s for special occasions. But the beauty of it is that it takes us just five minutes to walk down here. You don’t need to book 10 days in advance; we can just go down and see if there’s a table and generally, there is a table.

Are there any other nighttime spots that you particularly adore in town? 

The Viaduct. I love going near the water. I love being around the boats – I adore them… Shout out to Janet of Wyoming.

Yes, she’s often moored in the Viaduct. I always check on that boat too!

She’s been gone for quite a while, but she’s back. And then I’m always curious about any other big boats that are in. And I’m always daydreaming about what venues could be on our waterfront.

The waterfront is pretty special. Last New Zealand Fashion Week I went to a show outside Shed 10. The sun had just set, the city and harbour were glittering and Auckland had never looked better. 

Sometimes she looks amazing. I was invited to help with one of the Fashion Week shows and I had the best time. And I love Shed 10. 

I really enjoy seeing things at The Civic for the New Zealand Film Festival – that’s coming up soon – with everyone staring up at the ceiling in wonder. It never gets old. Where’s the best view in the city, in your opinion?

Head to any rooftop. There are lots of bars [Queens Rooftop, Sunset, Bar Albert] or you can just head to the top floor of a parking building. Anywhere with a view.

Any other thoughts about Auckland after dark?

I just love it. And I’m proud. I think we should all be very proud. It’s an incredibly beautiful city. Being on the water and being so small and having the amenities it has, it’s so easy… we’re really, really lucky.