National’s Barbara Kuriger, the MP for Taranaki-King Country, is facing a challenge for her seat in parliament.

The Herald’s reported that secondary school teacher Brian Winter is seeking the party’s candidacy in the seat Kuriger has held since 2014.

Kuriger resigned from her agriculture portfolio last year after it emerged there was a conflict of interest due to a dispute between her son and the Ministry for Primary Industries.

While she said she wouldn’t be quitting politics, National leader Christopher Luxon said the conflict with MPI was a “serious lapse of judgement”.

Meanwhile in politics, Green Party co-leader Mamara Davidson has confirmed she will only be running a party vote campaign this year and won’t stand in the Tāmaki Makaurau electorate.

This year’s headliners are Blackpink, Frank Ocean and Bad Bunny but it’s who’s on the undercard that makes this year’s Coachella festival far more interesting. Blondie’s in the mix, so’s Björk, Charli XCX and the Chemical Brothers, as well as the first ever performance from Jai Paul. If you were in Palm Springs to see it all take place, Pusha T, Wet Leg and 070 Shake would also be must-sees.

Guess what: you can see it all anyway! This year, for the first time, all six stages are being livestreamed from 11am Saturday-Monday (and again next weekend) with the expanded Coachella YouTube stream right here.

If you have any screentime available after that, the fourth and final season of Bill Hader’s hitman comedy Barry (Neon) gets under way on Monday, the fifth and final season of The Marvelous Mrs Maisel (Prime Video) begins today, and the first two episodes of the third (and not final) season of hip-hop comedy Dave (Neon) are out now.

Also set to debut is the Wild West series Django (TVNZ+) from today, Jennifer Garner’s missing person saga The Last Thing He Told Me (Apple TV+) and the documentary Longest Third Date (Netflix), about a couple’s never-ending Covid date. (This one looks so bad it might actually be good.)

If you’re heading out to the movies, expect cinemas to be booked out with Super Mario Bros screenings after last weekend’s block-busting run. Elsewhere, Ben Affleck’s Air takes on the Michael Jordan / Nike story and has great reviews, and Russell Crowe’s The Pope’s Exorcist has slightly worse reviews but it has been lambasted by the Vatican  as “unreliable … splatter cinema” so … it should be fun?

* This is an excerpt from The Spinoff newsletter Rec Room. Sign up for this and much more delivered to your inbox every Friday here.

Wellington’s Dominion Post has announced a rebrand, ditching the “Dominion” from its name and simply becoming The Post.

It’s been over 20 years since the capital’s newspapers The Evening Post and The Dominion merged, but the paper’s current editor Caitlin Cherry said the name didn’t make sense for an independently owned outlet. “We are under no-one’s dominion. New Zealand’s status as a dominion ended in 1945 when we joined the United Nations. It’s time for the word to go,” she said.

“We thought carefully about what we wanted The Post to represent now and into the future.”

The rebrand of the Stuff-owned newspaper will come into effect in about two weeks time.

Aotearoa needs to double the size of its electricity industry over the next 30 years to meet our emissions reductions targets. We’ve done it before in 1945 to 1985 but can we do it again? With a myriad of privately and publicly owned companies waiting for market and regulatory signals, it seems unlikely. In the latest episode of When the Facts Change, Bernard Hickey talks with electricity expert John Hancock about the prospects of doubling our power industry again and explains how we can get it done.

Listen below or wherever you get your pods

The minister in charge of the government’s three waters overhaul has admitted there was difficulty getting the public onboard with the so-called “co-governance” aspect of the original plan.

It was confirmed yesterday that the water infrastructure plans would be moving ahead but with some substantial changes. There will be now be 10 regional water entities, instead of four. And local councils will now have more control over what actually happens with their own water supplies. You can read about all the changes in The Bulletin today.

One aspect of the original plan that has remained seemingly unchanged happens to one of the most controversial: co-governance. The prime minister wouldn’t admit that, saying it wasn’t actually co-governance (something opposition parties are not convinced of this).

Speaking to Newshub’s AM, Kieran McAnulty, the local government minister, said there was never any question of it staying part of the proposal – but the public needed to be brought onboard.

“Māori have a special interest in water and that’s been established by the courts – I wasn’t prepared to put anything up that would be counter to that,” he said.

“At the end of the day, I was confident that if we actually explain what it is we’re proposing – accepting that our explanation previously wasn’t effective and that people found out that it wasn’t actually governance, that it was very similar to what’s happening in the local government sector on a day-to-day basis – then, really, New Zealanders would be comfortable with it.”

McAnulty said the government could prove that the new plan would save people money, but the National Party did not have a plan yet. “There’s not a single ratepayer in the country that will pay more, long term, as a result of these reforms,” he said.

Not all local councils are onboard just yet. McAnulty said he was never expecting to win everyone over immediately, but “I did hope I would be able to get the majority onboard”.

A new economic forecast predicts inflation will be at 6.6% by the end of this year and 3.8% by the end of next year, still well above the Reserve Bank’s target of 1% to 3%. Infometrics’ chief forecaster Gareth Kiernan says that while inflation pressures are reducing internationally, New Zealand is not feeling the benefits.

“The problem in New Zealand is that we’re just not getting any of the real good bits [of economic data] through here so our problem still seems to be more acute than what you’ve got overseas,” he tells Stuff, adding that he believes the official cash rate will increase to 5.75% in the next few months. A decrease in interest rates from mid-2024 will likely be slower than the pace of increases had been, he says.

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