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TVNZ / Screenshot
TVNZ / Screenshot

The BulletinOctober 15, 2019

The Bulletin: Pair of polls puts pressure on Ardern and Labour

TVNZ / Screenshot
TVNZ / Screenshot

Good morning, and welcome to The Bulletin. In today’s edition: A pair of polls put pressure on the Labour Party, a wild night of weather in the North Island, and Shane Jones snapped brandishing a semi-automatic.

Parliament resumes today after a fortnight recess, and MPs were given a welcome-back present in the form of two opinion polls. Last night, 1 News delivered a set of numbers that could return to power that old combo of the National Party plus ACT – but only by a whisker. The Colmar Brunton poll for TVNZ put National up 2 points on 47%, Labour down 3 on 40%, the Greens up 1 to 7%  and NZ First up 1 to 4%. ACT, the Māori Party and TOP were all steady on 1%.

Twenty four hours earlier, as noted in yesterday’s Bulletin, Newshub declared, “the age of Jacindamania is over”, with its Reid Research poll putting National up 7 points to 44%, Labour down 9 to 42%, the Greens steady on 6% and NZ First up 1 to 4% (the three smaller parties all registered 1%). That’s bad for Labour, but not as terrible as it might seem: on those numbers, a Labour-Green coalition could cross the line, while the previous poll, four months earlier, probably flattered Labour.

The usual caveats apply: it’s just a couple of opinion polls, and it’s always the trend that matters more than one snapshot. At the same time, it’s clear Labour has been on a bumpy road lately, with the stalling of KiwiBuild and the botched investigation into a staffer both likely to have had an impact. The new polls do put Labour higher than its recorded result on election night (“I take heart in that,” the prime minister told RNZ this morning), but it needs a strong finish to the year to halt the slide in the “year of delivery”.

“There are still some big areas where the promised reforms haven’t yet come,” said RNZ political editor Jane Patterson. “National has plenty of fodder.” The Herald’s Claire Trevett advised we buckle in for a “white-knuckle ride to the 2020 election”.

The preferred PM polling has tightened, too, though Ardern continues to hold a strong lead. Colmar/TVNZ puts Ardern on 38 to Bridges on 9, and Newshub has Ardern on 38 versus Bridges on 7.


It’s been a wild night of Spring weather across the top half of the North Island. A low is travelling southeast across the island, dispatching as it goes heavy rain and at times severe gales, with surface flooding and downed power lines reported in Auckland, the Coromandel and the Bay of Plenty. Emergency services report 37 call-outs overnight, with evacuations of freedom campers in Coromandel. It’s not going anywhere in a hurry, either. The Met Service severe weather warning is in place until tomorrow morning. The forecast is for rain, wind and trampolines.


Shane Jones has succeeded even while on holiday in making life difficult for Jacinda Ardern. He’d promised to take with him the Cabinet Manual; instead he’s been photographed with a semi-automatic, reports the Herald (paywalled). In now-deleted pictures posted on Facebook by his wife, Jones is shown firing an AR-15, which would be banned in New Zealand under new laws. Jones says it was “international research”; Ardern says the important thing is he supported the gun reforms.


The Christchurch Press leads this morning with the announcement of fines as high as $100,000 for universities that fail to take care of students in their accommodation. The story is of particular significance to Canterbury because it was there that Mason Pendrous, pictured on the front page of the paper, died at the Sonoda hall of residence, his body lying many weeks undiscovered. A new mandatory code of practice would replace the existing voluntary system, announced the education minister, Chris Hipkins. “The recent death at a student hall of residence in Christchurch exposed the limitations of our current system,” he said.


A funding boost for efforts to tackle online extremism has been announced. The government says the $17 million spend will double the size of an Internal Affairs team focused on investigating and halting violent extremist content online. It will also see the chief censor empowered to assess and make faster decisions about harmful content. Internal Affairs minister told media Martin that the changes mean extremist material can be “targeted by working quickly with online content hosts to remove it as quickly as possible”, reports Newshub. Chief censor David Shanks told Newstalk ZB this morning he was confident the changes would make an important difference.


The most compelling sport in New Zealand in recent weeks? The battle between Spark and Sky for the future of sport broadcasting. Spark shrugged off its rugby streaming snafus last week with a shock announcement that it had swooped for New Zealand domestic cricket rights. Now another twist: not only has Sky secured New Zealand rugby rights till 2025, it’s sold, as part of that deal, 5% of the company to NZ Rugby. It’s an extraordinary thing to happen – something that is hard to imagine, say, in the Ofcom-regulated UK market. In the Herald (paywalled), Chris Keall argues it puts NZ Rugby in a conflicted position for future rights negotiations. It’s intriguing, too, that Spark didn’t get a chance to bid: Sky closed the deal during its exclusive negotiation period.


Newspapers in Australia and the UK are reporting that two young New Zealanders have been hired by Boris Johnson’s election campaign team. As the Brexit maelstrom rages on, a snap election looks imminent – the Queen’s Speech delivered overnight by the prime minister is widely reported to have been an election manifesto in all but name. In preparation for that contest, the Conservatives have signed up Sean Topham and Ben Guerin, the twentysomething New Zealanders described as “digital gurus” by the Sydney Morning Herald’s Latika Bourke for their work on Scott Morrison’s campaign, which “saw the Liberals outclass Labor online”. The British tabloid The Sun is so sure they’re digital gurus it called them that four times in one short report.

The pair, who have renamed from Topham Guerin to TG, are reported to be at work already, having made the launch video for the Tory leader’s recent conference speech.

Topham was “the digital whiz who worked at in the inner sanctum of the Liberals’ campaign HQ in Brisbane”, wrote NZ Herald political editor Audrey Young in a June profile. “We were highly responsive to daily events so leveraging Labor’s missteps and rapidly cutting short clips or graphics and rapidly pushing them out on social media,” Topham told the Herald. It’s a style that will be familiar to anyone watching the recent output from Simon Bridges’ National Party, who acknowledge they’ve taken a leaf or two out of the Liberal campaign book.

For someone so young – he’s 28 – Topham “has a remarkable campaign CV”, said Young. While president of the Young Nats, he’d worked on John Key’s 2014 campaign, and subsequently on David Cameron’s team in 2015, and Malcolm Turnbull’s in 2016. He also worked on Bill English’s campaign in 2017, said Young. “Although he did not do the two most famous social media components of that campaign, the Walk-Run and the Spaghetti Pizza.”


In sport, sort of, the 2019 Booker Prize is about to be handed out, and the chinking of glasses is just about audible from London. First, read our books editor Catherine Woulfe’s Booker confessions, then tune in to the announcement, which is being livesteamed neither on Spark nor Sky Sport, but it is on the BBC from 9.30am NZ time.

The bookmakers have Margaret Atwood a firm favourite for The Testaments, followed by Elif Shafak’s 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World and Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport both at 3/1. At 5/1, Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other. At 6/1, An Orchestra of Minorities by Chigozie Obioma. And making up the field, it’s Salman Rushdie, whose Quichotte is a 12/1 longshot.

In other sport, also sort of, the massively popular online game Fortnite just got sucked into a black hole, and people are pretty angry about it.

Keep going!
Some of the various winners of mayoral races around the country (Image sources: Radio NZ, Getty Images, Supplied)
Some of the various winners of mayoral races around the country (Image sources: Radio NZ, Getty Images, Supplied)

The BulletinOctober 14, 2019

The Bulletin: Key analysis from local elections 

Some of the various winners of mayoral races around the country (Image sources: Radio NZ, Getty Images, Supplied)
Some of the various winners of mayoral races around the country (Image sources: Radio NZ, Getty Images, Supplied)

Good morning, and welcome to The Bulletin. In today’s edition: Analysis that hits the mark after a big weekend of local elections, new party poll released, and Dunedinites turn out to clean up in honour of killed student.

By now, you probably know whether or not you have a new local representative. If not, you might have to google it, or search through our live blog from the weekend to see if your area comes up. Either way, there were some surprising results and margins, and the question now on both a local level and national level is pretty simple – what does it all mean?

Here are a few pieces that have a crack at answering that. First of all, our glorious local elections editor Hayden Donnell went through and picked out his winners and losers (and gigantic losers too.) Among the more general points made was that it was a pretty good election for incumbents. That’s how the vast majority of mayoral races with an incumbent ended up playing out. It was also a pretty good election for younger candidates – there are always a few who get elected, but in Wellington and Christchurch especially quite a few made it onto Council.

The mention of Wellington is probably the most obvious counter-example to the incumbency effect. There Justin Lester got knocked out by Andy Foster (who? read thischeat sheet) in what has to be considered a surprise upset. There are a few major areas that could have implications, and one of them is unpacked excellently by the NZ Herald’s (paywalled) Georgina Campbell, around the Let’s Get Wellington Moving transport package. The new mayor indicated he’d like to renegotiate parts of it, and so central government might now be feeling a bit nervous about having to go back to the drawing board. Other races in the region which saw mayoral swings – Hutt City and Porirua, are covered here in the Dominion Post.

In Auckland, it was a lot more clear cut at the top. But as Stuff’s Todd Niall writes, Phil Goff could face an equally challenging term with the possibility of a hung council on a fair few issues. For those who watch these things closely, it’s well worth keeping an eye on the final count in Waitematā, and whether City Vision’s Pippa Coom will retain her slender lead over regular Goff opponent Mike Lee. On what Goff plans to do next with his mandate, Simon Wilson in the NZ Herald (paywalled) has a comprehensive interview. As for John Tamihere, Newsroom’s Tim Murphy is pretty unequivocal – he constantly veered away from the key themes of his campaign and in the end got thrashed.

In terms of reading about what happened in other parts of the country, I’d recommend going to the Radio NZ section landing page and start scrolling. There’s a few of the more fun and colourful stories from the end of the campaign sprinkled through their strong straight news coverage. Finally, the Policy Local site is still up, so for whoever did get elected, if they said what they intended to do there it’ll be easy to go back and compare it to what they actually do later on.

Finally, I’d like to close out this section with something of a plug. Along with Hayden, a few of us at The Spinoff (big shout out to Josie Adams and Alice Webb-Liddall) really threw ourselves into local election coverage. Over the last month it has been among themost popular sections on the site, and it feels like some of our stories really resonated with people. All of it was funded by The Spinoff Members, and we’re hugely grateful for that support. But there’s a lot more journalism we’d like to do with that funding, so if you want to read more like it, please consider helping us out.


A new poll is out, and it reveals a classic example of taking polls as single data points within wider long term trends. The Newshub survey shows a huge drop for Labour from the last Newshub poll, but that one is widely considered to have over-estimated their support. National is the largest party in the poll, with the Greens above the 5% threshold and NZ First below it, so those aspects largely conform to other polls this year. ACT are showing signs of life, and TOP and the Māori Party are surviving.


Dunedinites have turned out in their thousands for a street clean up in memory of student Sophia Crestani, reports the ODT. Crestani was tragically crushed to death at a student party that got out of control, and her parents expressed a wish that students should honour her by participating in the clean up. At least 12 skips were filled with rubbish dumped around the city.


The union for radiographers is alleging that the Counties Manukau DHB illegally broke a strike by putting medical students to work, reports Stuff. It says the DHB broke the Employment Relations Act in the process. The DHB “strongly disagrees” with the allegation, saying the students weren’t doing anything outside of what their duties would normally have been.


The average price of rentals has actually gone down in the last quarter, reportsInterest. It was especially pronounced in Auckland, with dips across almost every part of the region. However, don’t get too excited about the prospect of paying less – it’s likely just be because of seasonal variation, and overall for the year rental prices are up nationwide.


The Māori Party have lined up their first confirmed candidate for the 2020 election, in which the seven Māori electorates will be crucial. The NZ Herald reports it’s iwi leader and campaigner against seabed mining Debbie Ngarewa-Packer. She’ll run in Te Tai Hauāuru, currently held by Labour’s Adrian Rurawhe. It’s a signal that the Māori Party really is going to have a serious crack at 2020, though it isn’t yet known who will stand for them in the other Māori seats.


A bit of housekeeping: I won’t actually be writing tomorrow’s Bulletin. I’ll be travelling instead and will probably be around Huntly when it gets sent out. But don’t worry, I’ll be back on Wednesday. And the guest writer we’ve got filling in tomorrow is pretty handy, so I’m looking forward to reading it.


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Stephen Colbert and Jacinda Ardern in Morningside, Auckland. Photo: Toby Manhire / The Spinoff

Right now on The Spinoff: Greta Yeoman asks politicians who voted no on marriage equality whether they’d change that stance now. Renu Sikka writes about the place Diwali will always hold in her heart. Sam Brooks makes a call on why he reckons Jennifer Lopez is so underrated, and deserves an Oscar. Uther Dean writes about the lost lustre of Breaking Bad as TV watching patterns change. And Toby Manhire got a big scoop on Friday that comedian Stephen Colbert was in the country, by looking out the window and seeing him there with the PM.


For a feature today, a review of a book where both the author and the reviewer are deeply well versed in the subject matter. Writing in Metro, political commentator Ben Thomas has cast his eye over a new work by political marketing academic Dr Claire Robinson. The review is thoughtful in a way that makes you want to learn more about the topic. Here’s an excerpt:

Even seemingly concrete issues are often little more than symbolic shorthand. A National campaign booklet in 1949 lambasted the Labour government for spending taxpayer money on “super-duper cars for Ministers” — a signifier for extravagance and aloofness that has persisted for seven decades without any noticeable diminution in the quality of Crown transport once outraged oppositions reach government.

Visual language can be decoded, but it cannot be reasoned or argued with, or interrogated and made to give up the truth. The same goes for graphs and the ubiquitous use of statistics in isolation. A 1954 National pamphlet proclaims, among a raft of figures about increased production of nylon stockings, cement and cigarettes (!), that “statistics culled at random tell a story of prosperity that nothing can gainsay”. In 2017, we have the Treasury’s wellbeing measures, from the 1970s we had OECD rankings, and in 1951, we had boasts about the number of lamb carcasses eaten by New Zealanders each year.


It’s a big old sports section today. We start with a record being broken (sort of) in one of the world’s oldest athletic disciplines – the marathon. Eliud Kipchoge has run the first ever marathon in under two hours, reports Stuff. It’s an incredible feat, but won’t count as an official record because it wasn’t accomplished under race conditions.

The Silver Ferns are absolutely on fire right now. Radio NZ reports they’ve taken down Australia again, this time in the opening match of the Constellation Cup. It was a narrow one point win, and took an absolutely hearty 4th quarter surge to make happen. But then again, if a year ago you said the Silver Ferns would notch up consecutive wins against the Diamonds, people would have scoffed.

And in the Rugby World Cup, Japan have made it into the quarterfinals on pure merit. There had been some suggestions that their crucial clash against Scotland might be cancelled along with several other games, because of the deadly typhoon hitting the country. The petulant Scots threatened to sue if it was called off. So Japan went out there and beat them fair and square, bringing home a 28-21 victory. They’ll now face South Africa in the quarters, and honestly, who would bet against them on current form? When Ireland beat the All Blacks in their quarterfinal, I’ll definitely be switching my support to Japan.


That’s it for The Bulletin. If you liked what you read, and know other people who would find it useful, pass on this signup form to them. And if you want to support the work we do at The Spinoff, please check out our membership programme.

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