Cross Party Lines

Hosted by Phil Goff and Chris Finlayson, Cross Party Lines opens with a tribute to former Speaker Adrian Rurawhe — a man of great humility, dignity and genuine cross-party respect — before turning to the final sprint of the election campaign: empty promises from every direction, billionaires gaming the electoral system, the minor parties’ kingmaker debate, and a Burnham bounce that might finally put Brexit on trial.
All thanks to Frank Risk Management, the 100% Kiwi Owned Insurance Brokerage.
In this episode:
* The campaign’s hollow promises and the policies that actually matter — Chris reaches for Horace — the mountain labours and a ridiculous mouse is born — as his summary of the policy avalanche hitting voters in the final week. The BNZ nationalisation is a barefaced lie that will never happen. The Greens’ $2 train fare is potty. ACT’s Paris Agreement withdrawal would torpedo both the EU and UK free trade agreements and is equally dishonest — as Laura Clark, former British High Commissioner and now a climate advocate, pointed out bluntly on RNZ, New Zealand is already facing a complaint from a Dutch environmental group over its weakening of climate commitments.
* Billionaires gaming the system and the Kingmaker debate’s tired chestnuts — The Mowbray family — New Zealand’s wealthiest — and Don Brash are publicly urging voters to give electorate votes to National but party votes to ACT, engineering a potential overhang that Phil connects directly to the German experience: the Germans had an identical MMP system, the same tactic was tried, and they were forced to change the law. Both Phil and Chris are unambiguous — this rots the system, undermines electoral credibility, and should be condemned.
* Burnham’s Brexit courage and Farage on the ropes — Andy Burnham has said what no Labour leader has dared to since 2016: Brexit was born in a lie, largely propagated by Boris Johnson, it has not increased wealth, it has devastated it, and it is time for a new arrangement with Europe. Chris is delighted. Phil notes the Burnham bounce is real — Labour up to 30% in some polls, reform down to 23-25%, the Conservatives in the high teens — is exactly what real political leadership looks like, and what New Zealand has been missing.
Cross Party Lines exists to lift political literacy and create space for calm, good-faith political conversation. New episodes every Tuesday. If you value thoughtful debate, follow the podcast and share it with someone who might too.
📋 Election day is 7 November. Make sure you’re enrolled and make sure everyone you know is too.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit crosspartylines.substack.com

Hosted by Phil Goff and Chris Finlayson, Cross Party Lines returns to dissect party launches, Nicky Hager’s latest book, the US midterms and the Xi-Trump summit that produced two pandas and precisely nothing else.
Proudly supported by our Foundational Partner Frank Risk Management - the 100% Kiwi owned insurance brokerage.
In this episode:
* Party launches: Labour’s energy versus National’s empty seats — Phil went to one launch and won’t make you guess which one. Audrey Young’s verdict — Labour had it all over National for sheer impact, with new policy, a new attitude and a better speech — saves Phil from being dismissed as a party hack, though he notes Hipkins’ language at the lectern raised eyebrows. Chris channels John Key’s campaign gospel: repeat, repeat, repeat, don’t deviate, don’t embellish.
* Nicky Hager’s Dirty Works — useful journalism or a pop gun? — Phil delivers an even-handed assessment of Hager’s career: Hollow Men and Dirty Politics were game, set and match — documentary proof of collusion with the Exclusive Brethren and the weaponisation of the OIA and the SIS. Dirty Work, both agree, is not a smoking gun — but the documented links between the Taxpayers Union, tobacco industry funding, and the orchestrated amplification of anti-Māori sentiment are not nothing, and Chris expresses a fervent hope that Hager’s next book is about New Zealand First.
* US midterms: Kansas wobbling, Texas flipping and Trump’s Faustian reckoning — Chris has been doing his homework and the picture is striking. Kansas — reliably Republican for a century — is in play. Texas, which Trump won by 13.6 points, has the Democrat ahead. Iowa farmers, hammered by tariffs and diesel costs, are reconsidering. Phil lays out the arithmetic: Democrats need four Senate seats to take the chamber; the House is almost certainly gone; and if both flip, Trump faces impeachment proceedings in his final two years while the courts continue finding his executive orders unconstitutional. Chris’s verdict on the moral of the story: if you make a Faustian deal with someone like Trump, 2026 is the year you’re held to account.
Cross Party Lines exists to lift political literacy and create space for calm, good-faith political conversation. New episodes every Tuesday. If you value thoughtful debate, follow the podcast and share it with someone who might too.
📋 Election day is 7 November. Make sure you’re on the roll.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit crosspartylines.substack.com

Hosted by Phil Goff and Chris Finlayson, Cross Party Lines returns for a week of policy overload, parliamentary chaos, and language in the House that both men thought they’d never hear. With 46 days to go, the episode cuts through the confetti of promises to ask which ones are serious, which are wacky and which are simply dishonest.
Thanks to Frank Risk Management, the 100% Kiwi Owned Insurance Brokerage and our Foundational Partner for the podcast.
To hear more from the Both Sides Now Podcast, use this link.
In this episode:
* Policy week: supermarkets, farming, Paris Agreement and the BNZ fantasy — New Zealand Firsts “Make New Zealand Healthy Again” health policy — promoting prevention while having just repealed the Smokefree Act and halved the tax on heated tobacco products — draws Phil’s sharpest word of the episode: hypocrisy. On farming and the environment, Phil draws a direct line from ACT’s deregulatory instincts to the Paris Agreement clauses embedded in both the UK and EU free trade agreements — breach them, and the tariff preferences that have grown New Zealand’s exports by 25% and 38% respectively are at risk. And on New Zealand First’s proposal to renationalise the BNZ for $30 billion — Chris parks it under wacky, and moves on.
* Debt: when to borrow, when to pay down and what the Taxpayers Union gets wrong — Chris is asking Katie Bradford and anyone who would listen for a serious debate on debt. Phil obliges with the clearest statement of fiscal philosophy either man has offered all season: borrow for intergenerational infrastructure investment, not for operating costs or tax cuts; pay down debt when times are good; keep powder dry for the unknown unknowns — Christchurch, COVID, and possibly the alpine fault. Chris’s concern: we don’t know what’s coming next.
* Parliament’s final sitting: bad language, worse legislation and valedictories worth watching — Sixty-five hours across five days, legislation passing at midnight with drafting errors that left 70,000 people without payments they were owed, and two MPs using the C-word on the floor of the House — one by spoonerism, one deliberately. Phil is forgiving of the former (John Carter, who reported the incident in his own valedictory); he is not forgiving of the latter. Chris invokes JFK’s inaugural address — civility is not a sign of weakness — and tells every candidate watching that they are signing up to one of the oldest democracies on earth and should dress and speak accordingly.
Sharp, wide-ranging and funnier than any episode this close to an election has any right to be, this episode is a reminder that the difference between good government and bad government is rarely the promises — it’s what happens when the promises meet the books, the drafters and the midnight sitting hour.
Cross Party Lines exists to lift political literacy and create space for calm, good-faith political conversation. New episodes every Tuesday. If you value thoughtful debate, follow the podcast and share it with someone who might too.
📋 46 days to go. Make sure you’re on the roll — and make sure everyone you know is too.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit crosspartylines.substack.com

Hosted by Phil Goff and Chris Finlayson, Cross Party Lines marks the 25th anniversary of September 11 with a deeply personal account of the night the world changed — and then turns to an election campaign generating more heat than light and an AI warning that even the people building it are frightened by.
All thanks to our foundational partner Frank Risk Management, the 100% Kiwi Owned Insurance Brokerage.
To hear more from the Both Sides Now Podcast, use this link.
In this episode:
* September 11 — where they were, what it meant and the wars that followed — Phil was Foreign Minister when the call came through at one in the morning from his driver: go downstairs and turn on the television. By the time he got there, the second plane had hit the South Tower. Chris had just returned from three months studying Latin in Rome with a drunk monk from Milwaukee. Both share vivid personal accounts of the hours and days that followed.
* Campaign week: KiwiSaver, student loans, supermarkets and the same old Peters playbook — Labour’s KiwiSaver policy gets a broadly positive reception — raising employer contributions to six percent over four years, with employee contributions defaulting to four percent but not mandated, addressing the million New Zealanders contributing nothing and losing their employer match. The Greens’ state-owned supermarket proposal gets a more sceptical hearing: Phil’s nuclear option would be forcing Pak’nSave to divest from its parent, bringing real competition rather than a government-owned operator with no track record in retail. National’s transport policing announcement — fifty officers for the CRL — draws a wry Chris story about being abused on the Karori bus and not one passenger helping, and his firm view that police should at minimum patrol that route.
* AI — when the people building it start warning you, listen — Phil opens the final segment with what he calls the most serious issue of the episode: AI systems at OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta have been found taking their own initiative, contrary to instruction, in ways their creators did not anticipate. The CEOs of those companies — people Phil is often cynical about — are now issuing serious warnings about existential risk. Chris agrees the only possible response is international, drawing the analogy of the Berne Convention on copyright: domestic legislation alone cannot work when the technology is global and the race to get ahead of competitors is driven by the United States and China.
Along the way: the CRL opening attended by five politicians who had nothing to do with getting it built, an Auckland Grammar head girl giving Phil hope for the future, Pauline Hanson attacking Anthony Albanese’s dead mother for living too long in council housing — prompting Chris’s most disgusted response of the podcast.
Cross Party Lines exists to lift political literacy and create space for calm, good-faith political conversation. New episodes every Tuesday. If you value thoughtful debate, follow the podcast and share it with someone who might too.
📋 Election day is 7 November. Make sure you’re on the roll — and make sure everyone you know is too.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit crosspartylines.substack.com

Hosted by Phil Goff and Chris Finlayson, Cross Party Lines takes to the stage at The Piano in Christchurch for a sold out live episode that opens with a tribute to the resilience of Cantabrians and closes with a plea to get on the electoral roll before 25 October. In between: the Pacific being carved up by superpowers, an election campaign built on little lies and big lies, and the strategic questions nobody in Wellington wants to answer.
All thanks to Frank Risk Management - The 100% Kiwi Owned Insurance Brokerage.
In this episode:
* The Pacific — neglected, militarised and handed to China on a plate — Phil’s account of the Pacific Island Forum in Palau is forensic and sobering. Five leaders stayed away — all from countries with close Chinese ties — in what Phil reads as geostrategic interference turning a forum for Pacific solidarity into a proxy battleground between Washington and Beijing. The Cook Islands leveraged China against the United States and got $100 million for a port on Penrhyn — an island of a few hundred people with a deep harbour that can take warships. Chris and Phil agree on the diagnosis: for generations New Zealand neglected the islands, failed to build the courthouse in Samoa, paid peanuts in compensation for the Rena, and now wonders why China has filled the vacuum.
* Election lies, ACT’s contradictions and promises that will never be kept — Chris invokes what he calls the principle of political attribution: if you’re going to say Labour is responsible for every tax floated by the Greens, Te Pāti Māori and the Opportunities Party, then National must own the BNZ nationalisation, Paul Henry’s $2 billion cancer hospitals and every other coalition promise. Phil is blunter: Simeon Brown’s nine-taxes campaign is an absolute bloody lie, and he says so to a Christchurch audience that appears to agree. The ACT policy to abolish the Māori and Pasifika medical school admissions scheme draws Phil’s sharpest domestic argument of the episode: David Seymour was asked why racial discrimination applies to Māori and Pasifika entry but not to rural students. Both Phil and Chris are scathing about the race to the bottom on tax promises, with Phil noting that two-thirds of New Zealanders say they’d happily pay more tax for a health system they can rely on — and asking why no major party is listening.
* The audience takes over — strategic planning, superannuation and the antidote to populism — The Christchurch audience doesn’t hold back. The standout question of the night comes from the floor: how, under a three-year parliamentary term, does New Zealand ever achieve long-term strategic planning on infrastructure, immigration and an ageing population? Phil draws the direct lesson from Auckland’s $200 million wasted on light rail planning — scrapped by an incoming government — and argues that long-term projects need genuine cross-party buy-in from the start. Chris backs a revived Commissioner for the Future, abolished by Muldoon in 1983, as the structural answer. On superannuation, Phil raises the question both major parties refuse to touch: life expectancy has risen ten years since the retirement age was set at 65, he worked until he was 71, and he was still drawing a pension while doing so. On the trade agreements question — a Cantabrian asks why the government is walking back its climate commitments under the EU and UK FTAs. And on populism, Phil and Chris deliver their clearest joint statement of the season: the antidote is not rhetoric, it is major parties performing — delivering for the broader community, not just their own tribe, and being honest about the cost of doing so.
Cross Party Lines exists to lift political literacy and create space for calm, good-faith political conversation. New episodes every Tuesday. If you value thoughtful debate, follow the podcast and share it with someone who might too.
📋 Not on the electoral roll? Enrol before 25 October or your vote won’t count. Don’t let anyone you know get disenfranchised.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit crosspartylines.substack.com