Gone By Lunchtime

The Kingmakers’ Debate is the highest-profile of a burst of events in the first full-throttle week of the 2026 campaign. How did the party leaders do in the Press-Post thing, and what happened to the worm? Toby Manhire, Annabelle Lee-Mather and Ben Thomas gather at the roundtable to exchange their piping takes.

Plus: What does new polling tell us about the way Māori are planning to vote? Now that John Key has knocked it down, is Harry Mowbray’s overhang campaign a serious thing? Who are the breakout stars of the election to date? And a word on Adrian Rurawhe.
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Here’s a taste of our new podcast, At Large with Toby Manhire: this week Jack Tame came in to talk about how he’s preparing to host the first leaders’ debate in 2026, how the campaign is taking form, and the struggle to get the prime minister (and others) to talk to him on Q+A.

Watch the Mt Albert debate in full here: https://youtu.be/LZO7gu6rhQg

Watch the debate debrief with Lyric Waiwiri-Smith and Hayden Donnell here: https://youtu.be/1KewN5ilXtc

Watch the full interview with Jack Tame here: https://youtu.be/RYOI7d16ApQ

Follow At Large with Toby Manhire now on ⁠⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠Apple Podcasts,⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠, or wherever you get your pods.
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Parliament has disgorged its politicians ahead of a Super Sunday of campaign launches, with just a month and a day until advance voting begins. Toby Manhire, Annabelle Lee-Mather and Ben Thomas leaf through the brand new Ipsos Issues Monitor, which reveals which issues matter most to New Zealanders in election season, which parties they consider best equipped to tackle those concerns, and where people rank out of 10 the government’s performance. Have the competing parties successfully shaped their campaigns to meet a mood in which voters are very exercised about cost of living and increasingly worried about the health system?Plus: Nicky Hager has published Dirty Work, the third in a trilogy – what does the book tell us? And how alarmed should we be about a flagrant subversion of the Official Information Act in the curriculum overhaul project at the Ministry of Education?
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Just when you thought the two main parties were fixed on a do-little election, the National Party bursts out the triangulator and gazumps its Labour rivals with a pledge to pursue a breakup of the Foodstuffs group of Pak’nSave, New World and Four Square. Annabelle Lee-Mather, Ben Thomas and Toby Manhire race their trolleys to the studio to ask: will Nicola Willis’s bold call cut through the blancmange like a Smeg blade through an Ooshie? Will the popular appeal outweigh the pushback from local businesses? Are the KiwiMart Greens, NZ First and their "copycat" pals National now natural partners? Where does it all leave Labour? And does Annabelle deserve more respect for her "menage-opoly" bit?Plus: The report on the four-year ordeal for the Phillips children has been released and it's a horror show. What are the lessons for agencies including Oranga Tamariki and the Police, and is New Zealand suffering from an “accountability sink”?And what to make of the moves to wind down the Waitangi Tribunal?
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This just in: we have nine more weeks of this. Can National's indefatigable campaign manager Simeon Brown sustain the unremitting tax focus all the way to election day, can Labour move the discussion to somewhere that suits it better, and with politicians across the board shrugging off requests for factual corrections and apologies have we waded into a post-truth, alternative-fact mire? Ben Thomas, Annabelle Lee-Mather and Toby Manhire convene to tackle these question. Plus: Is Chris Hipkins hugging National close or spooning them? Is Te Pāti Māori's policy to entrench te tiriti as radical as some have suggested and how did Willie Jackson do in outling his own party's Māori campaign?
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