Heather du Plessis-Allan Drive

The US House of Representatives has passed a measure to halt US President Donald Trump from taking further military action in Iran with a 215-208 vote.
The vote resulted from four Republicans joining the Democrats.
The action must still pass through the majorly Republican senate.
Washington Bureau Chief for The Guardian David Smith said the Iran war has gone badly for the President, and there are indications he is tired of it.
"In many ways, several times in recent weeks he's claimed we're close to a deal, and that never seems to materialise," Smith said.
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Budget 2026 allocated an annual $8 million in baseline funding to pay for food distribution which includes collecting surplus and donated food, and delivering it to places like food banks.
Food banks have also been allocated $7m in 2026/27, but no more after that.
Salvation Army food security manager Sonya Cameron told Andrew Dickens that she is concerned about the lack of ability to provide extra much-needed support for people.
"For example, obviously when people come to see us they might have problems with debt, they might have problems with income support, they might have problems with their housing. The problem we might have now is that we're simply unable to provide those, those sort of wrap-around services for whanau," she said.
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On the Heather du Plessis-Allan Drive Full Show Podcast with Andrew Dickens for Thursday, 4 June, 2026, Speaker of the House Gerry Brownlee is bemused by a ban on four MPs from entering China for a year because they visited Taiwan.
A former police detective tells us about Spark's new way to detect spammers on your phone.
We hear about plans to almost double the size of the Remarkables skifield in Queenstown.
And on The Huddle, Oscar Kightley and David Farrar on how our voice of rugby is changing.
Get the Heather du Plessis-Allan Drive Full Show Podcast every weekday evening on iHeartRadio, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Otago Senior Research Fellow Kimberley O'Sullivan reckons the money for the winter energy payment should be instead put towards a solar subsidy.
"What I do think that we need is an off-ramp, a way to permanently reduce household exposure to rising electricity costs so that we don't have to keep paying the winter energy payment and perhaps in 20 years we won't need it at all," O'Sullivan told Andrew Dickens.
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Four New Zealand MPs have been quietly banned from China for a year after travelling to Taiwan on a junket. The group—ACT’s Laura McClure, New Zealand First’s David Wilson, Labour’s Duncan Webb and National’s Maureen Pugh—travelled as part of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Taiwan, which promotes cross-party engagement and economic ties.
China didn’t like it. They decided to impose a sanction but they didn’t announce it publicly. Instead, last week the Chinese embassy contacted our Parliament and requested a meeting to deliver key messages, suggesting the bans could be lifted if the MPs apologised.
Laura McClure was on with Heather this morning. She was asked, “Will you apologise?” and she said, “No. This is a type of foreign interference. I did nothing wrong.”
MFAT also confirmed this is the first time China has sanctioned New Zealand MPs for such a trip, even though past delegations—including one involving John Key as a backbencher—have faced no consequences whatsoever.
Now, this has provoked some angry responses. Human rights groups are speaking out—Pillar calls it intimidation—and Professor Anne-Marie Brady, who has had disputes with China, calls it a punishment we should retaliate against. She points out that in 2021 the European Union cancelled official dialogue with China after a similar sanction on politicians.
But what China has done here is, to me, neither a meaningful punishment nor particularly damaging. A tit-for-tat retaliation like the one the European Union instituted would do nothing for New Zealand. A ban on four MPs visiting China for a year really isn’t much of a punishment—they had no plans to go there anyway.
Retaliation, however, could be damaging. What I think we should do instead is object strongly. This story happened last week and was kept under wraps until Laura McClure leaked it. I think that was a mistake. We should have gone public immediately—made a big noise about it.
We should tell China, “This is not the way we behave.” We should urge them to grow up and point out that denying these MPs the chance to visit also denies China the opportunity to show New Zealand that it can be a reasonable member of the international community—that it can make a reasonable and humanitarian case on Taiwan.
After all, we support the One China policy. But actions like this suggest that China itself does not follow that principle in spirit and instead intends to subsume Taiwan without respecting its rights.
So we should say, “No, that was the wrong thing to do,” while at the same time taking no retaliatory action—maintaining the higher moral ground.
Because, in my view, this was a poor show by China. It weakens them and their case—not us.
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