Two hours after Labour launched its flagship transport policy in the central city, National launched its own 30 kilometres south. Duncan Greive was there to watch. National unveiled its rail transport policy under a slate grey sky at a train station in Papakura, doing their best impression of obliviousness to the nation’s incipient Jacinda-mania. Bill English … Read more
Labour has jettisoned its leader and overhauled its campaign – but National, too, is having to rethink its approach, writes Toby Manhire Look, it’s not as though it was Obama 2008. Labour’s new mantra, “Let’s do this”, sounded less stadium and more working bee. But there was no mistaking the buoyant mood at the launch … Read more
Against a new challenger, Bill English will need to lift his game, while Winston Peters as PM becomes a real proposition, writes former National Party cabinet minister Wayne Mapp. The dramatic elevation of Jacinda Ardern to the leadership of the Labour Party instantly raises the question of whether she is ready to be prime minister in just … Read more
In our video series Kiwis of Snapchat, comedian Tom Sainsbury sources exclusive Snapchat footage of Kiwi citizens making the news. Today: Bill English and Paula Bennett have a plan to target the youth vote. Click here for all our Kiwis of Snapchat videos. Want more politics? Check out the Spinoff’s Gone By Lunchtime political podcast, … Read more
With the new season of Suits coming express to Lightbox, we found an unlikely fan in the Right Honourable Bill English, Prime Minister of New Zealand. Earlier this year when Spinoff editor Duncan Greive interviewed Prime Minister Bill English, there was one question that didn’t make the final cut. Today, The Spinoff can finally reveal … Read more
Loaded to the eyeballs on performance enhancing mint chocolate, the Gone By Lunchtime beat combo pick over the remains of a momentous week in New Zealand politics. As the election build-up lurches through the gears, Toby Manhire is joined by Annabelle Lee, executive producer of The Hui, and Ben Thomas of Exceltium to discuss the scandal that led … Read more
Jane Yee, Duncan Greive and Alex Casey gather around a pile of cheesy Lotatoes to talk about the latest happenings in New Zealand television and real life in New Zealand. It’s a huge week on The Real Pod, with the New Zealand pop culture news about as piping hot as the cheesy low-carb Lotatoes that are … Read more
Dismayed by the press gallery’s failure to interrogate the prime minister’s epistemological framework in the Todd Barclay scandal? Undismay yourself: New Zealand’s leading craft beer enthusiast and philosopher king Ben Thomas is here. Bill English is known as one of parliament’s deep thinkers. Never has this been more on display than Saturday, on Newshub’s The … Read more
The Todd Barclay affair has plunged the new prime minister into his first major political maelstrom, leading to claims of contradictory statements. Do they add up? Here’s our trawl of the key remarks. Text messages from Bill English to then Clutha-Southland electorate chairman Stuart Davie, February 21, 2016, via Newsroom: “[Barclay] left a Dictaphone running that picked … Read more
The Todd Barclay affair has prompted many memory lapses, but perhaps none as powerful as Prime Minister Bill English’s now-forgotten objections to cover-ups and deceit. Branko Marcetic looks back to 2002, when Helen Clark’s Paintergate and Corngate scandals were making the news – and Bill English was making hay. “Today we see the real story … Read more
Todd Barclay is going, but how much damage has he caused – to his party and especially to the leader who tried to cover for him? Or has Bill English brought this on himself? Remember when former PM John Key went on radio station The Rock and took part in a prison rape joke, and … Read more
Yesterday Newsroom posted a scoop on Todd Barclay’s weird, possibly illegal recordings of one of his former employees. Hayden Donnell keeps track of all the falsehoods unfurling out of the story. I went to sleep in London just after Newsroom broke its story about Todd Barclay, his secret recordings of a staff member, and the apparent … Read more
Newsroom today broke the story of the payments and coverup that followed allegations of clandestine recording by Todd Barclay. But the MP for Clutha-Southland remains something of a mystery on the national stage. Peter Newport, a former RNZ reporter based in Queenstown, has interviewed him on multiple occasions and shares his impressions. Over the past two years I’ve … Read more
With secretary of state Rex Tillerson in New Zealand on Tuesday, Bill English and Paula Bennett have a chance to strongly condemn the dereliction of international leadership in quitting the Paris deal – and to use the occasion to galvanise action here, writes climate scientist James Renwick This morning we heard President Donald Trump formally state … Read more
It seemed Donald Trump had killed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, but it has sprung back to life with Bill English’s visit to Japan. His confidence that the NZ parliament has already approved a TPP11 is misplaced, however, writes Andrew Geddis. As everybody should very well understand, the primary rule for surviving a horror movie is: “When it appears … Read more
Jane Yee, Duncan Greive and Alex Casey gather around the oval table to talk about the latest happenings in New Zealand television and real life in New Zealand. ‘Twas the night before The Champagne Lady’s party and The Real Pod gang are preloading with disgusting flavoured jellybeans and unfounded claims about Avril Lavigne being dead. Before tackling the … Read more
Sure, Alfred Ngaro screwed up royally – but there was a lot more to the National party conference this weekend. Steven Joyce let a budget secret slip, Paula Bennett stole the show, and the party revealed its 10 point plan to shut down Labour, writes Simon Wilson. “I can’t tell you how proud I am,” … Read more
The associate housing minister has issued a statement of regret after Newsroom caught him spraying threats at non-government service providers including Willie Jackson and the Salvation Army. Here we speculate on how it might read after a good dousing in truth serum. What Ngaro said: “My comments about the Government’s work in social housing and some … Read more
A new work by our leading political poet. When Bill English grasped the reins of power last year, he plunged a concrete post of literature into the tender soils of New Zealand by reading aloud a bit of poetry. This week, courageously, to staunch the bleeding of the national auditory canal brought on by Colin … Read more
The new foreign minister is lucky that so little fuss was made when he unilaterally abandoned the government line on Israel, writes Toby Manhire. At his post-cabinet press conference yesterday, Bill English voiced an age-old axiom of international relations: “In this world of diplomacy, each word matters.” He was answering a question about the newly … Read more
Prime Minister Bill English made his big pre-Budget speech in Wellington yesterday. He mentioned Auckland exactly zero times. Is this a deliberate election-year strategy, asks Simon Wilson. It’s three weeks till Budget Day. Three weeks until the government sets out the financial framework for the programme it will take into the election in September, now … Read more
Bill English made pizza for tea last night, igniting widespread internet debate over the leader of the nation’s culinary abilities. We asked one of the world’s best pizza chefs for his thoughts. An award-winning chef from one of Auckland’s best Italian restaurants has slammed the prime minister’s attempts at making pizza. “You can’t even call … Read more
The evidence shows that a ‘tough on crime’ approach is a posture, not a solution, writes criminologist Antje Deckert. In 2011, when Bill English was Finance Minister, he declared that New Zealand’s prisons were “a moral and fiscal failure”. Five years later, the National government has announced that it will recruit 1,100 new police officers … Read more
In an interview with The Spinoff, Bill English said that he didn’t claim to be a feminist, because to do so amounted to ‘virtue signalling’. Former mayoral contender and current Greens candidate Chlöe Swarbrick says it is part of a wider problem Doom and gloom. The world’s getting hotter, relative inequality is rising, housing is … Read more
A National Party chair has called for the return of corporal punishment, which seems sure to return the issue, including the smacking debate, to the agenda under NZ’s new social conservative PM. You’d be forgiven for thinking that New Zealand had by and large concluded the debate about whether beating up children is a good … Read more
Renting in New Zealand is now the way most of us live. Unfortunately, in many ways, it sucks. Spinoff editor Duncan Greive explains why we’re dedicating a week to the issue. A couple of weeks ago Arthur Grimes, the former chair of the Reserve Bank, was interviewed on Nine to Noon by Kathryn Ryan. The … Read more
Hundreds of NZ women are told every year that their request for an abortion is ‘not justified’. One woman describes the response she encountered, and why she feels betrayed by a system that continues to view women seeking termination through a lens of criminality Are you not with the father? Were you ever together? Had … Read more
After eight years watching John Key from the deputy’s seat, Bill English was thrust into leadership late last year. In the first in a series of election-year interviews with our political leaders, Duncan Greive goes to the ballet with the prime minister, and chews over his new job and how he plans to keep it. Photography … Read more
In an exclusive interview with the Spinoff, the prime minister invokes the term ‘virtue signalling’ and reveals why he decided to break with predecessor John Key on superannuation Bill English has reiterated that he does not consider himself a feminist, suggesting in an interview with the Spinoff that the term is not applicable to men, … Read more