A boil water notice is in place for parts of Auckland, following a similar advisory in Christchurch earlier this year. These precautions are not just about drinking, affecting hand-washing, doing the dishes and even watering the vege garden.

Watercare, Auckland’s council-owned water utility, issued a boil water notice on Sunday for parts of Mt Roskill, Royal Oak, Three Kings and Hillsborough, with residents “advised to boil drinking water until further notice” after traces of E coli were detected during routine sampling – now believed to have been caused by one sample tap. Follow-up testing of 21 samples showed no trace of E coli. However, as of Monday afternoon, that precautionary boil-water notice remains in place.

In February, 14,000 households in Christchurch were issued with a precautionary boil water notice after testing indicated a potential contamination of the water supply. It remained in place for several days. That same month saw a boil water notice issued in Pirinoa in Wairarapa after flooding inundated its treatment plant, and in Central Otago’s Roxburgh after a dead possum got into the reservoir. Kaeo in the far north has been under a boil water notice for 10 years.

This latest Auckland boil water notice covers around 7,500 households, and it extends beyond not being able to fill up a glass from the tap to quench your thirst. Here’s what you need to know.

So what do I actually need to do?

Taumata Arowai, New Zealand’s water services authority, sets out how to make your water safe if a boil water notice is issued. Boiling, funnily enough, is the easiest and cheapest way to do that for most people, and it’s very effective. Boiling water in an electric jug once is all you need to do, or you can bring water or to a rolling boil on the stove for one minute. Let it cool, and then store it in a lidded container for up to 24 hours. (Alternatives include buying bottled water or, for those in affected Auckland suburbs, sourcing treated water from one of Watercare’s two public tankers.) 

And when do I have to do this?

In all the following scenarios, you should be using boiled (or otherwise treated) water:

Drinking. This goes without saying. (If you don’t like the taste of boiled water, Taumata Arowai recommends pouring cooled water back and forth from one clean glass into another to add air to the water, letting it stand for a few hours, adding a pinch of salt to each litre of boiled water, or chilling it in the fridge.)

Brushing your teeth. Use cooled boiled water to  rinse both your brush and mouth.

Washing your hands. Use soap and boiled water. And wash them properly!

Washing up. Doing your dishes by hand? Boil a few jugs and use detergent – but don’t burn yourself.

Mixing baby formula. This should be done using commercially bottled water, or water that has been boiled and cooled first. If your boiled water is 24 hours old, it’s advised to boil it again for safety.

Watering your vegetable garden. Yep, you’re advised to use boiled or otherwise treated water for this too.

Making ice. Use boiled water.

Making coffee. Use boiled water.

Using a soda machine. Use boiled water.

Washing fruit and vegetables. Any food prep should be done using boiled-and-cooled, treated or store-bought water – this includes washing lettuce, soaking rice and rinsing chopping boards.

Cooking. If you’re boiling something like potatoes or peas, it’s recommended to bring the water to a proper boil first (to make sure any bacteria is killed off before the cooking process) before adding any food.

Water filters. Yours might be fancy, but the water that goes through it still needs to be boiled – filters don’t destroy bugs like E coli.

Is there anything that doesn’t require filling the jug?

Yes, tap water is still fine for the following:

Showering or bathing. As long as you don’t swallow the water, and be careful to avoid getting any in your eyes or nose. However, some people should take extra care; Taumata Arowai recommends giving infants a sponge bath instead of filling the tub, and people living with chronic illnesses, compromised immune systems or who have recent surgical wounds “may want to use” treated water for washing.

Shaving. Not a problem.

Running the dishwasher. Domestic models are “generally safe”, according to Taumata Arowai, as long as the final rinse reaches a minimum of 65 degrees. 

Laundry. Also fine.

Filling your pet’s water bowl. This is considered safe, though call your vet if you’re worried.

Flushing the toilet. That’s fine.

Christopher Luxon’s decision to replace Chris Bishop as campaign chair with Simeon Brown augurs a different sort of approach. But whether it helps him reach the voters he’s really struggling with is another matter, writes Toby Manhire.

It’s a strange old cabinet reshuffle when the most striking bit of reshuffling doesn’t involve the cabinet at all. “Guys, I think you’re really overthinking this,” bristled Christopher Luxon when his decision to remove Chris Bishop as National campaign chair prompted a flurry of questions around whether this was a response to whispers late last year of a challenge to his leadership, but it does bear a good bit of thinking. 

The rationale, said Luxon with studied bewilderment, is straightforward. Workload. Bishop’s plate, stacked already with transport, housing, infrastructure and the RMA colossus, had been topped further with the office of attorney-general. He had to lose something, guys, and that turned out to be leader of the house and party campaign chair. 

Without a doubt, Bishop is ferociously busy. But the workload argument strains when you consider the new wearer of the campaign chair sash. Simeon Brown remains as minister of health, in charge of an issue New Zealanders rank second only to cost of living as their biggest concern, and he takes back energy from Simon Watts (farewell to the most aptly named energy minister since Phil Heatley), a portfolio in which there’s a bit happening just at the minute. 

Then there’s the timing. Less than six months till parliament dissolves and campaigning goes full-throttle is a curious moment to swap out the chair of that campaign. Asked why it hadn’t been done earlier, Luxon said: “We have a series of campaign – I’m very proud of our campaign, from a party point of view, proud of the party, proud of the way we’ve organised our campaign. You saw us do that in 2023, from 2020 to 23, and we’ve been doing it the same since then.” Try overthinking that. 

Luxon’s changing of the guard, which reportedly left a hot, cross Bishop on the eve of Easter, may be less about Bishop having too much to do and more about him being too integral. As campaign chair he was architect of election strategy; as leader of the house he was foreman of the site. Those two roles amounted to a channel through which just about all National political activity must travel – the Strait of Bishop, perhaps. As of today, he has neither.

The elevation of Simeon Brown is just as remarkable. The unwavering loyalty helps, but it’s more than that. Brown, who celebrates his 35th birthday tomorrow, is the undisputed wunderkind of the Luxon government. Elected in Pakuranga at just 26, he has been trusted by Luxon in portfolios including health, energy, SOEs, transport, local government and Auckland issues. Returned to energy at a time when the nation is becoming increasingly preoccupied by the progress of oil tankers across the Pacific Ocean, Brown installs kitchen-cabinet presence in a portfolio alongside an associate minister twice his age and with 35 times his flamboyance, Shane Jones. 

But the greatest assertion of authority from Luxon is in replacing Bishop as campaign chair. The chair is like the conductor of the orchestra, according to Steven Joyce, who waved the baton at the National Party symphony across five elections. Brown, like Bishop, has a very sharp political mind. In other ways, he could not be more different. Bishop sits at the most socially liberal point in the National spectrum, Brown at its most conservative. He voted against the decriminalisation of abortion, for example, and against the ban on conversion therapy. Brown goes for Schubert, Bishop for Shihad.

It could be that Luxon has watched the New Zealand First and Act parties gobble up chunks of National’s support since 2023 and wants Brown to run a campaign that gobbles them back. He’ll have a greater appetite for dabbling in the culture wars. And he lives in Auckland, ear to the ground in the critical battleground for the 2026 election. 

Luxon and Brown were instrumental, alongside David Seymour, in forcing Bishop to retreat on density rules for Auckland not once, but twice. You can only imagine the way Brown might flinch at Bishop’s public remarks that it’s been good for the country for house prices to fall. That position might be consistent with Luxon’s exhortation to avoid “repeating the sugar-rush economics of the past”. But for many in National, house prices going up, and talking them up wherever possible, is seen as a necessity for electoral success. 

Whether Bishop’s relegation within the National engine room makes him more or less inclined to ponder a leadership challenge is another matter. He still has a formidable workload, as Luxon was so keen to point out, to which is now added the punctilious responsibilities of attorney-general. I’m reminded – and I admit this may be overthinking it a bit – of Jenny Shipley, who told us in an interview for the Juggernaut podcast that she was burdened with a huge amount of ministerial responsibility by Jim Bolger, prompting many to wonder whether that was designed to leave her too busy to mount a challenge. We all know what happened there. 

It’s hard to imagine New Zealanders looking kindly on internal bloodletting when we could be facing an energy crisis. And yet National’s dismal polling under Luxon carries an extra punch for Bishop. On the current numbers, he faces a mightily tall order to retain the swing seat of Hutt South. Absent a big shift in fortune, and with list seats hen’s teeth, he could be out of parliament altogether. 

As long as Luxon remains unshuffled as chief executive minister, of course, the most important part of any campaign is him. “In the modern age, a time-poor public puts more and more emphasis on the leader of each team,” Steven Joyce wrote after another orchestrating another triumph for “Team Key” in 2014. “Modern political campaigns simply reflect that reality.”

With that in mind, for Luxon, Brown and anyone involved in National Party strategy ahead of November 7, a more pressing challenge than winning back voters that have strayed to their coalition partners is getting women back on side. According to the latest survey by Roy Morgan – the only pollster that routinely publishes demographic breakdowns – National support among women aged 18-49 is just 13.5%. By this measure, not even one in seven female voters under 50 would vote blue.

Nicola Willis didn’t figure in the reshuffle announcement last week, and has hardly featured in speculation around the next leader of the National Party – the thinking being that she has become welded in the public mind to the economic melancholy of the last two years. Cometh the crisis, however. If you’d woken from a coma in the last four weeks you might think the new prime minister, Nicola Willis, was doing a good job. 

With a couple of big polls a few days away, might that performance be reflected in a bump for Willis? Across the last year she has scored somewhere between 0.1% and 1% in the Verian poll for 1News. Even a modest boost in that result could send a powerful message. 

As part of our series exploring how New Zealanders live and our relationship with money, a young New Zealander who moved to Australia after graduating shares where their money goes.

Want to be part of The Cost of Being? Fill out the questionnaire here.

Gender: Male.

Age: 24.

Ethnicity: Pākehā.

Role: Graduate.

Salary/income/assets: $75,000 AUD.

My living location is: Urban.

Rent/mortgage per week: $530 split between two.

Student loan or other debt payments per week: That awesome $5000 mandatory repayment for every year spent outside NZ.

Typical weekly food costs

Groceries: $60 for just me.

Eating out: $30.

Takeaways: $0.

Workday lunches: Included in the eating out… I usually bring in a lunch!

Cafe coffees/snacks: $10 a week while at work.

Savings: I manage to save a decent amount?? But having moved here, it drained my savings soooo much, so now back to basics. Have a heap of different savings accounts: travel, general savings, ring / wedding saving, and one for student loan repayments.

I worry about money: Sometimes.

Three words to describe my financial situation: Surprisingly kinda lucky?

My biggest edible indulgence would be: I love trying out new ramen places, so always on the hunt for that!! I’ll also always get a sweet treat when at the local markets…

In a typical week my alcohol expenditure would be: $20 max if going out with friends.

In a typical week my transport expenditure would be: $20 if using bus around the city, but usually I walk to most places. And owning a car is too expensive in Aus for my poor old graduate wage!

I estimate in the past year the ballpark amount I spent on my personal clothing (including sleepwear and underwear) was: Around $1000 – I had to buy a bunch of new work clothes, and some new shoes as well.

My most expensive clothing in the past year was: A new pair of Dr Martens boots, around $240? I love them so much despite the pain they have caused my feet!

My last pair of shoes cost: See above.

My grooming/beauty expenditure in a year is about: Around $100 every few months for a haircut and a beard trim.

My exercise expenditure in a year is about: My workplace has an on-site gym, but I also pay around $1000 a year for a local climbing gym!

My last Friday night cost: $40, shouted some beers for my coworkers!

Most regrettable purchase in the last 12 months was: Probably a pair of Dickies I bought that were way, way too big for me. They sat in my drawers for ages and I had to give them away when I moved to Australia.

Most indulgent purchase (that I don’t regret) in the last 12 months was: Bought some cool artwork from a favourite artist of mine! One of them has an orangutan and the other has a gorilla with a banana.

One area where I’m a bit of a tightwad is: N/a

Five words to describe my financial personality would be: Carefully calculated but love spending.

I grew up in a house where money was: Tight growing up, but as we got older and my siblings moved out, it freed up more money for my parents to renovate the house.

The last time my Eftpos card was declined was: About last December? I often forget to put money in the account lol

In five years, in financial terms, I see myself: On my way to getting a deposit down on either a house or apartment with who I hope will be my wife!!

I would love to have more money for: Travelling… now being in Australia, I’m desperate to get all over Asia, but don’t have nearly enough money. Oh and to get more tattoos!

Describe your financial low: After fourth year of uni, I had literally $0 in my accounts. I had to rely on asking my parents to cash in FlyBuys points to get New World vouchers.

I give money away to: My parents whenever I can, they’ve done so much for me so I love being able to help out any way I can.

It’s election year. That means endless arguments with your family members about politics. Here journalist Mark Crysell, who recently ran for Auckland Council’s Waitematā local board, takes on his mother-in-law, publisher and former Act MP Deborah Coddington, about the state of New Zealand and what should be done.

Mark Crysell: The increase in the price of petrol makes me feel like the economy has leaned back and kneed us in the nuts – again. How many more times does this country have to struggle back off the canvas before we reach the promised land?

For the lowest income earners, it’s a crisis – a proper one. It’s the difference between getting to work and not, between the kids eating well and not.

But here’s what’s shifted: it’s not just them anymore. The middle class has had a gutsful. They’re working their arses off and going backwards. Statistics NZ tells us the wealthiest 10% hold 48.5% of all the wealth in this country. The bottom 50% share 6.7% between them. That’s not a cost of living crisis – that’s a rigged game.

Deborah Coddington: The kick from petrol prices hurts more, perhaps, because it’s not this country’s fault. Trump took a spoon to a knife fight and we’re collateral damage. 

I disagree with you that this crisis is worse for the lowest income earners, Mark, because they are not driving to work: they are on welfare either as job seekers or superannuitants. The hardest hit are those who we take for granted in normal times – posties, truckies, builders, plumbers, sparkies, first responders, linesmen when your power goes out – the real working class. They are the “squeezed middle”. Political candidates should campaign to these guys this election.

I’ll tell you what’s rigged: housing. It’s the single biggest reason why it’s so tough, financially, in this country. New Zealand has the glorious honour of being one of the hardest places in the developed world to buy a house. Yet, we have these nimbys in Auckland’s inner-city, high-wealth suburbs, the ones who cluster around that nebulous group who call themselves the Character Coalition. 

They pay lip service to protecting heritage houses but in reality have a pull-up-the-ladder attitude because they are fine and dandy in their McMansions. These people believe when they bought their houses they also purchased the lifelong right to glorious views, unimpeded by nasty new apartment blocks. They did not. If they find it distasteful to see neighbouring sections divided and built upon, they should buy them, not lobby their local MPs to force Chris Bishop to pull his head in. 

So, congratulations to Luxon and Seymour (both lead parties which supposedly believe in property rights), who have fallen for it. You just made it even harder for strugglers to get a home of their own near schools, work, and transport hubs.

Still, if we leave housing out of the equation and look at income, in real terms the gap between middle and low-wage earners has actually shrunk, mainly because of big increases in the minimum wage and welfare increases.

MC: With the greatest respect, Deborah, I think we’re coming perilously close to agreeing with each other. You’re right that the working class are copping it hardest. They can’t work from home, they can’t UberEats their way around a budget, and they sure as hell can’t ride an e-bike to a job site in Pokeno.

But I’m not letting you off the hook on the wealth gap. Shrinking the gap at the bottom while the top keeps pulling away isn’t progress – that’s running on a treadmill to nowhere. 

Plus, we can’t leave housing out of the equation – we’ve built an economy where the most reliable path to wealth is owning the thing everyone else desperately needs. That’s not a market; that’s a toll road with a very exclusive guest list, and the same people have been collecting the tolls for 30 years.

Meanwhile, every three years, the election campaigns resemble something between a beauty pageant and an open mic night, while inequality, homelessness, superannuation and climate change get kicked down the road. Except as my wife (your daughter) put it: you can’t kick a can down a road that’s been washed away by a landslip.

DC: I’m not agreeing with you, Mark (except at Christmas dinner), because you’re a pinko and I’m a right-wing harridan, but, yes, it’s true that living costs have risen faster than incomes.

You talk about housing as a path to wealth, and yes, those who have managed to get on the property ladder keep growing their wealth. But, I’d just like to point out another reason, for owning a house, as opposed to renting: nesting. I remember discussing it once with Bob Jones. In general, people thrive better in their own home. They are more likely to have a garden, grow veges, keep the place tidy, and love it, because they have skin in the game. There are difficulties like rates, maintenance, insurance, but with a budget they can be managed. 

You mention inequality and the homeless. There’s always going to be inequality. I’m very comfortable right now, but you know it hasn’t always been so for me and my kids. I might lose it all again. 

What I struggle to understand is some of the responses to issues faced by the homeless. What was the point of 10 church groups holding an all-night prayer vigil at St Paul’s Cathedral recently to protest the “move on” orders? Churches could start paying rates to local bodies, and sell some valuable assets they currently rent out – that would raise enough dosh to house the homeless who sleep on the streets, instead of showboating with this handwringing and virtue signalling. 

MC: Deborah, you’ve just invoked Bob Jones on the joys of home ownership and sent the churches a rates bill, I’m going to need a moment. As for calling me a pinko? I was once on a ZB panel and a listener texted in to call me Commie Crysell, so I can take it. 

You’re not wrong about nesting. Former prime minister Norman Kirk put it better than anyone, when he said: all people really want is somewhere to live, someone to love, and something to hope for. It’s as simple as that. But we’ve let that truth become the justification for a system that makes ownership impossible for a generation of people who are doing everything right and still can’t get there. And the uncomfortable reality is that not everyone starts from the same starting line – big Norm knew that too.

The response to move-on orders? I take your point about churches, but “sell your assets and pay rates” is a fairly brisk solution to what is, at its core, a housing supply and mental health crisis dressed up as a moral failing. The prayer vigil might have been theatre, but at least they showed up.

And we all have to start showing up and coming up with solutions. We have to start asking, how do we make the waka go faster?

DC: My biggest concern right now is that we’re too far gone. New Zealand is seriously up the creek with nary a hoe in sight. Instead of being abstemious, our leaders have borrowed billions of dollars since John Key was PM, right through Jacinda Ardern’s watch, and now Nicola Willis is still at it. And what’s the response to the resulting crisis (before the oil crisis compounded it)? Word salad. 

There’s been no realistic but necessarily painful cuts, just reassurance. Nobody is taking personal responsibility. National blames Labour, Labour shrugs, the Greens are focused on Gaza, Act wastes time redefining the Treaty principles, and Te Pāti Māori self destructs. At least Winston will take a sword to the energy gentailers (horrible word, that) and reduce power bills.

You ask how we make the waka go faster. I think there are individual MPs who could work together across the floor, like National’s housing minister Chris Bishop and Labour’s housing spokesperson Kieran McAnulty. 

MC: Underneath all the pinko and harridan business, that’s where I think we actually agree: National and Labour working together. It’s exactly the kind of boring, practical, commonsense, good cross-party cooperation that I’m gagging for. Nobody tweets about it, nobody gets a damehood – it just works.

Knock off the political theatre, just bloody talk to each other and share a beer afterwards. It’s dangerous when people lose faith in democracy – that’s why we have Trump, why we have Brexit and why Nigel Farage and Pauline Hansen are surging.

By the way, I reserve the right to revisit the capital gains tax. You didn’t think I’d let that go, did you? 

DC:  Look, our Westminster system barely allows us all to paddle in the same waka – by its very nature it’s adversarial. Still, in my experience, you can work with MPs from all parties behind the scenes – in taxis, cafes, after hours – and persuade them to compromise/swallow some dead rats for the good of the nation. You can put your ego aside for progress.

I’m happy to take you on about a capital gains tax, Mark, but do you realise we already have one?

While some warn the true cost of Operation Epic Fury is only beginning to land, one economic commentator is finding reasons to be cheerful, writes Catherine McGregor in today’s excerpt from The Bulletin.

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Fuel stocks stay steady

The government’s latest fuel stocks update, released on Monday, showed 61.9 days of petrol, 51.5 days of diesel and 50.1 days of jet fuel in-country or on the water, with importers reporting no material disruptions. Finance minister Nicola Willis confirmed the country would remain in phase one of its crisis response, and, as RNZ reports, said a planned 12-cent-per-litre fuel tax rise next January was now “very unlikely”.

Also on Monday, foreign minister Winston Peters flew to Washington DC to meet US secretary of state Marco Rubio for discussions on the cooperation plans for the Pacific and “the conflict in the Middle East and its impacts on our region”.

A spiralling conflict seemed more likely than ever after another unhinged social media post by the US president over the long weekend. On Truth Social, he demanded that Iran “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH!” He added: “Praise be to Allah.” Iran this morning rejected a peace plan from Pakistan, a key negotiator, which would have involved an initial 45-day ceasefire and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.

Three reasons not to despair

What does all this mean for the economy? Amid the alarm, the NZ Herald’s Liam Dann (paywalled) is “sticking with the broadly optimistic tone” he has maintained since the conflict began. Markets tend to get “bored” with geopolitical crises, Dann argues, pointing to the market panic and subsequent recovery following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Monetary policy also provides a buffer, Dann says. With interest rates still set at a stimulatory level, the Reserve Bank “has room to move – in both directions”. Dann’s other reason to be (relatively) cheerful: “What we face here is disruption and inconvenience, not an existential threat.”

Even so, the timing has been brutal. Writing in the Sunday Star-Times (paywalled), Vernon Small notes that, until the war, the government’s books were improving. “Of course, Operation Epic Fury has changed all that.” On Wednesday, the Reserve Bank will release its latest OCR decision. While the interest rate will almost certainly stay at 2.25%, the accompanying monetary policy review is likely to “make grim reading”, Small says. “Uncertainty may be the best we can hope for.”

A fragile foundation

In a meaty piece of analysis for The Weekend Post, Luke Malpass challenges Christopher Luxon’s claim that New Zealand was “incredibly well positioned to head into the crisis”. The reality, he argues, is a fiscal position weakened by accumulated shocks and compounded by choices made under two successive governments.

Nicola Willis’s consistent warning over the past two years that New Zealand needs to rebuild fiscal buffers has been “proven right” by the Iran crisis, Malpass writes. Yet, “on nearly every financial measure – debt, deficit, revenue growth and spending – the situation has worsened under this Government, reflecting both inherited conditions and policy decisions since 2023.”

“[This] shock is merely the latest event that begs the question whether the pace of fiscal repair is appropriate both for the level of debt New Zealand has or the times in which we live,” Malpass writes. “It is an opportunity for a fundamental rethink once the crunch of the crisis abates.”

Everyone’s in opposition

Writing in The Spinoff, Joel MacManus argues, tongue in cheek, that the governing coalition has concluded that incumbency is no longer the political boon it once was; now it is “a hot potato no one wants to handle”. Of 64 countries that held national elections in 2024, incumbents lost vote share in 80% of them. The reason: “voters just hated whoever was in charge”.

As a result, even the parties of the coalition are eager to proclaim their oppositional bona fides. NZ First and Act are old hands at this, but now National is getting in on the act, MacManus writes. Just look at the evidence: Luxon calling himself “CEO”, not prime minister; the government avoiding the Beehive Theatrette for its Covid-era optics – and perhaps “to avoid looking too much like a government”. As for Luxon’s absence from the fuel-crisis podium: he may be wary of gaffes, or “it could be because he doesn’t want to give the wrong impression that he is in charge and has the power to do anything.”

Over the past week, The Spinoff writers have been stealthily logging thanks yous uttered on buses across the motu. Today, we present our findings.

There’s a video doing the rounds on social media at the moment capturing different international cricket teams alighting buses during a recent competition. For the first half of the video, the bus drivers are largely ignored by players, who swing their gear busily and avoid eye contact. It’s a soul-crushing watch until the Black Caps enter stage right, with each player stopping to acknowledge the driver with a cheery nod and a “thank you,sir” before they leave. 

Saying thank you to the bus driver is the New Zealand way, and something a lot of people don’t realise is unique until they go overseas. Novelist Rebecca K Reilly, an astute observer of local quirks, says that “thank you, driver” sits alongside our other secret etiquette rules including “waving at cars that stop at crossings, not sitting down anywhere where there might not be enough seats for everyone, and leaving the last item on every shared plate of food”. 

“One of my favourite things about New Zealand is that people generally act with an awareness that they’re in a community,” she tells The Spinoff. “They will say thank you and apologise to people, help people who’ve dropped something, hold doors and stop to ask people if they’re OK.” 

That said, there are growing concerns that saying thank you to the bus driver might be going the way of Tangy Fruits, Fair Go, and other cultural institutions now lost to the ravages of time. Over the last few years, multiple Reddit posts have queried the decline, and Reilly herself had an “internal crisis” after nobody said it at the university stops on her Auckland bus route last year. “I thought it was rude, then I was worried that I was just out-of-touch,” she says. 

With the fuel crisis causing more people to take public transport across the country, The Spinoff thought this was the perfect time to get out there and see how our main centres are tracking when it comes to thanking the driver. Sending our writers out incognito in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin (apologies to Hamilton and Tauranga, times are tight), we stealthily logged your thank yous, your no thank yous, and any other surprises along the way. 

Auckland

I don’t want to become the guy who bangs on about kids these days but kids these days don’t say thank you when they get off the damn bus. My 931 route goes past Northcote College on its way to the city and its pupils trudged into the realm of learning with nary a grunt of acknowledgement for the driver who’d shepherded them down the hellscape of Onewa Rd.

To be fair, you’d have to go back a century to find teenagers that weren’t prone to bouts of noncommunicative gloom on their way to school, and that would only be because they were up a chimney or at war instead. Still, the fact remains that Auckland’s stats were in the Strait of Hormuz by the time we even arrived at Fanshawe St. They didn’t improve much when the office workers of Wynyard Quarter disembarked. Though I’d managed to catch the least full bus in the city, the waterfront office park remains a popular stop. Most of the crowd alighting the vehicle seemed more concerned with not bumping into each other than saying thank you to their driver.

Thank God then for Auckland University students. Almost every soul that survived the great disgorgement at Wynyard was grateful. When the vehicle finally arrived at its final stop opposite the uni quad, seven out of seven passengers delivered a loud thank you on their way off.

Caveats apply. The first is the low number of passengers, the result of a bus directly in front snaking most of our potential embarkments. The second is the commendably generous nature of our driver, who flipped the script by saying thank you to everyone leaving the bus. There’s a chance his kindness filled the gratitude void and left others feeling like they didn’t need to add their own to the mix. / Hayden Donnell

Wellington

There are many joys in boarding the capital’s busiest bus route, the number 2, which connects commuters on the east (Miramar/Seatoun) through the city centre to the west (Karori). It’s never not full before 10am or between 5pm and 6pm, and if you’ve caught this bus during peak time I would safely assume you’ve had the experience of being squashed up between some yo-pro’s fully-stuffed backpack and an elderly gentleman who forgot to shower.

I catch this route everyday as it goes through Mount Victoria and on this day, just before 9am, it was already overflowing with more than 50 passengers aboard. We were mostly office workers – this route doesn’t really hit any school zones so the age demographic is typically 20s and above. The TYD (thank you, driver) rate was sparse heading through Courtenay Place but at the first stop on Manners St, all six passengers departing the bus gave the driver their gratitude. It seems to make a difference if the first person getting off gives a hearty “THANK YOU DRIVER” and thus creates some pressure for passengers following who don’t want to look impolite, even if their version of TYD is just a whisper.

The frequency of TYDs picked up around Lambton Quay, with the majority of departing commuters thanking the driver for doing the hard yards. It’s also around this part of the journey that the bus typically thins out a lot, and I can’t help but wonder if being in a crowded bus makes you more grumpy and therefore less grateful for the journey, while a less crowded bus can help you appreciate the miracle that is getting from A to B on a public transit system and encourage you to express that gratitude openly and thankfully.

By virtue of being in a city inhabited by the likes of what Winston Peters may describe as soft-handed soy boys wearing comfortable shoes, you’d expect Wellingtonians to be “thank you, driver” purists. But all in all, only around 58% of passengers on this commute mustered up a “thank you, driver”. There was also one “thanks boss”, which really blew me away in all of its casual gratitude and is something I shall be adopting for myself. I will be taking my findings straight to my father, a bus driver who assures me the culture of TYD is still mostly alive and well. / Lyric Waiwiri-Smith

Christchurch 

I had a lot of faith that the Garden City would be as littered with thank yous as it already is autumn leaves when I boarded the number 1 city-bound at 8.30am. When they aren’t yelling at you from boy racer cars or BMX bikes, I’ve found Cantabrians to be much more polite and friendly in public than Aucklanders. Given I overheard a 100% thank you rate from Cashmere High students getting off The Orbiter while I was waiting at the bus stop, expectations were sky high as we soon thundered through Cashmere and crawled down Colombo Street.

While there was only one outlier stop, where a large group of 12 surly teen boys, headphones on and eyes to the ground, refused to utter a single thank you, Ōtautahi generally did pretty well. It wasn’t just that 66% of travellers proudly bellowed their gratitude to the driver while getting off the bus, but many also said thank you while getting on the bus, often with a cheery “good morning!” I also watched people give up their seats for older people and women and children, and our heroic driver even chased after a passenger outside South City who had left his hat on his seat. “Thank you,” the man said. “No problem, it was easy,” the driver replied. 

And what of those 34% who couldn’t be arsed? I certainly noticed people were less likely to say thank you if they were getting off at the front, perhaps the proximity making things awkward, and often would refrain if they were nestled in a large group alighting in high traffic spots like the bus depot. The coolest sign-off came from a tiny kid in a shark backpack who bellowed “BYE!!”, which I scientifically weighted as akin to the value of five thank yous via cuteness and enthusiasm. I made it all the way to Merivale and got off outside the denture clinic, smiling from ear to ear as I hit a powerful 100% thank you rate with my fellow three departees. / Alex Casey

Dunedin

I had high hopes for the good people of Ōtepoti Dunedin when I climbed aboard the number eight bus. My experience of living here is that we like public transport and are also nice people, which means getting off a bus is a polite person’s time to shine. Case in point: it was raining so the driver let me onto the bus early, and folded up his morning copy of the Otago Daily Times to start his engine at the exact departure time of 7.49am. I was thanking him already, and I had only just sat down.

The bus zoomed along from St Clair, through South Dunedin and towards Normanby in the north of the city, and quickly filled with school students and employees heading to the city centre. It took 10 minutes for the first passenger to disembark, and he set the bar with a hearty “thank you!” all the way from the back door. 70% of passengers offered their thanks on this journey – some were loud and emphatic, others muttered so quietly that they could barely be heard by the passenger themselves, let alone the driver. Full credit to the woman in the black jacket who gave the driver a jaunty wave, and to the giddy group of school students who effed and jeffed their way along George Street but who all said thank you to the driver when they got off.

Disappointingly, 30% of passengers did not move their lips as they left the bus. This mostly happened at the city centre bus hub, where only a couple of people offered any thanks, while the others made a silent exodus into the grey mist of the working day. Also at one point the bus driver swapped with a different bus driver, but neither driver appeared to thank the other driver, and when I caught another bus home, the driver thanked ME when I disembarked. What does it all mean? Not entirely sure, but thank you anyway, Dunedin. / Tara Ward

Comparative analysis

The good news for all of Aotearoa is that the majority of us are still choosing to say thank you to the driver when we get off the bus, even if the ungrateful demographic described by Hayden Donnell as “kids these days” threw the stats dramatically in both Auckland and Christchurch. It also appears that TYD rates plummet at busy stops such as city centres and bus depots, where passengers are more likely to alight in a silent peloton helmed by one lead thanker.

Even if we are still a country of more thank yous than no thank yous, the regional differences are clear. Not doing any favours to its snobbish reputation, Auckland was the least thankful city surveyed. Wellington was picked by our external expert Reilly to have the strongest showing of thank yous but failed to meet expectations (although it is worth noting that, also true to its brand, Wellington was the only place to drop a bit of creative panache in “thanks boss”.)

Which brings us to the South Island, and the clearest trend we can extrapolate from this highly scientific nationwide survey (again, sorry to Hamilton and Tauranga). The data certainly suggests that the further south one travels, the more “thank yous” one can expect to hear on public transport. Christchurch gave it a good old Kiwi try, but ultimately it was Dunedin who took the TYD crown with its southern charm and endless well of gratitude. Thank you, one and all. 

Labour’s pick to reclaim the high-profile seat from Te Pāti Māori is making a case for power from within.

The last time Kerrin Leoni sat down with The Spinoff, she was in the midst of her campaign to become the mayor of Auckland. Today, she hasn’t given up on that goal, confidently announcing: “I still will be the mayor one day.” 

We’re at a cafe in Manukau, close to where Leoni now works for a Māori youth organisation, delivering development programmes and services to rangatahi. It’s a big change from the council chambers where she spent the last three years, serving as the Whau Ward representative and first wahine Māori city councillor.

Leoni didn’t contest the Whau seat at last year’s local election, going all in on her mayoral bid. She received almost 80,000 votes, but lost decisively to incumbent Wayne Brown, who won by a margin of more than 100,000. But she’s taking lessons from that campaign into her next – attempting to win back the Tāmaki Makaurau electorate for Labour at this year’s general election.

Leoni was recently chosen as the party’s candidate for the electorate, defeating relative political newcomer and local business owner Nathaniel Howe. It’s not her first foray into national politics: in 2020 she was Labour’s candidate in the Waikato electorate, losing to National’s incumbent Tim van de Molen, and her list ranking wasn’t high enough to win her a place in parliament, despite a landslide victory for Labour that year. She had returned to New Zealand in 2015 after a decade in London, and was elected to the Waitematā local board of Auckland Council in 2019, becoming a councillor in 2022.

The Tāmaki Makaurau Labour electorate committee that Leoni once co-chaired alongside Grant Williams has now put its faith in the 46-year-old wahine, who was born and raised in Auckland, to take on incumbent Oriini Kaipara. Last September, Kaipara soundly defeated Labour Party MP Peeni Henare in the Tāmaki Makaurau byelection, held following the death of Te Pāti Māori MP Takutai Moana Natasha Kemp.

While Kaipara won the byelection definitively, Leoni says she’s confident it will be a different story when the general election rolls around in November. Some saw Kaipara’s victory as the result of tactical voting by the electorate to get two representatives in the House, given Henare was already an MP via the Labour list, and that’s partly where Leoni’s confidence stems from. She says she’s hoping to get a top 40 spot on the party list this year, but it’s unlikely she will be placed high enough to guarantee her a seat, making Tāmaki Makaurau a must-win.

Henare had held the seat for Labour for three terms before losing to Kemp in 2023 by a margin of just 42 votes. He has now left politics, and Labour’s new candidate taking on an almost-new Te Pāti Māori candidate will make for an interesting race in one of the largest and highest-profile Māori population centres in the country.

This time around, Leoni is hopeful voters in the electorate will be strategic and vote for her instead of Te Pāti Māori’s candidate, because she thinks there’s a good chance Kaipara could make it into parliament on the list (though her place on that list is not yet known). In a poll released by Roy Morgan last week, support for Te Pāti Māori was at 3%. If the party achieved that result in the election and managed to win at least one electorate, Te Pāti Māori could end up with four seats in parliament.

The other major change in dynamics since the byelection last year is the disarray Te Pāti Māori has found itself in, and Leoni is confident many of its supporters will turn to Labour. “Just keep doing what you’re doing, JT [John Tamihere, Te Pāti Māori president],” she laughs. “Keep going.”

Asked what she thinks about the “unapologetically Māori” catchphrase used by Te Pāti Māori throughout the Tāmaki Makaurau byelection, Leoni says she’s not concerned about being labelled a “Pākehā Māori” by Tamihere. When it comes to being a part of the well-established system of the Labour Party, Leoni says she won’t be toeing the party line when it doesn’t align with her values.

“I stood as an independent when I ran for mayor. I have shown that I can stand alone when required.” 

Another source of confidence is the results of her mayoralty bid. Despite the significant loss, Leoni says many of her votes came from areas with a high density of Māori voters, such as Manurewa. She’s confident this will translate to electorate votes come November. “Te Tai Tokerau is won in West Auckland and Tāmaki Makaurau is won in South Auckland,” she says.

When it comes to policy, Leoni’s focused on the party’s priorities – jobs, housing and healthcare. Instead of benefit increases, she wants to see more Māori in employment. “If that means we have to provide grants so employers can give people a chance to work somewhere like this cafe – then I’m all for it,” she says. Trades training schemes are also a focus, and she would like to see an increase in support for night classes and those looking to change careers.

Leoni says she is acutely aware of the growing influence of gangs and drug culture on rangatahi Māori in Auckland, and is an advocate for getting ex-gang members and career criminals to speak to the youth about the realities of gang life, encouraging them to seek a different path.

When it comes to profile, former broadcaster Kaipara has a distinct advantage over Leoni, despite the mayoralty bid. But Leoni highlights her political experience as a clear point of difference between the two. She also argues she could achieve more meaningful change from within the Labour Party, as opposed to a minor party such as Te Pāti Māori.

“I can’t actually think of one meaningful thing that Te Pāti Māori has done, either as a coalition partner or in opposition,” Leoni says.

For someone championing their political acumen and support for empowering wāhine Māori, it’s a bold claim – and one that overlooks the establishment of Whānau Ora in 2010 by the late Tariana Turia, then Te Pāti Māori co-leader.

“We set up the Māori Health Authority, although it’s now been disestablished,” Leoni says. “Te Pāti Māori might be talking about establishing a separate Māori parliament and other similar things, but we’ve actually created quite radical change from within.

“They need to stop selling false dreams and making empty promises to our people.”

It’s the potential to create meaningful change from within that Leoni claims truly sets her apart from Kaipara, and she alludes to a belief she may one day be a minister within a Labour government. 

“No offence to Oriini, but I doubt she would ever actually become a minister. If Tāmaki Makaurau wants somebody who can truly make change from within – I’m the person to do it.”

The bid to become the Tāmaki Makaurau MP is Leoni’s fifth campaign in the space of seven years. She says she’s learned from her previous campaigns and a large cohort of her team from the mayoralty bid are supporting her in Tāmaki Makaurau. Similarly to that campaign, Leoni is likely the underdog up against the incumbent Kaipara. However, she now has the backing of the Labour Party, which is desperate to win back the Māori seats.

With Te Pāti Māori in a state of turmoil, Leoni sees herself as more than a placeholder candidate in the Tāmaki Makaurau race, appearing to truly believe she has what it takes to reclaim the seat for the Labour Party.

In many ways, the contest for Tāmaki Makaurau is bigger than either Kerrin Leoni or Oriini Kaipara. It is a referendum on two competing ideas of Māori political power – whether it’s best exercised from within the machinery of a major party, or asserted independently and unapologetically from the outside.

Leoni is hoping voters will return to Labour’s promise of influence, access and delivery. That change comes not from rhetoric, but from proximity to power. Kaipara and Te Pāti Māori offer something else entirely – politics less concerned with compromise, and more willing to redraw the terms of engagement altogether. For voters in Tāmaki Makaurau – one of the country’s most significant Māori population centres – the choice is not just about who represents them, but how they want to be represented.

After a byelection shaped by strategy and circumstance, November’s result will be something closer to a true test. Not just of Leoni’s rise, or Kaipara’s hold on the seat – but of where Māori political momentum now sits, and where it’s heading next.

We round up everything coming to streaming services this week, including Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, Apple TV, ThreeNow, Neon and TVNZ+.

Big Mistakes (Netflix, April 9)

Created by Dan Levy (Schitt’s Creek) and Rachel Sennott (Bottoms, I Love LA), Big Mistakes stars Levy as Nicky, a queer pastor and unlikely jewel thief. After a misguided theft for his dying grandmother goes horribly wrong, he and his sister Morgan (Taylor Ortega) are blackmailed into working for organised crime. Described as a “comedic exploration of small-f family dynamics, generational trauma and why we stand by the people who make us craziest,” this crime comedy is one to watch if you’re a fan of Breaking Bad and Ozark.

The Boys (Prime Video, April 8)

Based on the comic book by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, the dark superhero satire The Boys is coming to an end with its fifth and final season. Details are scarce about what’s in store for the Vought-employed Supes (or superhumans), but what we do know is that the United States remains controlled by the homicidal Homelander and that a synthetic pathogen that can kill Supes has been discovered. Now, it’s up to Karl Urban’s Billy Butcher to dispense with the pathogen and to save the country. A “welcome respite from Marvel overkill,” season five of The Boys is bound to be bloody and brilliant.

The Testaments (Disney+, April 8)

Based on the novel of the same name by Margaret Atwood, The Testaments is set four years after the ending of The Handmaid’s Tale, shifting focus from the handmaids to their successors. Set at Aunt Lydia’s elite preparatory school for future wives, this coming-of-age tale is led by One Battle After Another’s Chase Infiniti who plays Agnes MacKenzie, a pious teenager who must grapple with the bleak future that awaits her. Just like its predecessor, The Testaments will be chillingly relevant.

Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair (Disney+, April 10)

Set 20 years after the end of the original series, Frankie Muniz, Jane Kaczmarek, Bryan Cranston, Christopher Masterson and Justin Berfield return to the Nolastname home for Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair. Malcolm, having distanced himself from his family’s chaos, now lives a happy life with his daughter and girlfriend, but he’s brought back into their tumultuous whirlwind when Hal and Lois demand his presence for their 40th wedding anniversary party. Sure to be a nostalgia hit filled with side-splitting antics.

Outcome (Apple TV, April 10)

Directed and co-written by Superbad star Jonah Hill, Outcome follows Keanu Reeves as beloved Hollywood actor Reef Hawk. After taking a break from acting and getting sober for five years, he must “dive into the depths of his hidden demons” and make amends with those he has wronged when a mysterious video threatens to shatter his entire image. Also featuring Cameron Diaz, Matt Bomer, Drew Barrymore, and Martin Scorsese, the offbeat Outcome is unmissable.

2000 Meters to Andriivka (AroVision, April 8)

The follow-up to the Oscar-winning 20 Days in Mariupol, Mstyslav Chernov returns to helm the harrowing 2000 Meters to Andriivka. This gut-wrenching documentary follows Chernov and a Ukrainian platoon as they attempt to liberate Andriivka, a strategically important village held by Russian forces. Largely capturing the bloodbath through the point of view ofUkrainian soldiers and their helmet cameras, this immersive, boots-on-the-ground documentary “offers a groundbreaking view of the horror and pity of war.” An agonisingly stark reminder of the cost and absurdity of this brutal conflict, 2000 Meters to Andriivka is essential viewing.

The rest

Netflix

Sheng Wang: Purple (April 7)

Untold: Chess Mates (April 7)

Trust Me: The False Prophet (April 8)

Big Mistakes (April 9)

Bandi (April 9)

18th Rose (April 9)

Turn of the Tide S3 (April 10)

Thrash (April 10)

Immortals (April 10)

The Truman Show (April 10)

At Home With the Furys S2 (April 12)

TVNZ+

National Security (April 6)

Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini (April 6)

Bricks on Track (April 6)

Elysium (April 7)

Worlds Apart (April 8)

Voltaire in Love (April 8)

The Great British Sewing Bee S11 (April 9)

The Great British Bake Off S16 (April 9)

The Miniature Wife (April 10)

Chateau DIY S8 (April 10)

Grand Designs NZ S9 (April 12)

Buzz’s Epic Little Missions S2 (April 12)

Mr Hugo’s Little Library (April 12)

Cats & Dogs (April 12)

The Bourne Legacy (April 12)

Bad Behaviour (April 12)

ThreeNow

Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie (April 7)

MĀORI+

In the Zone (April 6)

Dreambuilders (April 10)

Pork pie (April 10)

Go! (April 11)

The Great Gatsby (April 11)

Neon

Life After Life (April 6)

Fight or Flight (April 6)

Reef School (April 7)

Shimmer & Shine (April 7)

Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles S2 (April 7)

Katie’s Kurī S1 (April 7)

Tākaro Tribe S1-S2 (April 7)

Sands of Iwo Jima (April 7)

Superman (April 8)

Becker S1-S6 (April 9)

The Guns of Navarone (April 9)

Prime Video

Nippon Sangoku: The Three Nations of the Crimson Sun (April 6)

13 Going on 30 (April 7)

The Boys S5 (April 8)

Fist of the North Star (April 11)

Disney+

The Testaments (April 8)

Hey A.J.! (April 8)

Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair (April 10)

RoboGobo S2 (April 10)

Perfect Crown (April 11)

Apple TV

Outcome (April 10)

DocPlay

André is an Idiot (April 9)

Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore (April 9)

Hayu

The Real Housewives of Atlanta S17 (April 6)

AroVision

Mistress Dispeller (April 8)

Orwell: 2+2=5 (April 8)

Vermiglio (April 8)

2000 Meters to Andriivka (April 8)

The Bride! (April 8)

Ick (April 8)

In a rare show of unity, every party in parliament agrees they aren’t the ones in charge.

It’s a hard time to be in government. The post-Covid world has been defined by high inflation, sluggish economic recovery, geopolitical turmoil, a global fuel shortage, and lots of unhappy voters.

In 2024, 64 countries, representing nearly half the world’s population, held national elections. In 80% of them, the incumbent lost vote share compared to the previous election. There was no clear trend to the left or the right, voters just hated whoever was in charge. 

Incumbency, once one of the greatest advantages in politics, is now a curse. A hot potato no one wants to handle. New Zealand’s last election was defined by voters blaming the incumbent government for high cost of living caused by global trends, and its next election will likely be defined by voters blaming a different incumbent government for high cost of living caused by global trends. 

This is a major risk for New Zealand’s political parties, many of whom are incumbents or who are at risk of becoming incumbents soon. So, in a cunning tactical move, every one of them has pivoted to being in opposition. 

National

Christopher Luxon was extraordinarily successful in opposition. He went from MP to PM faster than anyone in New Zealand history. But his preferred prime minister ratings have declined ever since he became prime minister and National’s party polling has followed suit. 

This may explain why Luxon is trying to obfuscate his job title. “My job is the CEO,” he told Tova O’Brien in an interview last week. “Your job is prime minister,” she annoyingly reminded him. 

Luxon has avoided the spotlight during some of the government’s daily fuel crisis briefings. This could be because he isn’t as across the details as his deputy Nicola Willis and is afraid of making another gaffe. Or it could be because he doesn’t want to give the wrong impression that he is in charge and has the power to do anything. 

The government has been avoiding using the Beehive Theatrette for these briefings despite it being the default location for official government announcements. According to Thomas Coughlan at the NZ Herald, this is to avoid looking too much like the Covid-19 response. It also helps the government to avoid looking too much like a government. 

It’s not just optics. The National Party has taken a number of strong policy stances seeking to differentiate itself from the National-led government. 

After the National Party announced its support for a bill that would allow three-storey townhouses by default on most properties, the National Party came out strongly against it and promised to repeal the law. The National Party proposed an alternative, giving councils more flexibility as long as they planned for the same number of houses. But then the National Party decided that would mean too many houses in the rich parts of Auckland and forced the National-led government to drop its housing target from 2 million to 1.6 million. Then they did it again, to 1.4m. 

National has been a powerful opposition party on several other issues too. After the Labour government banned live animal exports in 2022, citing animal welfare concerns, National vowed to overturn the ban. MP Nicola Grigg said it caused “economic pain for farmers and consumers”. The National Party included the policy in its election manifesto and wrote it into its coalition agreements with Act and NZ First. In March, the National Party withdrew its support for repealing the ban, citing animal welfare concerns. 

New Zealand First

The pioneer of the opposition-while-in-government technique, New Zealand First has thrice ended a term in government by being booted out of parliament or very close to it, and is eager to ensure it doesn’t happen again. 

NZ First leader Winston Peters was the deputy prime minister for the first half of this term but he would very much like you to forget that. Instead please focus your attention and anger on people who wear comfortable shoes. 

Peters, who is the minister of foreign affairs, has come out strongly against the signature foreign policy achievement of this term: the India-New Zealand free trade agreement. He said the government he is part of had “rushed it through” for “political purposes”. 

On the domestic front, NZ First recently got into an argument with National over who deserves credit for killing a controversial fishing bill that NZ First campaigned on and National officially endorsed in its coalition agreement. The proposal to remove minimum size limits for commercial fishing was widely opposed by recreational fishers. Both National and NZ First promised the anglers they would stand up for them against the overreaches of the out-of-touch government, whoever that is. 

Act

The Act Party, in its eternal quest to wrestle culture war votes from NZ First, has followed its coalition partners’ lead by coming out strongly against many policies of the government it is part of. 

Leader David Seymour has been at the forefront of this shift. After years of purporting to have a libertarian view of housing policies – including writing a book on the subject in which he urged politicians to do “nothing, or almost nothing, in the field of urban planning” – he abandoned that ideology once he realised new houses might be built in his neighbourhood. He now wants intensive regulations to stop apartment-dwelling sickos from “looking into everyone’s backyards and their swing sets and their pools”. 

Act has taken a strong stand against the government’s proposed ban on paywave surcharges, which National’s commerce and consumer affairs minister Scott Simpson previously celebrated as “a win for New Zealanders”. Seymour countered that is “not actually a win” and is “bad economics”. Act recently pulled its support for the bill, which Seymour now says is “dead”, though Simpson insists the government is working on a way forward. 

Act also recently withdrew its support for the government’s bill to ban greyhound racing. Act MP Cameron Luxton said the party wants more compensation for racing dog owners and asked the industry to “forgive our sins”. In an incredible piece of manoeuvring, Luxton managed to point the blame not at the current government that initiated the bill, but at a government that hasn’t existed in six years. “This reminds us of the Labour-New Zealand First government’s rush to seize the property of licensed firearms owners,” he said. This didn’t affect the bill, which passed last week with the support of opposition parties, and is set to take effect in August. 

Labour

Labour leader Chris Hipkins has been the prime minister previously and it went poorly for him. Now that he isn’t in charge any more he’s doing everything he can to remind voters of that fact. When asked, repeatedly, what Labour would do about the fuel crisis, Hipkins offered no ideas, saying: “We are not the government.” 

Even saying what you would do if you were in charge is too close to being in charge, and that’s a risk Hipkins isn’t willing to take. Opposition leaders have tried having opinions about government policies before and it worked out badly for them – case in point Simon Bridges during the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Sometimes voters don’t want solutions, they just want to vent. Hipkins will be here to listen, nod, and remind you again that he’s not in government and can’t be blamed for any of it. 

The Greens

The Green Party came dangerously close to looking like a government when they made the foolish mistake of proposing a constructive solution to the fuel crisis. The party offered National its votes in exchange for free public transport and relief payments for low-income people, among other things. Fortunately for them, the government said no, and they were able to retreat safely to their default position of righteous opposition without responsibility. 

Te Pāti Māori 

No party has executed the all-opposition strategy more elegantly than Te Pāti Māori, which is such a shambles that it couldn’t possibly be mistaken for a government. It barely resembles a parliamentary party.

First they came for the Toffee Milk bars…

A few years ago, while driving on a South Island road trip, we stopped at a corner dairy to buy some milk for our toddler son. At the counter, a box of Whittaker’s Toffee Milk bars sat temptingly. A handwritten sign perched on top. It read: LIMIT 5.

I paid for my milk and, ever the impulse purchaser, asked the shopkeeper for 10 Toffee Milk bars. She looked at me and said, “Sorry, it’s a limit of five.”

In my greed, I had misunderstood the sign to mean that you must buy at least five. Linda Evangelista famously once said she wouldn’t get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day, and I had assumed this dairy owner operated on a similar principle – except her minimum threshold was five Toffee Milk bars.

But no. As she explained to me with the patience of someone who had clearly been forced to elaborate before, there was a limit of five bars per customer because Toffee Milk bars had been discontinued, and this was, in fact, the last box in New Zealand. It wouldn’t be fair to other customers for a gluttonous Christchurchian to snaffle the lot in one go.

I apologised for my faux pas and purchased my milk and five Toffee Milk bars at the inflated price of 50 cents each, before heading back to the car to explain my windfall to my husband.

He – being British – had never actually tried a Toffee Milk bar before. I explained the lore. Legend had it that a Toffee Milk bar required such forceful mastication that the consumer expended more calories chewing it than the bar actually contained. The perfect guilt-free snack.

We shared them evenly: him one, me four. On my fourth and final bar, I managed to rip a filling out of my back molar, making it the most expensive Toffee Milk bar ever consumed.

But we were not merely enjoying a sweet treat. We were experiencing a moment in history, and it was part of a much larger extinction event happening quietly inside New Zealand dairies. The discontinuation of Toffee Milk bars was just the tip of the iceberg. Sparkles, Snifters, Jaffas, Tangy Fruits and roughly 80% of the flavour varieties of K Bars have now joined the great sugary graveyard.

But it’s not just the lollies themselves that are being discontinued. It’s the purveyors of sweets, too. Not too long ago, it was commonplace (and a basic human right) to have a corner dairy close enough to your house that you could dash there during an ad break – remember those? – of your favourite show, and be back in time to see whether Dr Ropata was in Guatemala or not.

Now, corner dairies are shutting faster than you can say Z Energy. And the dairies still in operation have removed their greatest allure of all: the white paper bag and the autonomy to choose.

Growing up in New Zealand in the 90s,  it was every child’s rite of passage to stand in front of the dairy counter , hopping from one jandaled foot to the other, coins jangling in a grubby hand, dithering over an array of lollies and carefully selecting which ones to choose while the owner waited, tongs poised with the patience of Mother Teresa, for your decision.

At 5c each – or sometimes even two for 5c – the possible combinations felt endless. You were in charge of choosing your own destiny, and no two weekend pocket-money hauls were ever the same.

The lollies were usually kept in glass jars behind the counter, the perfect conditions to keep them at their textural prime. The gummy fried eggs were permanently sunny-side up, the blue and pink shells perfectly al dente, and the Pineapple Lumps a satisfying medium-rare. For the more daring customers with taste buds of steel there were Bulldog Sours and Warheads.

For the time-pressed youngsters with urgent handball tournaments to attend, there was the time-efficient yet slightly risky gamble of plumping for a preselected white-paper-bag $1 or $2 mix.

For those unconcerned with aesthetics, there was the Ka-Bluey: a lolly so radioactively blue it would coat your tongue and lips in a fashion that could be mimicked only by chomping down on a cyan printer toner – a colour that lingered for days, like evidence.

Childhood lollies in the 90s also required a surprising amount of engineering to consume. Some even needed tools. Take sherbet sticks – a product so tantalisingly delicious, yet so fiendishly difficult to extract. One drop of ill-placed saliva would render the vessel an impotent, gummed-up mess. But no matter: you could always use Mum’s sewing scissors for their real purpose – slicing it into convenient, tasty sections of sherberty straw to chomp on, so you could enjoy them like a small cowboy chewing tobacco while watching What Now? And we’re worried about microplastics now.

But something changed – whether health and safety regulations, profit margins, or both. Now lollies are sold in sterile plastic bags, their contents so uniform and clinically selected it’s enough to bore you to tears.

But what about selection bags? Are they still as delightful as ever? Short answer: no.

Last week I witnessed a true crime against humanity. After a sporting event, we were given a family-sized bag of Party Mix lollies. Being a sweet tooth and a greedy one at that, I eagerly ripped open the package. What I found inside left me appalled. Jelly snakes so stiff they could double as doorstops. Banana puffs hard enough to rattle like loose gravel. Eskimos with the texture of Nerf gun bullets. Solidified jet planes in a dismal array of anaemic colours. And not a single milk bottle in sight. A lolly selection so bleak and depressing it was less suited to a party and more in keeping for a candle-lit vigil. 

I feel blessed to have grown up in New Zealand’s great lolly heyday, when any child with $2 could feel like a confectionery venture capitalist, carefully diversifying their bonbon portfolio across sour, gummy and chocolate assets. I was lucky enough to experience this golden age.

But what becomes now of Aotearoa’s youth? Won’t someone – anybody – think of the children? Or at the very least, bring back the white paper bag.

Oil crisis got you thinking about buying an EV? Henry Oliver charts the highs and lows of his seven years driving a Nissan Leaf.

In 2019, I was not in the market for an EV. Our 2003 VW wagon was expensive to run and expensive to fix, but there never seemed to be one specific problem that was big enough to justify getting rid of it. Then a professional perk changed all that.

As part of my job at the time, I was leant an electric VW, in the hopes I’d write about it. I loved it immediately. Driving it felt like a souped-up golf cart. Charging it felt more like plugging in your phone than refuelling at a petrol station. And in 2019, there was almost never a queue for a public charging station, should you need one.

I loved my week with that car so much that a month later we traded in our tired VW for a six-year-old Nissan Leaf (you can imagine how much VW’s PR person loved that detail). The guy gave us $600 for the wagon, mentioning that the warning on the dash I’d been ignoring – the one the manual said meant “see your dealer immediately” – was not good.

For the first five years, the Leaf was close to a perfect car. The inconveniences were minor, the electricity was cheap, there was no road tax, and it never needed a single repair. I loved not going near a petrol station or mechanic for years. The only thing it ever required was a charge and water for the windscreen.

Except when we went on holiday.

Our first long drive – a family Christmas in Kuratau on Lake Taupo – went surprisingly well. We moved from charging station to charging station with never more than a few minutes’ wait. Six months later, heading to Ohakune to show the kids some snow, I was filled with confidence. I had a route planned, all saved to Google Maps. It should have been straightforward, if a little slow.

Everything that could go wrong, did. At our second of four planned stops, the only parking spot near the charger was occupied by a car with a handwritten note saying the driver had gone to lunch and would be back when charged. They did not return for an hour. We had no choice but to wait. At the next station, we arrived to find ourselves third in line without enough charge to make the next town. We crawled into our rented holiday house hours late, driving slowly through the dark to conserve what little battery remained.

Planning a long drive in an EV is a special kind of psychic labour. You begin with a map of charging stations, like a medieval pilgrim plotting monasteries. You check which ones are actually working – a more optimistic exercise than you might hope. You calculate range against terrain and temperature (cold weather and hills are punishing; a flat motorway in summer, fine) and build in a buffer because the stated range is always slightly aspirational. Then you work out whether the charger at your destination is fast or slow, whether it’ll be free when you arrive, and whether you’ll have enough charge to get to the next one.

Around year five, a new problem emerged. EV batteries, like all batteries, degrade over time – sped up, I now know, by fast charging and always filling up to 100% – and ours had declined to the point where a full charge delivered only around 60km. In the city, we could still manage, but barely. The Leaf’s useful life seemed to be drawing to a close.

There’d long been rumours of various start-ups figuring out ways to revive individual battery cells, so one-by-one you could swap the dead cells for new ones, but the technology was slower to develop than hoped, and incredibly expensive. Then I discovered the secondhand battery market. When an EV gets written off in an accident, its battery often survives intact. You can buy one, have it installed, and for around $4,000 all up, we now have a battery that charges to 145km – more range than our car would have had when brand new. 

Not long after, we moved further from the city, and the reality we’d been avoiding became harder to ignore: we were a two-car household. We bought a hybrid. Years ago, in print, I’d dismissed hybrids as timid half-measures – equivalent to going vegetarian but still eating animals that just happen to live in water. But the hybrid doesn’t rely on charging infrastructure or require route planning. It just goes and when it’s about to stop going, you can switch to petrol and get the battery back to 100% in a matter of seconds. But the Leaf remains the default — the first set of keys you reach for, the one that handles everything within its radius, which, it turns out, is most of life.

Over the past few weeks – as petrol prices have crept toward $4 a litre and the global oil market grows harder to read – we’ve leaned on the Leaf more than ever. What once seemed like an inconvenience now feels like a modest form of independence, even if only in increments of 145km.

I am still, for what it’s worth, a believer. Just a wiser, slightly humbler one with one more car than I’d like.

It’s not the MAFS AU season we need, but perhaps it is the MAFS AU season we deserve. 

Just when you think MAFS AU can’t possibly get any worse, along comes geezer Danny justifying why he wouldn’t be comfortable moving into his wife’s house. “I suppose everyone looks at it differently,” he tells the dinner party. “But it makes you feel like a bit of a bitch moving in with a woman.” Some at the table gasp, the experts hold their heads in their hands, but not everyone is shocked by such a flagrant admission of sexism and insecurity. “I do agree with Danny,” says Gia. “He wants to feel like the man, and he has every right to feel like that.” 

Danny’s bitch-house theorem goes largely unchallenged, and is in fact supported by most of the group – “I’ll be honest, I couldn’t go to hers,” says Scott, gesturing vaguely in the direction of his wife. It’s a typical scene in a season of MAFS AU that seems hellbent on eroding whatever tiny shred of faith in humanity the audience has left, giving men the floor to say the most nonsensical manosphere guff they want and leaving the women to tear apart each other’s “ratchet hair extensions” and “stripper boots” while also insisting they are a “girl’s girl”. 

Like Danny, I’ve been working on a theory of my own – that this is the MAFS AU season 2026 deserves. Every year, the season purports to hold up a mirror to society, and every year that reflection is looking worse and worse. We used to have comic relief like cackling Collins and teeth-brushing Troy, and human sunbeams like Lucinda Light, but now the show feels relentless in its pursuit of destruction and drama. The storylines are incoherent, the people in charge can barely keep it together, and everyone is furious and scared. Sound familiar? 

Speaking of the decline of civilisation, another thing that’s struck me this season is the brutality of the language thrown around at dinner parties. Sure, MAFS has always had yelling and conflict, but at least past insults have boasted a bit of flair, such as Cyrell saying “you ain’t King Dingaling” or Sam calling Bryce “Gonzo” due to his resemblance to the Muppets star. In 2026, everyone on MAFS is calling each other a “dumb cunt” or a “rat bitch”. I blame AI for this creative hollowing, and certainly never need to hear the term “fingerbang” ever again. 

After reading Alice Neville’s brilliant analysis of the Covid-19 inquiry post-truth spin, I realised MAFS is also firmly in its post-truth era. Never have we seen so many participants brazenly lie about things that we have all just witnessed, like when Juliette accused husband Joel of yelling “I AM THE STAR” in an argument, despite us all knowing full well he actually said the much, much, funnier quote “you don’t see the star in me”. On the retreat, Bec accused Rachel of “going off her head” while we all watched her sitting quietly on the couch with Steven, head firmly intact. 

And then there’s all the manosphere business, brought front and centre by the casting of Trump-loving groom Tyson. He wanted a submissive woman, hated “green-haired” wokeness, and preferred that gay people were kept “behind closed doors”. Alarmingly, it’s not just the men spouting putrid masculinity rhetoric either – Alissa accused husband David of being a “weak man”, Stella called Filip “feminine” because he was too tired to go out, and Bec relishes in calling men “pussies” on the daily. Don’t even get me started on Joel’s teddy bear gate. 

Maybe this is all because we are addicted to watching shows that stress us the hell out, chasing any kind of experience that feels even a modicum more anxiety-inducing than real life. But every day I read headlines filled with egomaniacs causing unprecedented destruction for no reason, and every night on MAFS I watch egomaniacs causing unprecedented destruction for no reason. Maybe I’m a green-haired wokester, but I miss the love stories, I miss the eccentric weirdos, I miss the joy. To borrow a phrase, I miss when MAFS used to see the star in us.

Married at First Sight Australia airs on Three Sun-Wednesday and here on ThreeNow

Inside the creative writing course offering incarcerated women choice, a voice, and hope.

If you had told AW a year ago that she would be standing up on a stage receiving a standing ovation for her writing she’d have said you were lying. But on Friday, March 27, AW and fellow contributors, editors and project managers, launched Wāhine Inside: Poetry and prose from wāhine in Christchurch Women’s Prison. “It was overwhelming,” said AW. “To have all these people I respect and admire screaming at me, ‘We see you!’ I still get chills thinking about it.”

Wāhine Inside is a project led by Te Kāhui, a small but dynamic organisation that leads creative arts workshops in consultation with the communities they serve, from migrant and refugee rangatahi, to rangatahi and wāhine in prison. The book is stunning as an object: designer Kaan Hiini created texture by using scans of hand-written poems to weave throughout the typeset pages, and the cover image evokes the weight and feel of clay. 

The tactile feel to the design is exactly what editorial advisor Deborah Smith wanted for the book. She loves that readers will get to see the hand-written pieces, the crossings out, the authors’ own hands processing ideas and emotions on the page. As a beneficiary of other creative writing programmes, Smith understands what it means to have the space to create. After her release from prison she continued writing to help process conversations on stigma, bias and the struggle of reintegration. The combination of these experiences meant Smith was uniquely qualified to midwife the women’s submissions to the book into a logical flow, and offer thoughts on how their work should be treated. “[The writing] felt fresh and real and authentic,” she said. “That is how we wrote in there. We didn’t have pads or booklets, but that didn’t stop us from writing poetry on scraps of paper.”

Wāhine Inside represents Smith’s first time as an editor. For her, finding the patterns across the submissions, which often stem from a prompt given in the writing workshops, revealed to her just how essential art programmes like Te Kāhui are for giving incarcerated women a voice. “It’s lifesaving,” she said. Smith feels blessed to have had the support of Sherry Zhang and Ruby Macomber, Te Kāhui’s co-managers, who gave Smith the confidence to trust her gut as she went through the editorial process, and to trust in the process.

Wāhine Inside has gifted Smith a community that understands the struggle of reintegration, of like-minded people who have, like her, discovered that everybody has the right to be heard, and that anybody can change. She hopes the book will help shift the landscape for incarcerated women in the minds of readers: “We’re not only the name of a crime,” she said.

AW agrees: “You don’t have to be the person you were. You’re not that person now.” This is what she hopes readers, particularly women either incarcerated or formerly incarcerated, will take from this book. As for other readers, AW wants them to remember who the authors really are: “They’re not statistics, or bad people who were locked up. They’re multifaceted women. They’re mothers and daughters, aunties and sisters.” 

As for the writing itself, AW laughs when she recalls that her high school English teacher, who surprised her by turning up to the Auckland launch of the book, said it was ironic that it was poetry that brought her back into print. AW loved writing as a child but stopped for a long time. It was her high school English teacher who encouraged her talent for the written word, mainly essays. But in prison it was poetry that resonated with AW: “it’s a vessel for truth. It helps people articulate and process anger, trauma and grief in a way that doesn’t feel like a forced rehabilitation programme, or overly structured like therapy. Poetry allows you to deal with your damage on your own terms and in your own words in the way that you want.”

Hope 

Hope looks like

closed minds

learning to open,

quiet and still.

– an excerpt from ‘Hope’ by AD in Wāhine Inside

Both Smith and AW are passionate about the necessity of programmes like Te Kāhui. Far from viewing creative arts and education as “nice-to-haves” they see them as essential to survival both inside prison and out. Both have gone on to study at tertiary level and credit the work they did in prison, as well as the ongoing support of their tutors and Te Kāhui staff, with helping their reintegration and continuing explorations of themselves as artists and creatives and people. “This programme saved me from myself. Te Kāhui gives you options,” said AW.

But as of June 2026, Te Kāhui will be going on indefinite hiatus. “A combination of factors, including a constrained funding ecosystem exacerbated by significant changes in public funding to arts and culture budgets, has created difficulties in our sustainability,” reads the statement on their website. Homeground, an organisation facilitating creative arts programmes for women in the justice system, also went on hiatus in November 2025, with inadequate resourcing as one reason for the pause.

In the meantime, Wāhine Inside is an astonishing, surprising and raw collection of voices to be read, shared and respected. “My copy is tatty!” says Smith. “I see fight, and resilience and relatability in these pages.”

Wāhine Inside: Poetry and prose from wāhine in Christchurch Women’s Prison ($35, 5ever Press) can be purchased from Te Kāhui Creative Writing | Youth Arts New Zealand.

How to watch, who to watch out for and everything else you need to know.

What’s all this then?

It’s the sporting event of the weekend as some of New Zealand’s best Scrabblers go head-to-head over three days of intense competition in the most prestigious tournament on the NZ Scrabble calendar.

Where do we watch?

Right here! Or wherever you normally watch YouTube.

Day one | Day two

Streams start at 9.30am NZT each morning, and you can dip in and out during the day or watch back at your leisure. Not a Scrabble expert already? That’s OK – commentary from internationally renowned Scrabblers like Canada’s Josh Sokol and Australia’s Anand Bharadwaj will make you feel like one.

Who’s playing?

It’s a veritable who’s-who of New Zealand Scrabble personalities. Wellingtonian Dylan Early is back to defend the title he won last year, clinched with a mindblowing win over number one rated Wairarapan word wrangler (and 13-time Masters champion) Howard Warner. Other heavy hitters include Canadian expat Chris Tallman, whose tile shuffling speed has to be seen to be believed, and Lewis Hawkins of Christchurch, who holds the record for youngest Masters competitor, having made his debut in 2017 at the age of 12.

Anyone who watched the 2023 documentary Every Word Counts on The Spinoff will remember Lawson Su, whose collection of self-designed Scrabble T-shirts seems to grow with every tournament, and Laura Griffiths, who hasn’t stopped climbing the ratings since our cameras captured her winning the C grade at the 2023 Nationals. Spinoff readers may also recognise Nick Ascroft, who penned an excellent diary of a poet for the site last year.

What’s the format?

It’s a 23-game single round robin, meaning everybody plays everybody else once and whoever has the most wins at the end of it wins the Masters shield. If players are tied on wins, it’s decided by spread (total points scored minus total points scored against them by their opponents).

How do I play in the Masters?

Entry to the Masters is by invitation only, limited to the top 24 available rated players in the country. To become a rated Scrabble player you need to get a few tournament games under your belt. Pretty much every other tournament on the NZ Scrabble calendar is open to all comers, though it’s highly recommended you join a local club and learn the ropes there first. 

Where can I watch more Scrabble?

LetsPlayScrabble is the best place to go to watch livestreamed games from other parts of the world, while Will Anderson is for my money the best Scrabble YouTuber. And while you’re at it, give Scrabble New Zealand a follow too.

Every year, Shihad’s 1997 single ‘Home Again’ helps countless New Zealanders remember how daylight saving works.

This story was first published in 2017 and reshared pretty much every year since.

Jon Toogood was 24 years old when he wrote one of the great New Zealand song lyrics.

“Put your clock back for the winter” is the opening line of ‘Home Again’, the first track on Shihad’s 1996 self-titled album. In just seven words it evokes an acute, crushing sense of ennui which instantly sets the tone for the song’s themes of distance and separation. It is a huge part of what makes the song one of our most enduring homesickness anthems.

It is also probably the most helpful rock song ever written in this country – a failsafe mnemonic for remembering how daylight saving works. For years, many New Zealanders and even some Australians have used what is known as the “Shihad Method” when resetting their clocks and watches. One subscriber to the method described it to The Spinoff as “bloody useful”.

Shockingly, this famous line almost didn’t make it onto the record.

Toogood’s old notebook, displayed at Auckland Museum as part of 2017’s ‘Volume: Making Music in Aotearoa’ exhibition, shows the first draft of the song’s lyrics had a completely different opening line – one almost identical to a line from the Beatles’ ‘Here Comes the Sun’ – which was later crossed out and replaced: “It’s one long, cold, lonely winter.”

“We’d been living in LA for ages, writing and touring living apart from friends and family and more specifically my partner at that time,” Toogood told The Spinoff. “I think that opening line came from the million and one phone calls between her and myself – it just stuck out to me that I was living in a completely different world where everything was opposite to where she was including something as fundamental as the seasons. I just thought that line helped illustrate that idea, more for myself than anyone else really.”

While the song’s genesis is in Los Angeles, the lyrics to ‘Home Again’ were written at Auckland’s York Street Studios in June 1996. The whole song took just 20 minutes to write. “I had thoughts about what I wanted to sing about, but I didn’t articulate them until I was forced to,” Toogood told Rip It Up in 2010. “I left it until the last minute, which is what I do with every important moment in my life.”

It remains unknown exactly how last-minute the inclusion of “Put your clock back for the winter” was, but it was undoubtedly an important moment. “He basically crossed out a shit opening line and replaced it with a great one,” explains rock critic Russell Brown.

Songwriting expert Mike Chunn agrees. “It’s crucial to have the listener wanting to know more, to have their curiosity piqued,” he says of the importance of the opening line. “‘Home Again’ does just that – we want to know more, and as the song evolves we are riveted and stay with it. That’s very hard to do well…  Jon does it.”

Although it only reached number 42 on the singles chart when released in 1997, ‘Home Again’ went on to become one of Shihad’s best-known songs – a beloved, and very helpful, entry in the canon of New Zealand popular music.

Daylight Saving ends on the first Sunday in April – unofficially known as Shihad Day.

The top 10 sales lists recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington.

AUCKLAND

Move along hot cross buns and chocolate eggs, Aotearoa’s real Easter food arrives with a gentle thud on the lawn.

Easter, as a concept, is a bit of a tangle. It can be, depending on your vantage point, the most solemnly profound moment in the Christian calendar – a story of death, resurrection and the improbable triumph of life. Or, it is a long weekend punctuated by traffic, shuttered supermarkets and a murky sense that one ought to be eating something symbolic to mark it all, even if, beyond chocolate and buns, no one is entirely sure what that something is. 

Some of this tangle is historical. Easter’s origins are famously contested. Its very date has been the subject of ecclesiastical squabbles that have stretched across nearly 2,000 years. And despite the significance within Christianity, there are persuasive accounts tracing Easter back to pagan festivals dedicated to Eostre, the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring, revolving around fertility, renewal and light. And the holiday seems to have inherited much of its accoutrements – eggs, rabbits, chicks and flowers – from those pagan customs.

In Aotearoa, Easter-time ambiguity – not helped by the fact that we’re celebrating a spring festival in autumn – extends to the table. In many parts of the world, Easter comes with a fairly detailed culinary outline: specific breads, soups, stews, pies, cakes, even, in some places, butter sculpted into the shape of lambs. Here, the list is shorter: hot cross buns and chocolate eggs, maybe lamb, perhaps brunch. Beyond that, Easter eating in New Zealand is rather incoherent. It lacks the culinary structure of Christmas with its weeks of planning and indulgent excess. It lacks, too, the kitschy theatrics of Halloween or the grounded-in-place meaning of Matariki. For those inclined to think about food, Easter in Aotearoa can feel like a holiday in search of a culinary tradition. 

And yet there’s something rather liberating about that looseness. Few of us will be drafting multi-course menus or mentally bracing ourselves for marathon shifts in their home kitchen or lying awake wondering if we need to purchase just one more bottle of cream. There’s no particular pressure to produce anything impressive. In fact, there’s very little pressure to do anything at all.

Which brings me, improbably, to the feijoa. Lately, while slicing them open and then scooping out their gritty, vaguely floral-tasting innards, I’ve begun to think of them not just as an autumnal treasure, but more specifically as our own, locally specific emblem of Easter.

Because while Easter remains symbolically tethered to spring, in this part of the world it arrives in autumn. The light has softened, the heat has dissipated. Mornings are growing darker. The afternoons are crisper. The trees begin their transformation, greens soon deepening into browns and bronzes. Easter here is less a time of emergence than a time of languorous withdrawal. And it is in this liminal moment that the feijoa appears.

It is, admittedly, an unlikely candidate for symbolic elevation. Small, green and unassuming. Common, even. It lacks the gloss of a chocolate egg or the rather morbid markings of a hot cross bun. Yet, I can’t help but point out that its ovoid shape does echo the season’s most enduring motif, the egg.

More importantly, the feijoa’s Easter relevancy lies in its seasonality. For a brief window, they are everywhere. They drop overnight, gathering beneath trees, rolling onto footpaths, accumulating in bowls and bags and in buckets in front of fences. “Help yourself!” There is always too much. And then, they vanish. 

This fleeting presence feels especially significant (and rare) in a society accustomed to year-round availability. Berries in winter, citrus in summer, everything at all times. Among all this, the feijoa does not budge from its temporality. It arrives, it overwhelms us, and then it is gone. We miss it. When it returns again, we rejoice for about five minutes, and then we take it for granted again. Over and over.

Though not native, the feijoa has been so thoroughly absorbed into New Zealand life that it feels almost inseparable from it. It takes over gardens, spills over fences and its surplus is shared generously and freely among neighbours and strangers alike. There is some kind of theological lesson in all of this. Easter, whatever its precise origin story, is preoccupied with cycles: death and life, ending and beginning, absence and return, of giving and receiving. The feijoa, in its fleeting glut, is a kind of edible reminder of these never-ending rhythms. 

Perhaps this is what makes Easter, at its most appealing, feel distinct from other holidays. It is an actual pause. A few days away from regular programming to notice the change in light, to sit with the big existential questions – of time, of what comes next, of what it all means. And, inevitably, to ponder what to do with the accumulating pile of feijoas on the bench. If Easter is, at its heart, a meditation on cycles, why not take the lesson from a small, green fruit.

Was your town lucky enough to have a giant chook birthing ovoid chocolate treats on demand every Easter?

It began, as far as we can tell, with Meg. Or was it Eggo?

The year was 1958; the location, Hay’s, Christchurch’s “friendly store”. Meg was a giant hen who would appear in the lead-up to Easter and heave out a chocolate egg for any child with a sixpence to spare. If the below newspaper ad is anything to go by, Meg was accompanied by a “real LIVE EASTER BUNNY” that was in turn carried by a terrifying Donnie Darko-esque figure in a rabbit suit.

Further south, Eggo was similarly delighting the children of Invercargill. Due to the Southland Times not having been digitised beyond 1945, it’s not clear exactly when she first became a fixture at H&J Smith. But, if Acton Smith’s account in the recently published H&J Smith history book is accurate, Eggo was already well established in the late 1950s, when the then 11-year-old got his first job rolling Easter eggs down a chute to emerge from the chook into the hands of awaiting children. Smith, part of the H&J Smith dynasty, later spent 30 years as managing director of the long-running department store. Eggo had impressive staying power, reappearing every year until the closure of H&J Smith in 2023, when she moved to the Invercargill Central mall.

The Spinoff reached out to Invercargill Central to see if Eggo was still in action. A spokesperson revealed that sadly, the mall didn’t have the storage capability to keep the massive chook, so she was given to Toot Sweets, the lolly shop across the road, which unfortunately faced the same problem. The spokesperson said she believed Eggo had ended up at Invercargill’s beloved Bill Richardson Transport World – “hopefully she’s still clucking away somewhere in town!” – but The Spinoff was unable to confirm Eggo’s whereabouts by the time of publication.*

As for Meg, Eggo’s rival for the title of Aotearoa’s original Easter-egg-laying hen, there’s no record of her after 1967, but by that time the idea had well and truly caught on. Thanks to Papers Past extending its Evening Post collection just a couple of weeks ago, The Spinoff can reveal that Clucky (“you’ll love her realistic cackle!”) first appeared at Wellington’s Kirkcaldie’s in 1961, much earlier than has been reported previously (though, to be fair, we can’t be 100% sure it’s the exact same chook).

Then there was Henrietta, who showed up at Christchurch’s DIC store in 1963, laying eggs for the bargain price of threepence (with DIC taking a frugal approach to advertising to match: see below). By 1965, Henrietta’s eggs had doubled in price and the ads were slightly fancier, but she was never mentioned again. It wasn’t until the late 1980s that Christchurch was graced by the presence of another big chook, fittingly named “Big Chook“, who laid eggs at Christchurch’s fourth-best mall to raise funds for a local school’s soccer team. Just like her Cantabrian poultry predecessors, Big Chook’s reign was short-lived, and she was never mentioned again.

In Wellington it was a different story. Clucky endured, appearing every Easter at Kirks until it closed its doors in 2016 and she moved to Wellington Museum, where she resides to this day. In 2019, Clucky was still in working service, though eggflation saw her offerings now fetching the hefty price of a gold coin (Eggo’s eggs, meanwhile, remained a bargain-basement 50c until the end of her H&J Smith tenure). As of last year, Clucky was “enjoying some quiet time”, no longer birthing chocolate ovoids on demand.

Another long-lived hen is Hetty of Whanganui. Sadly, no Whanganui newspapers from the second half of the 20th century have been digitised, but according to reports, Hetty first appeared at DIC’s Whanganui branch in the early to mid 60s, then moved to the Londontown department store. When Londontown closed in 1989 she was given to the Whanganui Regional Museum, but made annual appearances at the Trafalgar Square shopping centre, before being fully retired to the museum in 2010. She was still laying Easter eggs for museum visitors a decade ago, though they were plastic ones that could then be swapped for chocolate eggs by a staff member. Hetty then moved around a couple of Whanganui libraries, but hasn’t been heard from since 2021.

So how did these remarkable fowl actually work? Most children believed they were fully automated, or perhaps magical, but the truth is more prosaic. As Acton Smith revealed in the H&J Smith book, an egg was simply rolled down a chute by a human hand. On learning the shocking truth about Eggo in 2023, Stuff’s Hamish McNeilly lamented that his “whole childhood was a lie”.

In a chilling reveal that casts Acton Smith’s tale of child labour in a less wholesome light, Spinoff member “Martin from Kilbirnie” (commenting on our recent marshmallow egg ranking) claimed that up north at Kirks, Clucky’s egg roller “was an SJS student stuck in an unventilated unlit hen hell for a couple of weeks every year. Possibly recruited for size and/or clucking ability.”

It wasn’t all bad everywhere, though: former Hetty workers from Whanganui reminisced about the job in comments on a 2024 Facebook post, sharing tales of scaring annoying children, hurling eggs down the chute at high speed, and having to “interpret the chicken sound when they lost the recording”.

*Exciting update, April 7: Transport World has confirmed that Eggo is still in residence and still laying.

Do you know of any other animatronic Easter-egg-laying chooks from New Zealand’s past? Did Auckland really not have any? Why were Christchurch’s magical hens all so short-lived? Share your memories/theories/hot takes in the comments below, or email info@thespinoff.co.nz

The Auckland mayor wants a grand coalition. The idea neglects two major factors in politics: emotion and self-interest.

A couple of weeks ago, everyone’s favourite Grandpa-Simpson-on-Facebook Wayne Brown took his mayoral schtick to the Sunday Star-Times in an op-ed titled “Let’s fix Parliament with a Grand Coalition”. The bulk of Wayne’s 800-odd words consisted of the usual Brownian greatest hits: other people are dumb and useless; ideas other than mine are dumb and useless; central government is dumb and useless while “I relentlessly pursue savings and better value for money from the rates we all pay”.

However, buried in this general disparagement of everyone other than himself was a concrete suggestion that raises its head from time-to-time. Outside of weird pandemic times, when voters are so grateful not to have died that they reward the governing party with an absolute majority, our MMP voting system is always going to require more than one party to agree to govern together. But rather than these agreements involving one of the major (or legacy) parties and some minor (or new) parties, why don’t Labour and National form a “grand coalition”? A kind of NatLab collab, if you will.

The model for this proposal comes from the home of MMP, Germany, where that country’s political equivalents to the National and Labour parties have several times agreed to govern in tandem. Such “Große Koalition“ (or, Germany’s 2013 word of the year, “GroKo”) have repeatedly been used to avoid having to rely on specific minor parties for governing support. This “cordon sanitaire” approach is considered necessary to prevent parties with extremist pasts or dangerous ideologies from obtaining a foothold in government.

You can see why Germany might be particularly sensitive to such concerns. And, while I’m sure every reader has a view on which of our current parties is bad for the country, none have been publicly viewed as fundamentally system-threatening as Germany’s ex-communist Die Linke or far-right AfD have. So, the argument for adopting a grand coalition here in Aotearoa New Zealand must be different.

Wayne Brown, of course, thinks that because everyone else apart from him is dumb and useless, a NatLab collab is necessary to get 20 “sufficiently capable, intelligent people” running the country. Combining the top 10 MPs from National with the top 10 MPs from Labour would, he thinks, result in a Cabinet with “nearly three quarters who can do their job”.

An initial problem with this sort of individualised take on government is that it assumes that capable and intelligent people rise to the top of an organisation. I simply note that evidence does not necessarily back up this claim. More fundamentally, it reveals that Brown’s political experience is limited to the world of local government, where councils largely function as a collection of individuals only loosely grouped into tickets at election time. That very much is not the reality of central government with its much stricter forms of party discipline.

So, if coalitions are a matter of forming inter-party governing arrangements rather than selecting for individual talent, why might a NatLab collab be desirable? Brown does point to one benefit. We hear constant calls for “bipartisan agreement” on a whole host of long-term problems that we collectively face, including superannuation, infrastructure and climate change mediation and adaptation. Then, whisper it, on many of these policy issues (as well as a host of others), Labour and National actually are more closely aligned with each other than they are with their current potential governing partners on the left and right respectively. If they were to come together in government, they could craft some sort of consensus compromise that would be more likely to last for the long-term.

On its face, the logic is appealing. But it neglects two major factors in politics: emotion and self-interest. 

The emotional aspect relates to how those involved in Labour and National see themselves and, importantly, how much of that self-image is crafted through contrast with the other party. After all, for some 90 years our national politics has been a matter of (usually) National or (less often) Labour governing, with the other party’s prime aim in opposition to displace them. That history breeds culture, and culture is a strong determinant of action.

Forming a NatLab collab would involve a major reorientation within a group of people that all have cut their political teeth on stories of conflict with, and triumph over, the other. Within that political culture, it’s hard to gain traction for arguments that joining your enemy is for the best of the country.

The self-interest point depends on predictions regarding how a NatLab collab would be viewed. Brown paints a rosy picture of it having “majority voter support” that “would guarantee long terms for the MPs involved”. Possibly that is true, and given current polling such an arrangement after the 2026 election would include some 65% of MPs.

However, any NatLab collab would not create a truly equal union. Whichever party got their person into the role of prime minister would be seen as the “main” governing partner. To them would go the spoils of any success that the coalition achievedin terms of public support, while the “second fiddle” party would risk being overshadowed for the entire governing term.

Then there is the fact that those minor parties outside the NatLab collab would be free to critique the governing arrangement from both the left and the right, bleeding support from each of the parties in power and strengthening their own political positions at the next election.

So, do National and Labour risk a term of government in which they try to put aside past enmities and jointly seek fixes to the country’s problems, with one of them being seen as working “under” the other while each are attacked from their right and left flanks respectively for every policy compromise that they make? At the end of the term, do they find there is not enough support for them to form another NatLab collab, but instead they must try to make a new governing arrangement with invigorated minor parties eager to pull the country to the right or left?

Or, do they choose an arrangement with their existing governing partners that allows them to be the major partner in government, advance more of their preferred policy positions, and gives their MPs the majority of ministerial positions? If you were in charge of either the National or Labour parties, which option might you find the more compelling?

From Love Story to Louis Theroux to Last One Laughing, we recommend 10 top TV shows to enjoy this long weekend.

Easter is here, and if you’re lucky, you’re about to enjoy a four-day long weekend. No matter whether you’re staying at home or heading out of town for a quick holiday, The Spinoff knows there’s no better way to spend your precious free days than staring mindlessly at a screen. With that in mind, we’ve gathered together 10 of our favourite shows to watch right now. From nail-biting award-winning dramas to shocking documentaries to a British comedy that really doesn’t want you to laugh, there’s a recommendation here for everyone.

Love Story (Disney+)

The best thing about Love Story is that it’s actually quite boring. We know how the story of JFK Jr and Carolyn Bessette ends so all we have to do is follow their impeccable style along the rollercoaster of their courtship with vague interest. If you’re anything like me, you might need your escapism this Easter to be relatively low-stakes yet mildly compelling all the same. Love Story is smooth, nostalgic (that 90s fashion, those New York vistas, that 90s music), easy to absorb, and will lend you a cathartic cry (the finale is the best episode with the best performances – heartbreaking). It’s also great fodder for follow-up reading material, particularly Daryl Hannah’s blistering take-down in the NY Times (they did her dirty in the show). / Claire Mabey

LOL: Last One Laughing UK (Prime Video)

If you want a few hours of completely silly TV, I can’t recommend Last One Laughing enough. Based on a Japanese format, this comedy series chucks a bunch of funny people together in a Big Brother-esque house and asks them not to laugh for six hours straight. If anyone dares to crack a smile or stifle a guffaw, they’re out, and the last comedian standing wins. The just-concluded UK season is arguably the best yet, thanks to comedians like Alan Carr, Mel Geidroyc, Romesh Ranganathan, Diane Morgan, Sam Campbell and season one winner Bob Mortimer, who’s back for a second go at the laugh factory. Just like Taskmaster, Last One Laughing is completely ridiculous and totally pointless, but it’s never felt so good to have a laugh. / Tara Ward

The Pitt (Neon)

Four days off sounds pretty relaxing. Too relaxing. Enter The Pitt, which is stressful as all hell and so worth the cortisol spikes. Noah Wyle, known for starring in ER as an emergency room doctor, shows his range by starring in The Pitt as an emergency room doctor. Honestly, range is overrated – just do what you’re good at, and Wyle is damn good at playing a calm-on-the-outside, messy-on-the-inside, blood-spattered doctor. The writing is sharp, the acting nuanced and the pace is relentless in the best possible way. Binge both seasons (series two is about to wrap up) consecutively and you’ll end up pretty much feeling like a qualified medic. Side effects may include muttering about tachy patients, intubating and getting 10ml of epi on board. / Veronica Schmidt

Millie Lies Low (Maori+ from April 5)

Sure, it’s a movie rather than a TV series, but Millie Lies Low is a local gem. Ana Scotney and Rachel House star in this comedy-drama about a wannabe architect who fakes her career online. Scotney plays Millie, a young woman preparing to leave New Zealand for New York to intern in a renowned architecture firm when her anxiety gets the better of her. Instead of catching her flight to the other side of the world, Millie retreats into her Wellington home and sets about convincing everyone online that she’s actually living her best life in the Big Apple. Directed by Michelle Saville, Millie Lies Low received glowing reviews when it was released in 2022 and was praised as “a refreshing must-watch” and “an instant New Zealand classic”. / TW

Heartbreak High (Netflix)

Amerie, Harps, Darren, Quinni, Malakai, Cash, Spider, Missy, Sasha! Over the past three seasons of Heartbreak High I’ve grown to love these Aussie high-schoolers. The show is a bit like Sex Education but grittier and with more developed characters. Rachel House is brilliant as the school’s principal and season three (the final season) introduces Aki Munroe as Taz, House’s charismatic onscreen niece. Every single actor steals the show in this high-stakes, high-drama, high-hair, high-glitter dramedy-thriller. It’s glorious, it’s messy and it’s a shot of youthful energy. Highly recommend bingeing the lot in one go. / CM

The Newsreader (Netflix)

This award-winning Australian drama came out in 2021 but fkew under the radar here in Aotearoa, and is thankfully getting a new life on Netflix. Anna Torv and Sam Reid star as rival newsreaders working in a cutthroat Sydney newsroom in the mid 1980s, who decide to pair up to survive the sexist and unforgiving industry. The Newsreader has it all – an excellent cast, strong writing and a vivid sense of the 1980s, as real news stories like the Challenger explosion and the AIDS crisis are wound through the episodes. There’s plenty of drama both in front of and behind the cameras, and with three juicy seasons to binge, The Newsreader is a compelling, easy-to-watch gem. / TW

The Other Bennet Sister (TVNZ+)

There’s nothing like a period drama for a bit of escapism on a long weekend, and this new BBC series is charming from start to finish. Based on the novel by Janice Hadlow, The Other Bennet Sister takes Mary Bennet – the awkward middle Bennet daughter from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice – and gives her a vibrant and independent life far beyond the original character. The 10-part series is a fresh take on a much-loved story that still honours Austen’s spirit. Ella Bruccoleri stars as Mary, while Richard E Grant and Ruth Jones play the Bennet parents – and don’t miss the cameo from Lucy Briers, the actress who played Mary in the iconic Colin Firth/Jennifer Ehle 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. / TW 

Crackhead (ThreeNow)

Confident, fresh and darkly funny, Crackhead is one of New Zealand’s strongest TV shows in recent times. Created by, written and starring Holly Shervey (Millennial Jenny) and directed by Shervey’s husband Emmett Skilton (The Almighty Johnsons), Crackhead follows Frankie Jones (Shervey) as she confronts her addiction and spiralling mental health at a 28-day rehabilitation programme in the remote town of Laast. Frankie arrives at the facility (fittingly called The Laast Resort) expecting a luxury holiday, but what she finds is anything but relaxing. With a stacked New Zealand cast and a raw, fierce energy, Crackhead is a compelling portrayal of one woman’s descent to rock bottom and her emotional journey back up to redemption. Don’t miss it. / TW

Louis Theroux: Inside The Manosphere (Netflix)

Everyone has been talking about this documentary, but I’ve been hesitant to watch Louis Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere because I don’t know if I can face the horrors of watching misogynists be misogynists for a full 90 minutes. Yet it remains on my to-watch list because men like the ones featured in this doco – who think women should be their sexual playthings and housekeepers –  are absolute mysteries to me. It’s impossible to understand how anyone could think or act as they do, and I’m curious as to what could drive them. So I’m going to watch it over Easter, probably on Friday, so I have three full days to recover before having to face the world again. / VS

Deadloch (Prime Video)

A second season of this sharp and darkly comedic Australian murdery-mystery recently dropped on Prime Video, and great news, it’s as sharp and funny as the first. Created by Australian comedians Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney, Deadloch takes all the familiar murder-mystery cliches and plays with them for laughs, giving us a fresh perspective on a well-known genre. Madeleine Sami and Kate Box are back as two detectives investigating a series of mysterious deaths, this time in the hot and sweaty Northern Territory. “Deadloch captures the eccentricities of small-town Australia and the complexities of family dynamics in humorous ways, but never forgets to hit you with an emotional sucker-punch at the end of the joke,” we said in our review. “If you’re looking for a smart, funny series that isn’t remotely subtle, this is well worth the watch.” / TW