Gone By Lunchtime: Simeon Brown and the family feud

A bumper week of policy and the launch of a striking new infantilisation strategy.

The gun for election 2026 was fired with great fury and much shrapnel on Sunday, with National campaign manager Simeon Brown sparing almost no one. The parties of a potential rival coalition got a dressing down. So did his own coalition partners. There was even an implicit repudiation of the National Party, or at least the Key-English version that scrapped KiwiSaver kickstarter in 2015.

In a new episode of the Spinoff politics podcast Gone By Lunchtime, Annabelle Lee-Mather, Ben Thomas and Toby Manhire huddle together to revisit those dramatic scenes in the Hutt Valley and seek to understand why Brown thought it is a good idea to say that Winston Peters and David Seymour are his squabbling children and to declare NZ First irredeemably untrustworthy. Is it the polling numbers that drove him to it?

The KiwiSaver policy revealed on Sunday staked out territory for the months to come, while the Greens were also in bold policy mode, laying out there plans on tax. And the dam has burst on the policy front for Labour, too. Did the public transport cap hit the mark?

Plus: Erica Stanford turns the scrutiny spotlight squarely on MBIE officials over their questionable persistence on a multimillion-dollar biometric tech project. And is Tama Potaka just tweaking Conservation policy for the sale of “bits and bobs” or does the new act entail something more troubling?