Show Notes
If you were feeling a little election fatigue before this week, you may now be reaching for the remote, the mute button and possibly something stronger than a cup of tea. We’ve had the policies, the debates, voting strategies and enough political point-scoring to qualify as an Olympic sport. Voters have listened patiently to arguments about the cost of living, health, education and the economy. All important stuff, of course. But even the most devoted political tragic can only take so many announcements before wondering whether anyone has actually come to fix anything. Then along comes the gangs controversy. Suddenly, the campaign had a fresh lease of life - although not the sort any party leader, or voter, wanted. Photographs of Green and Te Pāti Māori politicians at a Mongrel Mob gathering sparked fierce criticism. Labour leader Chris Hipkins condemned their judgement and ruled those parties out of police and corrections portfolios in a potential Government. Then Labour candidate Kerrin Leoni appeared in footage campaigning alongside gang members in Labour-branded clothing. She resigned on Friday. And just when National may have thought it had a comfortable position from which to criticise its opponents, and boy did they, a photograph emerged of National minister Tama Potaka with Mongrel Mob members at a public hui. Potaka said one gang member was a former schoolmate who had asked for a photo. Christopher Luxon insisted the circumstances were quite different. Today, photos of Luxon and Erica Stanford at an event around the Abuse in Care report have surfaced. Welcome to election campaigning, where every photograph has a backstory, every backstory has a rebuttal, and every rebuttal creates more questions. The trouble for leaders is that voters expect, and deserve, consistency. It is erratic and suspect to declare a standard non-negotiable on a Wednesday, and on Thursday the following week announce that applying it to your own team requires a more sympathetic interpretation of the evidence. There are genuine distinctions between attending a public event, maintaining family connections and actively campaigning for votes alongside gang members. Politicians should be able to explain those distinctions. Equally, voters are entitled to question the judgement involved, given gang violence causes real harm to families and communities. We should also remember that contact with gang members does not automatically mean endorsement of criminal behaviour. Politicians sometimes need to engage with difficult people and difficult communities. The challenge is knowing where engagement ends and political promotion begins. But the timing is brutal. With the campaign already well advanced, leaders have found themselves defending decisions, distancing themselves from colleagues and answering questions they would much rather avoid. The important conversations have been elbowed aside by gang patches and political photographs. For voters, the weariness is understandable. Shall we have an amnesty on photos with gang members and be done with it? Come on - let's lay them all out on the table and be done with it. Voters want solutions, not another week of political theatre in which everyone claims the moral high ground while checking whether their own footprints are visible. Thankfully, the election will ultimately be decided by more than one controversy. The campaign is entering its final stretch. Perhaps the best promise any politician could make now is a simple one: leadership and positivity. Or as National would say - Stick to the Plan. LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
More from Election 2026
Gangs remain a contentious topic during this election campaign, following another week of high-profile incidents. Labour's Kerrin Leoni has resigned after a video emerged of her campaigning at a whanau event, with gang members present. A photo recently emerged of National's Tama Potaka standing next to patched members of the Mongrel Mob., prompting Labour's Chris Hipkins to accuse Luxon of 'double standards'. Former Minister and commentator Peter Dunne says these events have slowed down Labour's political momentum, and the damage has been done. LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
There's hope for a last minute rush tonight, as a significant number of Kiwis still aren't enrolled to vote in the election yet. The deadline to enrol to vote is midnight tonight, with voting starting from Monday until election day on November 7. Chief Electoral Officer Karl Le Quesne says they're hoping 100 percent of eligible people will enrol to vote. "We want to see that rise, and we're getting a lot of enrolment transactions coming through at the moment - so we know it'll keep going up." LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Oh, I tell you what, I cannot see Chris Hipkins winning the election now. I mean, if you thought that Mongrel Mob fiasco was bad before, it's got so much worse for Labour. Their candidate has quit and Chris Hipkins himself now looks like he's been fibbing to the public. It turns out, now that we've seen the video of Kerrin Leoni at the Mongrel Mob event, that it wasn't at all the family gathering Labour told us it was. She was there in her red Labour jacket with a placard featuring a picture of herself and Chippy, telling gang members to enrol and change the government. That doesn't look like a family barbecue, does it? I don't know how many family barbecues you turn up to wearing your work jacket. I also don't know how many voters are going to believe Hipkins when he says he didn't know about it and that Leoni misled him. Anyone paying attention would have seen Labour doing a fair bit of misleading themselves. When Leoni was first accused of meeting the Mongrel Mob the week before the Green and Māori parties had, Labour said it wasn't true. They said she hadn't met the gang the week before. But she had. It was nine days before, not seven, and that looks very much like Labour playing silly buggers with the timeline so we'd never know the event had happened. If they were prepared to mislead us on that, do you really believe they didn't try to mislead us when they said, "Hey, it's just a family event," when it was actually a political event? This is devastating for Labour because it's no longer just about whether you share Labour's values or what you think about criminals and gang members. It's now also about the integrity of the party leader and whether he and the party tried to hide this from voters. My suspicion is that, yes, they very much did. And that, with only two weeks until election day, is, in my view, unsurvivable for Labour short of a miracle. LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Labour leader Chris Hipkins says he wasn't told the full truth about the gathering that led to Kerrin Leoni's resignation as Tāmaki Makaurau candidate. At a debate this week, Te Pati Māori's Oriini Kaipara accused Leoni of visiting a gang pad a week before she did - which Leoni denied. Footage surfaced yesterday of her campaigning this month at a family event including gang members, wearing a Labour Party jacket. Hipkins told Heather du Plessis-Allan that Labour didn't know the extent of the event. He says it was working off the information she provided - that she had not visited a gang pad, and hadn't done what was alleged in the debate. LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
This week's Politics Friday Election Special focused on the Wigram electorate. The candidates, Labour's Dominik Yanzick and National's Tracy Summerfield made their pitch to become the next local MP. They discussed their backgrounds before entering politics and outlined how they would tackle the key issues facing the newly redrawn Wigram electorate. LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.