Taxpayer Update: NEW POLL: NZ First climbs 📈 | Labour’s fiscal plan unraveling 🧮 | 664k for cats in the Middle East 🐈

A shorter update today after Monday’s bumper Taxpayer Update, but we wanted to get our latest Taxpayers’ Union–Curia Poll into your inbox while it’s fresh.

We’ve also got James finding more holes in Labour’s fiscal plan, a foreign aid policy win, $664,805 for a documentary about cats in the Middle East, and a quick update from Generation Screwed.

But first, if you’re reading this as it lands...

🔴 LIVE NOW: Mt Albert Electorate Debate 🔴

Before we get to the latest national poll, there’s a rather good way to watch the campaign playing out live.

We’re at Albert’s Post in Mt Albert tonight for the latest stop on our Election Debate roadshow, with Anna Lorck and Damien Grant putting the candidates through their paces.

This one has an interesting twist: Opportunity leader Qiulae Wong is on stage alongside ACT and NZ First, giving voters a chance to see three of the smaller parties argue their case face-to-face as coalition negotiations loom after the election.

And tonight we’re also revealing a brand-new Mt Albert electorate poll, alongside the latest national Taxpayers’ Union–Curia Poll.

🍿 WATCH THE MT ALBERT DEBATE LIVE HERE 🍿

Can’t make this one? The roadshow rolls into Tukituki on Wednesday 21 October. Get your $10 tickets (and a complimentary drink!) here.

NEW POLL: NZ First does the heavy lifting for the coalition 📊

With less than a month until election day, our latest Taxpayers’ Union–Curia Poll has the Coalition extending its lead, thanks largely to a strong result for New Zealand First.

National is down 0.5 points to 28.5 percent, just ahead of Labour, up 2.3 points to 28.2 percent. The Greens are down 0.6 points to 13.3 percent, while New Zealand First jumps 3.6 points to 12.0 percent.

ACT drops 1.3 points to 9.2 percent, Te Pāti Māori falls 0.6 points to 1.4 percent, and Opportunity edges up 0.3 points to 4.8 percent.

The changes are in relation to the September 2026 Taxpayers’ Union-Curia Poll.

So both major parties are still stuck below 30 percent, while Winston Peters is doing much of the Coalition’s heavy lifting.

Translated into seats, National would lose 2 seats to 37, while Labour gains 1 to 36. The Greens lose 1 to 17, New Zealand First surges 5 seats to 16, ACT loses 2 to 12, and Te Pāti Māori loses 1 to 2. Opportunity, at 4.8 percent, would remain on zero seats after missing the five percent threshold.

That leaves the current Coalition up 1 seat overall to 65, against 55 for the Opposition bloc, enough for National, ACT and New Zealand First to return to Government on these numbers.

There is some comfort for National when voters are asked which party is best placed to handle the big issues.

National leads Labour on the economy, government spending, education, safety, inflation, the environment and not increasing taxes. Labour leads on housing, health and poverty.

So while National and Labour between them would hold only a little over 60 percent of Parliament’s seats, the issue polling shows there is still plenty for both major parties to fight over in the final weeks.

You can dig into the full October Taxpayers’ Union–Curia Poll here.

Labour’s fiscal plan: the more we look, the more we find 🧮👀

Ever since Labour finally released its fiscal plan, James and the policy team have been pulling apart the numbers line by line for our Bribe-O-Meter.

And on Tuesday, they found something pretty basic.

Our team discovered Labour had treated a $44.8 million cost as a $44.8 million saving, making its fiscal position look $89.6 million better than it actually was.

This wasn’t some arcane argument over economic forecasts. Labour appears to have taken the Government’s published costings for changes to the Income Related Rent Subsidy and Accommodation Supplement, and put them on the wrong side of the ledger.

Once James called it out, it was national news within hours.

The NZ Herald picked up the story, and Labour confirmed it would correct the fiscal plan.

Labour Finance spokesperson Barbara Edmonds even went on Newstalk ZB and thanked the Taxpayers’ Union for spotting it!

You’re welcome, Barbara. 😇

Finding one $89.6 million error raised the question: what else might have been missed?

Heather du Plessis-Allan’s team had some suspicions of their own about Labour’s costings and asked our team to take a closer look. James has been doing exactly that.

We’ve already raised concerns that school lunch funding disappears in 2031, while health cost-pressure funding stays flat even though Labour says its $525 million Graduate Nurse Job Guarantee will be paid from that pot.

And, as I write this, Nicola Willis has just pointed to another apparent omission: Labour has committed to establishing an independent redress system for survivors of abuse in care, but appears to have set aside no funding for it.

That’s another one for James’s team to dig into.

Tomorrow, James will publish Week 5 of the Bribe-O-Meter, with a full breakdown of Labour’s fiscal plan and what our team thinks the promises actually add up to.

Then next week, we get to do it all again when ACT and National release their fiscal plans.

At least for now, James might want to keep the calculator handy.

A foreign aid win: fund Pharmac, not overseas spending 💊🌏

Last week we dragged Labour’s $5.5 billion foreign-aid promise into the election campaign. This week, National is promising to cut foreign aid to fund Pharmac.

Labour promised to “progressively increase overseas development assistance towards 0.7% of GNI as fiscal conditions allow”, without saying what it would cost, so our boffins did the maths and conservatively put the bill at $5.52 billion over four years, or $2,662 per Kiwi household.

The very next morning, National was making almost exactly the same argument, with Simeon Brown putting the cost at $6.5 billion using slightly different assumptions. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and all that...

But this week National went one better.

It has now promised another $604 million for Pharmac, funded by cutting foreign aid outside the Pacific and finding savings at MFAT.

That is the sort of choice we have been calling for.

Rather than reaching for the taxpayer credit card to fund ever-higher spending overseas, politicians should be asking what existing spending can be cut so that genuinely important priorities at home can be funded instead.

Within a few days, an uncosted foreign-aid promise went from a buried line in a Labour speech, to our Bribe-O-Meter, to National’s campaign messaging, and now to a policy promising to redirect overseas spending into medicines for New Zealanders.

We’ll happily chalk that one up as a win.

And speaking of questionable priorities for taxpayer money...

You’ve got to be kitten me... 🐈💸

Apparently, peace in the Middle East may have been missing one crucial ingredient: cats!

You might remember that back in March we revealed $30,000 of taxpayer money had been used to fund a pro-Palestinian advocacy campaign in Christchurch.

Clearly, that was just the warm-up.

The New Zealand Film Commission has committed $664,805 to Cats in Conflict, a feature documentary filmed in Israel and Palestine exploring whether a shared love of cats can be used as a “weapon for peace”.

More than $660,000 of taxpayer money. On a documentary about cats in the Middle East.

There is a pretty simple test for government spending: is this really something taxpayers should be forced to fund?

With the Government borrowing billions, debt interest eating into the Budget, and genuinely important services competing for money, a documentary about cats in the Middle East should not be anywhere near the front of the queue.

If filmmakers think it is a great idea, good luck to them. Find an audience, find investors, crowdfund it, sell it to a streaming service.

We're pretty clear here at the Taxpayers' Union, taxpayers should not be expected to stump up more than half a million dollars to find out whether cats can bring peace to Israel and Palestine.

(If you have eight minutes of your life you’re willing to lose, you can watch the extended trailer here.)

Where did all the academics go? 🎓👀

Finally, a quick update from our campus group Generation Screwed, where our Wellington member Fin has been digging into staffing at Victoria University.

After the University’s cuts in 2023, students were told the disruption was supposed to be temporary. But Fin found that Victoria still has 62 fewer full-time-equivalent academics, despite student numbers increasing and leaving roughly 10 percent more students per academic.

Writing in the student newspaper Salient, he found that academic staffing is still well below where it was before the cuts, even as student numbers have rocketed.

At the same time, non-academic staffing has climbed back up.

Which raises a pretty obvious question: if universities exist first and foremost to teach students, why has the staffing recovery happened everywhere except the lecture theatre?

This is exactly the sort of thing we want Generation Screwed getting stuck into: following the money, asking awkward questions, and pushing institutions to focus on the people actually delivering the teaching.

Nice work, Fin! 👏

Have a great week,