September 7, 2026 • 10 mins
Tonight on the Huddle, Trish Sherson from Sherson Willis PR and Josie Pagani from Child Fund joined in on a discussion about the following issues of the day - and more!
NZ First's Winston Peters has indicated NZ Super should be restricted to citizens only. Do we see this winning votes - or is this a step too far? Should immigrants who've worked and contributed still be given something?
The latest Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll shows Labour has dropped to 25.9 percent - the lowest result for them since 2024. Should Labour and Hipkins be worried? Do we see these results improving?
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
With us this evening, we have Trish Sherson. Sherson, Willis
PR and Jo Spagani of Child Fund, the Chief Executive. Hello,
you two.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
That's a weird policy, isn't it, Josie?
Speaker 3 (00:08):
Yeah, I mean, the basic principle is if you pay,
if you've paid, you get something back. And these people,
as she just pointed out, they've come in, they're immigrants,
they've maybe lived here for decades, they've been paying tax,
they've been paying into their KiwiSaver and so on. They
should get a superannuation. I feel like what's happening here
(00:29):
is a little bit like the Winston Peters approach, yes,
but others as well, where you do the thing, you
start doing the things that voters say are not the things, right?
And what you should do is just do the things
that voters say are the things. And there's nobody going out,
as far as I can hear, saying, oh, there are
too many immigrants taking our superannuation. I mean, no one's
saying that.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
But this is what we keep getting told, Josie, is
that in the polling, in the focus groups, migration is
coming up really strongly. Which is why we're not discussing it,
but there are pockets of people discussing it. And those
people vote for New Zealand First and ACT and National,
which is why all three of those parties are releasing
migration policies.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
So, yeah, they'll all be focus grouping the bejesus out
of it. So, yeah, it will be coming out and
it will be coming out from, they'll be focus grouping
very specifically for, you know, New Zealand First or ACT voters,
potential voters.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Right. So I get that.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
But, you know, it's just a bit of, it ends
up feeling like misinformation, right? Because there is just isn't
a big issue here. And also, if you look at
what grows our economy, it's migration, it's interest rates going down, up, whatever,
the cycle of interest rates, it's the lack of productivity
or the increase in productivity. We need migrants. So, you know,
(01:42):
why get into this fight, really? It's not a big
vote winner, I don't think.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
I think, once again, this is a headline dressed up
as an actual policy for New Zealand First, and it
is just banging the anti-immigration drum. A couple of examples
here to just see why this is the wrong thing.
So you've got two people, right? Person A, permanent resident,
lived here for 35 years, worked here, raised a family here,
(02:07):
paid tax throughout, but never bothered to take citizenship. Person B,
someone who arrives later, becomes a citizen after meeting the
minimum eligibility period. if Winston's argument is contribution, how can
you seriously argue that person B has a higher eligibility
than person A? So I think this falls down on
(02:27):
this measure. The other thing that I found interesting yesterday
in their announcement, I think they got their numbers wrong
because they were referencing a figure, I think, of we're
paying a billion dollars a year to these people who
shouldn't be eligible. And they said that's $ 2 million a
week for this group are receiving. But that only adds
(02:49):
up to about $ 104 million. I think they might have
meant either $ 20 million a week or they've got their
total figure wrong.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
There's another point here, though, that if you start doing
the targeting thing, and I'm a supporter of the universality
of our superannuation. We're one of nine countries, not that many,
who have universal super. And as a result, we don't
have elderly people living on the streets because they can't
pay the bills when they're old, right? So you start
doing this targeting where you're going, ah, we're going to target,
(03:17):
you know, you're not a resident, we're going to target you.
Then we're going to target, I don't know, people who
don't pay, don't work for longer years or something or other, right?
You start doing the targeting, you start saying, oh, you
earn too much. We're not going to give you superannuation. Well,
then you're starting to really diminish that universality of superannuation
and which has been an absolute winner in New Zealand.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
And before you know it, you've got elderly poverty.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
But this comes back to the bigger theme we've just
all been discussing, this election. It's all very meh and
it's all populist slop. So if you are serious about
looking at the problem, the big wave of superannuation payments
we've got, You have to look at the age of eligibility,
and you have to put in a suite of other
measures around it, and you should be talking about KiwiSaver
(04:02):
as well.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
And that's why Winston's doing it, right? Because he's not
prepared to look at the age of eligibility. He knows
he's got to come up with something, so he's gone, oh, I'll.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
Target the immigrants. It's the old peanuts under the cup. Oh, 100%.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
Okay, I want to talk about Labour next, so let's
take a break. Back of the huddle, Trish Hearson and
Joseph O'Garney. Trish, what do you make of Labour and
where they're sitting in the polling?
Speaker 2 (04:20):
I agree with your assessment that Hipkins isn't the drag
on Labour's party vote that Luxon has been on Nationals.
I think what we are finally starting to see now
in the polls is the fact that Labour hasn't even
got the campaign bus turned on, let alone backed it
out of the garage. Look at this weekend. We had
(04:43):
three policy announcements. We had New Zealand First, Greens and Nationals.
nothing from Labour. And every weekend.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
And you had ACT. And we had ACT. We did.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
So every weekend this year, everyone else has been on
this vibe, right? Sunday's your day, all get out, nothing
from Labour. Slightly different thought on this, though. If I
were both Chris Luxon and Chris Hipkins, I would be
going and reading very carefully the speech that the Māori
Queen gave on Saturday. It was an exceptional speech about
(05:19):
leadership and vision, about building a picture of the future
you want to take people on, about leaving the past
behind and setting out what the future looks like. And
I think that's why we are finding both of these
leaders so disappointing, but Chris Hipkins particularly. I could tell
you pretty much everything Chris Hipkins stands against. There's very
(05:41):
little I could tell you that he stands for in
terms of the future itself. of New Zealand. And the
way I'm starting to feel about this is the difference
between when I look at the Waitemata Harbour versus the
Hutt River. Waitemata Harbour, sparkly and interesting. Hutt River, that
feels like Chris Hipkins to me.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
How dare you, you Auckland person, you.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
I refute that.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
The Hutt River driving down that motorway on a grey Sunday.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
On the shallow bits as well. Oh, very bad.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
But you're absolutely right that it does feel like both
Labour and National are it's charge of the lightweight brigade,
isn't it? That just not, you know, I mean, I
think I said last week, they're wandering around the country,
travelling around, meeting people, stirring up apathy. No one's getting excited, right?
No one's, and you talked about it before, Heather, you know,
people want vision. But with labour, it's a particular problem.
(06:30):
It's the small target problem. And there are two problems
with that. One is, look at someone like Keir Starmer
in the UK. He did a small target campaign, won
a landslide, but then got buried by his own landslide.
So that's the problem. You might win an election, but
you're going to be a terrible government. And the other
problem with the small target strategy, you look at Peter
Dutton across the ditch in Australia. He ran a small
(06:54):
target campaign. For years, the Liberals were ahead in the polls.
Then it came closer and closer and closer to the
election and just failed. So it was a failure on
the Liberals' part, and Labor's now doing the same.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
Because eventually you have to say what you stand for.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
More importantly, you have to deal with the frictions in
your own party. So I look at Labor now. There
are people in that party who still want to see
a ban on oil and gas. There are people in
the party who want to see, I don't know, gas.
banning social media giants or wealth tax or whatever, right,
or bigger capital gains tax. There's a whole lot of
(07:32):
different points of view. You can't deal with those differences
by having a small enough target that everybody agrees that.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
They like white bread. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:42):
Okay, you're going to try and do a Keir Starmer,
but Chris and the Labour Party here are not the
Labour Party in the UK after 14 years of appalling
Tory rule. So that's not going to work. So they're
going to end up like Peter Dutton, where he just
absolutely face-planted on the election. And elections are not earthquakes.
They're aftershocks. So if they leave it too late, then
(08:05):
the public have already had an earthquake. They've already made
up their mind. They've already gone, these are the issues
that are important to me. And they're just going to go,
you're a small target party.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
Well, Labour has been frothing over National's internal schmuzzle. If
I were in the Labour caucus, my question to Chris
Hipkins would be, how are we polling around 25% given
that schmuzzle?
Speaker 1 (08:28):
I think they go lower, Trish, than 26%.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
Well, and here's the other thing I would say to,
God help me saying things to Labour Party strategists, but.
Speaker 3 (08:38):
Thanks a lot, Trish.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
Learn the lesson from the last campaign. You ignore the
Newstalk ZB audience, and particularly Auckland, at your peril. I
think one of the reasons that Labour lost Auckland so
strongly last election was when Jacinda Ardern turned off appearances.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
On Mike Hosking.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
And Labour now appears to be doing the same thing.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
And I'll give you one other example. You remember when
Jacinda resigned and Chippy came out and he had a baseball,
dusty baseball cap on and dirty dog glasses.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
Oh, yeah. And it looked great.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
And he talked about a policy bonfire.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
No, it looked really good. Working class.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
It looked like my family.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
The working class loved it.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
And everyone went, this is different to the, you know,
Vogue dressing designer Jacinda, right? And everyone got excited. And
he was going to chuck everything on the policy bonfire. Well,
now he wears a sort of slightly oversized suit. He
looks like a teenager who's been forced to be best
man at his mother's third wedding.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
I just don't think he is not comfortable as a
people person. And from here, as we've spoken about, The
leaders that are going to do well in this campaign
are the ones that can actually connect and make voters
feel something. And as I say, right now, I'm feeling
like I feel driving by the Hutt River on a
Sunday on the rare occasion I do.
Speaker 3 (09:58):
Enough about the Hutt River there.
Speaker 2 (09:59):
Trish.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
I'm sorry, but it's, you know.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
He should go back to the dirty dog glasses and
the baseball cap and just be him. You know, I
feel like he's just, he's lost a sense of himself.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
Is that him though? Is that him? Yeah, no, I
think that's him. Yeah, he's changed since he's got skinny,
isn't he? It's not me, it's you. Yeah, it's not
as fun anymore. It was more fun when he was fat.
All right, guys, really appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
I can't believe you just said that.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
If he's not coming on the show to defend himself,
he can say anything.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
You can say anything.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
It's open slather. It's the vacuum that we're filling. Getting
rid of the broadcasting. BSA's gone, I don't care. BSA,
so that's okay. Trish Hurston, Joseph O'Garney. Well, Chippy, come
on the show. For more from Heather Duplessy-Allen Drive, listen
live to Newstalk ZB from 4pm weekdays or follow the
podcast on iHeartRadio.
With us this evening, we have Trish Sherson. Sherson, Willis
PR and Jo Spagani of Child Fund, the Chief Executive. Hello,
you two.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
That's a weird policy, isn't it, Josie?
Speaker 3 (00:08):
Yeah, I mean, the basic principle is if you pay,
if you've paid, you get something back. And these people,
as she just pointed out, they've come in, they're immigrants,
they've maybe lived here for decades, they've been paying tax,
they've been paying into their KiwiSaver and so on. They
should get a superannuation. I feel like what's happening here
(00:29):
is a little bit like the Winston Peters approach, yes,
but others as well, where you do the thing, you
start doing the things that voters say are not the things, right?
And what you should do is just do the things
that voters say are the things. And there's nobody going out,
as far as I can hear, saying, oh, there are
too many immigrants taking our superannuation. I mean, no one's
saying that.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
But this is what we keep getting told, Josie, is
that in the polling, in the focus groups, migration is
coming up really strongly. Which is why we're not discussing it,
but there are pockets of people discussing it. And those
people vote for New Zealand First and ACT and National,
which is why all three of those parties are releasing
migration policies.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
So, yeah, they'll all be focus grouping the bejesus out
of it. So, yeah, it will be coming out and
it will be coming out from, they'll be focus grouping
very specifically for, you know, New Zealand First or ACT voters,
potential voters.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Right. So I get that.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
But, you know, it's just a bit of, it ends
up feeling like misinformation, right? Because there is just isn't
a big issue here. And also, if you look at
what grows our economy, it's migration, it's interest rates going down, up, whatever,
the cycle of interest rates, it's the lack of productivity
or the increase in productivity. We need migrants. So, you know,
(01:42):
why get into this fight, really? It's not a big
vote winner, I don't think.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
I think, once again, this is a headline dressed up
as an actual policy for New Zealand First, and it
is just banging the anti-immigration drum. A couple of examples
here to just see why this is the wrong thing.
So you've got two people, right? Person A, permanent resident,
lived here for 35 years, worked here, raised a family here,
(02:07):
paid tax throughout, but never bothered to take citizenship. Person B,
someone who arrives later, becomes a citizen after meeting the
minimum eligibility period. if Winston's argument is contribution, how can
you seriously argue that person B has a higher eligibility
than person A? So I think this falls down on
(02:27):
this measure. The other thing that I found interesting yesterday
in their announcement, I think they got their numbers wrong
because they were referencing a figure, I think, of we're
paying a billion dollars a year to these people who
shouldn't be eligible. And they said that's $ 2 million a
week for this group are receiving. But that only adds
(02:49):
up to about $ 104 million. I think they might have
meant either $ 20 million a week or they've got their
total figure wrong.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
There's another point here, though, that if you start doing
the targeting thing, and I'm a supporter of the universality
of our superannuation. We're one of nine countries, not that many,
who have universal super. And as a result, we don't
have elderly people living on the streets because they can't
pay the bills when they're old, right? So you start
doing this targeting where you're going, ah, we're going to target,
(03:17):
you know, you're not a resident, we're going to target you.
Then we're going to target, I don't know, people who
don't pay, don't work for longer years or something or other, right?
You start doing the targeting, you start saying, oh, you
earn too much. We're not going to give you superannuation. Well,
then you're starting to really diminish that universality of superannuation
and which has been an absolute winner in New Zealand.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
And before you know it, you've got elderly poverty.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
But this comes back to the bigger theme we've just
all been discussing, this election. It's all very meh and
it's all populist slop. So if you are serious about
looking at the problem, the big wave of superannuation payments
we've got, You have to look at the age of eligibility,
and you have to put in a suite of other
measures around it, and you should be talking about KiwiSaver
(04:02):
as well.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
And that's why Winston's doing it, right? Because he's not
prepared to look at the age of eligibility. He knows
he's got to come up with something, so he's gone, oh, I'll.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
Target the immigrants. It's the old peanuts under the cup. Oh, 100%.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
Okay, I want to talk about Labour next, so let's
take a break. Back of the huddle, Trish Hearson and
Joseph O'Garney. Trish, what do you make of Labour and
where they're sitting in the polling?
Speaker 2 (04:20):
I agree with your assessment that Hipkins isn't the drag
on Labour's party vote that Luxon has been on Nationals.
I think what we are finally starting to see now
in the polls is the fact that Labour hasn't even
got the campaign bus turned on, let alone backed it
out of the garage. Look at this weekend. We had
(04:43):
three policy announcements. We had New Zealand First, Greens and Nationals.
nothing from Labour. And every weekend.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
And you had ACT. And we had ACT. We did.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
So every weekend this year, everyone else has been on
this vibe, right? Sunday's your day, all get out, nothing
from Labour. Slightly different thought on this, though. If I
were both Chris Luxon and Chris Hipkins, I would be
going and reading very carefully the speech that the Māori
Queen gave on Saturday. It was an exceptional speech about
(05:19):
leadership and vision, about building a picture of the future
you want to take people on, about leaving the past
behind and setting out what the future looks like. And
I think that's why we are finding both of these
leaders so disappointing, but Chris Hipkins particularly. I could tell
you pretty much everything Chris Hipkins stands against. There's very
(05:41):
little I could tell you that he stands for in
terms of the future itself. of New Zealand. And the
way I'm starting to feel about this is the difference
between when I look at the Waitemata Harbour versus the
Hutt River. Waitemata Harbour, sparkly and interesting. Hutt River, that
feels like Chris Hipkins to me.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
How dare you, you Auckland person, you.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
I refute that.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
The Hutt River driving down that motorway on a grey Sunday.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
On the shallow bits as well. Oh, very bad.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
But you're absolutely right that it does feel like both
Labour and National are it's charge of the lightweight brigade,
isn't it? That just not, you know, I mean, I
think I said last week, they're wandering around the country,
travelling around, meeting people, stirring up apathy. No one's getting excited, right?
No one's, and you talked about it before, Heather, you know,
people want vision. But with labour, it's a particular problem.
(06:30):
It's the small target problem. And there are two problems
with that. One is, look at someone like Keir Starmer
in the UK. He did a small target campaign, won
a landslide, but then got buried by his own landslide.
So that's the problem. You might win an election, but
you're going to be a terrible government. And the other
problem with the small target strategy, you look at Peter
Dutton across the ditch in Australia. He ran a small
(06:54):
target campaign. For years, the Liberals were ahead in the polls.
Then it came closer and closer and closer to the
election and just failed. So it was a failure on
the Liberals' part, and Labor's now doing the same.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
Because eventually you have to say what you stand for.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
More importantly, you have to deal with the frictions in
your own party. So I look at Labor now. There
are people in that party who still want to see
a ban on oil and gas. There are people in
the party who want to see, I don't know, gas.
banning social media giants or wealth tax or whatever, right,
or bigger capital gains tax. There's a whole lot of
(07:32):
different points of view. You can't deal with those differences
by having a small enough target that everybody agrees that.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
They like white bread. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:42):
Okay, you're going to try and do a Keir Starmer,
but Chris and the Labour Party here are not the
Labour Party in the UK after 14 years of appalling
Tory rule. So that's not going to work. So they're
going to end up like Peter Dutton, where he just
absolutely face-planted on the election. And elections are not earthquakes.
They're aftershocks. So if they leave it too late, then
(08:05):
the public have already had an earthquake. They've already made
up their mind. They've already gone, these are the issues
that are important to me. And they're just going to go,
you're a small target party.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
Well, Labour has been frothing over National's internal schmuzzle. If
I were in the Labour caucus, my question to Chris
Hipkins would be, how are we polling around 25% given
that schmuzzle?
Speaker 1 (08:28):
I think they go lower, Trish, than 26%.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
Well, and here's the other thing I would say to,
God help me saying things to Labour Party strategists, but.
Speaker 3 (08:38):
Thanks a lot, Trish.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
Learn the lesson from the last campaign. You ignore the
Newstalk ZB audience, and particularly Auckland, at your peril. I
think one of the reasons that Labour lost Auckland so
strongly last election was when Jacinda Ardern turned off appearances.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
On Mike Hosking.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
And Labour now appears to be doing the same thing.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
And I'll give you one other example. You remember when
Jacinda resigned and Chippy came out and he had a baseball,
dusty baseball cap on and dirty dog glasses.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
Oh, yeah. And it looked great.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
And he talked about a policy bonfire.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
No, it looked really good. Working class.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
It looked like my family.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
The working class loved it.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
And everyone went, this is different to the, you know,
Vogue dressing designer Jacinda, right? And everyone got excited. And
he was going to chuck everything on the policy bonfire. Well,
now he wears a sort of slightly oversized suit. He
looks like a teenager who's been forced to be best
man at his mother's third wedding.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
I just don't think he is not comfortable as a
people person. And from here, as we've spoken about, The
leaders that are going to do well in this campaign
are the ones that can actually connect and make voters
feel something. And as I say, right now, I'm feeling
like I feel driving by the Hutt River on a
Sunday on the rare occasion I do.
Speaker 3 (09:58):
Enough about the Hutt River there.
Speaker 2 (09:59):
Trish.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
I'm sorry, but it's, you know.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
He should go back to the dirty dog glasses and
the baseball cap and just be him. You know, I
feel like he's just, he's lost a sense of himself.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
Is that him though? Is that him? Yeah, no, I
think that's him. Yeah, he's changed since he's got skinny,
isn't he? It's not me, it's you. Yeah, it's not
as fun anymore. It was more fun when he was fat.
All right, guys, really appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
I can't believe you just said that.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
If he's not coming on the show to defend himself,
he can say anything.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
You can say anything.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
It's open slather. It's the vacuum that we're filling. Getting
rid of the broadcasting. BSA's gone, I don't care. BSA,
so that's okay. Trish Hurston, Joseph O'Garney. Well, Chippy, come
on the show. For more from Heather Duplessy-Allen Drive, listen
live to Newstalk ZB from 4pm weekdays or follow the
podcast on iHeartRadio.
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