Hosted by Phil Goff and Chris Finlayson, Cross Party Lines goes fully domestic this week — a weekend of wall-to-wall policy announcements gives the panel plenty to work with, a centrist party is suddenly polling close to the threshold, and a government that spent three years going hard on conservation and fisheries has quietly started walking backwards.

All thanks to Frank Risk Management, the 100% Kiwi Owned Insurance Brokerage.

In this episode:

* Labour’s apprenticeship push, National’s solar moment and a rare weekend of good policy — Labour’s congress produced one headline announcement: fully funded apprenticeships for the first two years, reinstating a scheme National halved in government. National’s solar panel policy gets a warmer reception than expected from both sides: electricity prices up, panel costs down, and every party bar ACT now backing some form of solar subsidy.

* The Opportunities Party — four percent and rising — With TOP polling at 4.1% in the Herald poll of polls and as high as 4.6% in some variants, Phil and Chris give the centrist party its most forensic examination yet. Chris invokes Peter Dunne’s historical observation — in MMP, no party has ever entered parliament from outside without an existing MP.

* Conservation backdowns, fisheries farce and the ninth floor asleep at the wheel — Tama Potaka’s partial retreat on the Conservation Amendment Bill draws a pointed parallel from Phil: this is John Key’s 2010 Schedule Four debacle replayed, almost scene for scene. Forty thousand people marched up Queen Street then. The same constituencies — trampers, Forest and Bird, Greenpeace, coastal communities — are mobilising now.

Along the way: Key as the ultimate Teflon politician and the heartbreak of trying to make things stick to him, wallabies crossing the Rangitāiki River as an emerging conservation crisis and Pauline Hanson’s maternity leave blunder costing her three points overnight.

Cross Party Lines exists to lift political literacy and create space for calm, good-faith political conversation. New episodes every Tuesday. If you value thoughtful debate, follow the podcast and share it with someone who might too.

🎟 Wellington is sold out. Auckland tickets still available at tapliveevents.com.

Hosted by Phil Goff and Chris Finlayson, Cross Party Lines returns for a policy-heavy episode — a weekend of conference announcements, party platforms and pre-election positioning gives Phil and Chris more material than they can get through in an hour, and they try anyway.

All thanks to Frank Risk Management, our foundational partner and the 100% kiwi owned insurance brokerage.

In this episode:

* $32 million, nothing to show and the eternal curse of government IT — Immigration New Zealand’s biometric system has consumed $32 million and produced precisely nothing. Phil and Chris trace the familiar pattern: INCIS in the nineties, Novopay, and now this. Chris wants a centralised specialist IT contract unit in government rather than every department reinventing the wheel. Phil adds a sharper question: if the public service can’t get biometrics right, what on earth makes anyone think it can safely replace 9,000 workers with AI?

* KiwiSaver, Green taxes and the election’s big policy weekend — National’s conference in Lower Hutt produced the headline announcement: compulsory KiwiSaver contributions rising to six percent. Chris calls it a seismic and welcome shift — one of Cullen’s great legacies, finally being taken seriously. Phil agrees in principle but worries hard about low-income workers living week to week, and raises a troubling allegation from a trade union that some employers are substituting KiwiSaver contributions for wage rises, meaning workers are effectively funding both sides. The Greens launched a sweeping tax package — inheritance tax above a million dollars, wealth tax, higher corporate rates, bank levies, tech company withholding tax.

* Starmer’s last days, reform’s wobble and the UK’s revolving door — Three British by-elections dominate the international segment. Andy Burnham cleaned up reform in Makerfield — a white working-class seat reform was confident about — while the Conservatives beat reform in Aberdeen South and held on in Angus East. Chris is delighted: reform may have peaked. Farage is being investigated over a £5 million payment. And Kemi Badenoch, about whom Chris had initial doubts, is fighting a genuine rebuilding effort from the pavement. Phil counts the prime ministers: if Burnham succeeds Starmer, Britain will have had seven in ten years.

Along the way: the Parliamentary Budget Office gaining rare cross-party momentum with both Willis and Sepuloni expressing support, Labour’s transport fare cap policy and the $30 million costing dispute versus National’s roads of national significance out by $30 billion and Chris washing his mouth out with soap for agreeing with Shane Jones twice…

Cross Party Lines exists to lift political literacy and create space for calm, good-faith political conversation. New episodes every Tuesday. If you value thoughtful debate, follow the podcast and share it with someone who might too.

🎟 Wellington is almost sold out. Auckland still has tickets. Get in now at tapliveevents.com.

Hosted by Phil Goff and Chris Finlayson, Cross Party Lines returns for an episode that moves from the Iran peace deal to the election campaign taking shape around them.

And all thanks to our foundational partner, Frank Risk Management, the 100% Kiwi Owned Insurance Brokerage.

In this episode:

* The Iran deal — incomplete, expensive and Trump’s to own — A purported peace deal between the US, Israel and Iran arrived as this episode was recording, and both Phil and Chris give it a cautious and sceptical reception. Chris has read the Obama agreement and the Trump version side by side: Obama’s was more comprehensive.

* Election season: polls, Peters and the Rakesh Naidoo affair — With four months to go, the election campaign is warming up fast. National is hovering at 29-30%, low enough that — on David Farrar’s own modelling — they would return just two list MPs, potentially losing Nicola Willis and Chris Bishop from cabinet. The Opportunities Party is polling near the threshold in one poll and nowhere near it in two others; Phil’s warning to progressive voters is direct: a TOP vote that doesn’t cross 5% is effectively a vote for the current government.

* Where’s the money coming from — and who’s counting it? — Nicola Willis has accused Labour of $18 billion in unfunded promises. Phil points out that National announced its fiscal plan two weeks before the 2023 election. Both agree the real fix is a Parliamentary Budget Office — independent, empowered to cost everyone’s promises, and long overdue. Australia has one. Canada has one. Victoria and New South Wales have one. ACT and New Zealand First have blocked it. Phil and Chris end the episode in rare complete agreement: this is an idea whose time has come.

Sharp, wide-ranging and more electorally focused than usual, this episode is a reminder that with four months to go, the campaign has already started — and some of the most consequential moves are being made before a single vote is cast.

Cross Party Lines exists to lift political literacy and create space for calm, good-faith political conversation. New episodes every Tuesday. If you value thoughtful debate, follow the podcast and share it with someone who might too.

🎟 Live shows — Auckland 8 August, Wellington 12 August. Wellington is 85% sold. Get your tickets now at tapliveevents.com.

Hosted by Phil Goff and Chris Finlayson, Cross Party Lines welcomes Phil back from China with a packed episode that moves from the streets of Beijing to the corridors of Parliament — and closes with a sharp verdict on American politicians who can’t stop telling other countries what to do.

Thanks to our foundational partner, Frank Risk Management, the 100% Kiwi owned insurance brokerage.

In this episode:

* Phil’s China dispatch — infrastructure, trade and a more controlling Beijing — Phil’s first China visit in nine years left him genuinely impressed and genuinely concerned in equal measure. The infrastructure shames us and the air in Beijing is so clean it’s unrecognisable from the smog-choked city he visited in the 2000s.

* Lobbying, Gmail accounts and the OIA that disappeared — Emails sent to the Prime Minister’s principal policy advisor’s private Gmail account — from Fonterra in June 2024 and Z Energy in July 2024, both lobbying on the Mike Smith climate litigation — were never disclosed under OIA requests. Phil is unambiguous: two separate incidents, two private email accounts, no disclosure. This was not a stuff-up. Chris thinks it was probably cock-up rather than conspiracy, but agrees the Official Information Act needs teeth.

* Hegseth, Vance and the Americans who won’t stay in their lane — Pete Hegseth managed to enrage most of Western Europe with an immigration rant at D-Day commemorations. JD Vance tried to weaponise the killing of an 18-year-old student by a British-born Sikh to score points about mass migration. Phil’s response is the most direct of the episode: New Zealand has nothing to apologise for, the Yanks were late for both world wars, and Mike Moore’s line captures it perfectly — we might do anything you ask, we won’t do anything you tell us.

Wide-ranging, historically rich and sharper than usual on democratic accountability, this episode is a reminder that the same principles apply whether you’re talking about Beijing, Wellington or Washington: transparency matters, sovereignty matters, and the rules only work if everyone plays by them.

Cross Party Lines exists to lift political literacy and create space for calm, good-faith political conversation. New episodes every Tuesday. If you value thoughtful debate, follow the podcast and share it with someone who might too.

🎟 Live shows — Auckland 8 August, Wellington 12 August. General sale now open at tapliveevents.com.

Hosted by Chris Finlayson, Cross Party Lines welcomes a familiar face from across the Tasman, special guest co-host Annette King — beaming in from Sydney while Phil is in China.

All thanks to our foundational partner, Frank Risk Management. The 100% kiwi owned insurance brokerage.

🎟 Live shows — Auckland 8 August, Wellington 12 August. Podcast listeners get pre-sale access. Head to tapliveevents.com and use code CPL26 (all caps).

In this episode:

* Nicola Willis’s budget — a bit of this, a bit of that — Annette gives her verdict: not easily named, cautiously welcomed on health and defence, but carrying the familiar ring of a surplus promise that every New Zealand government makes and few deliver. The conversation deepens quickly into the long shadow of the Muldoon decision to abolish the contributory super scheme in the 1970s — a move both Annette and Chris agree was one of the great shames of New Zealand politics.

* Australia’s CGT tweak, broken promises and the lessons for New Zealand — Jim Chalmers’ budget included changes to capital gains tax concessions for investors — not promised, immediately attacked by the Liberals as a broken promise, and now a test of whether Labour can hold its nerve. Annette has enormous respect for Chalmers as a treasurer and thinks the changes are defensible — but acknowledges that the optics of doing what Bill Shorten proposed in 2019 and lost an election over are not straightforward.

* The Liberal Party’s death spiral, One Nation’s rise and the Barnaby Joyce problem — Tony Abbott, newly installed as Liberal Party president after losing his own seat to a teal in 2019, is Chris and Annette’s exhibit A for a party that has lost the plot. The old Liberal heartland — Wentworth, Warringah, North Sydney — is now teal territory. One Nation has won its first lower house seat. And the Liberal response, apparently, is to move further right. Both agree this is a guaranteed path to irrelevance.

Cross Party Lines exists to lift political literacy and create space for calm, good-faith political conversation. New episodes every Tuesday. If you value thoughtful debate, follow the podcast and share it with someone who might too.

Hosted by Phil Goff and Chris Finlayson, Cross Party Lines dive into a budget week episode that is almost entirely domestic: 8,700 public service jobs cut, state house rents going up, culture war bills clogging Parliament, and a defence announcement both men broadly welcome but want to interrogate.

Cross Party Lines is made possible by Frank Risk Management, the 100% Kiwi owned insurance brokerage.

In this episode:

* 8,700 jobs — efficiency or ideology dressed as savings? — The government’s announcement of a 14% public service reduction draws a forensic and at times sharp response from both sides. Phil’s theory: this was never about efficiency — it was about finding $2.5 billion before the credit rating agencies moved again, and the justification was built around the number, not the other way around.

* Social housing - who pays the bill?— The social housing changes draw Phil’s sharpest words of the episode: $31 a week more from people who are, by definition, at the bottom of New Zealand’s social and economic heap. Chris asks whether Margaret Thatcher had a good idea selling council houses to their occupiers and we pass judgment on Nicola Willis’ “lotto” comment.

* Defence — necessary, expensive and long overdue — The pre-budget defence announcement draws broad agreement: New Zealand spent two decades at 1% of GDP on defence during what Helen Clark correctly called a strategically benign environment. That environment no longer exists. The frigates are nearly 30 years old. Ships sit at Devonport without enough crew to sail them. Any government serious about defence has to make the career attractive enough to keep the sergeant majors you can’t simply replace.

Along the way: a tribute to Jules Topp, Stuart Nash’s road-to-Damascus conversion to New Zealand First forensically dismantled, ministerial housing horror stories including Phil’s garage demolished by the USA and Chris tormenting Annette King about childhood dentistry

Cross Party Lines exists to lift political literacy and create space for calm, good-faith political conversation. New episodes every Tuesday. If you value thoughtful debate, follow the podcast and share it with someone who might too.

Live shows announced — Auckland 8 August, Wellington 12 August. Podcast listeners get early access to tickets next week.

Hosted by Phil Goff and Chris Finlayson, Cross Party Lines returns — fresh off the stage at Featherston — for an episode that opens with a tribute to one of New Zealand’s greatest legal minds and moves through a week of elections, populist tremors and an education debate that has been going around in circles since the 1990s.

Thanks to Frank Risk Management, the 100% Kiwi owned insurance brokerage.

In this episode:

* The Trump-Xi summit — pomp, ceremony and a ridiculous mouse — Chris reaches for the Latin poet Horace to deliver his verdict: all the hype, all the ceremony, and nothing of substance emerged. No breakthrough on Taiwan, 200 Boeings ordered instead of the promised 500, and none of the Nixonian moment that a genuine Sino-American summit could have been.

* The pre-budget squeeze — $300 million less and nowhere to hide — The government has cut its operational allowance from $2.4 billion to $2.1 billion, meaning $300 million less new spending in a budget that already has to find money for defence, health, education and law and order. Phil is blunt: there will be cuts, the lolly scramble is off, and Labour faces the same fiscal straitjacket as the government it hopes to replace.

* NCEA — a debate going around in circles since the 1990s — Phil and Chris both remember this argument from when they were on opposite sides of the House. The OECD’s early 2000s push toward skills over knowledge went too far; the pendulum is swinging back; but the question is whether it’s swinging with the evidence or against it. Phil is particularly troubled by a cabinet paper that acknowledges the reforms will likely reduce achievement rates for Māori, Pasifika and low-income students — a problem New Zealand already has and cannot afford to worsen.

Along the way: a tribute to Sir Ken Keith, New Zealand’s only ever ICJ judge; the opera about Nixon in China that Chris thinks was pretty bad; why nationalising the BNZ for $24 billion is both impossible and unaffordable; a mystery special guest joining Chris in two weeks while Phil travels to China; and a big live show announcement coming next week.

Cross Party Lines exists to lift political literacy and create space for calm, good-faith political conversation. New episodes every Tuesday. If you value thoughtful debate, follow the podcast and share it with someone who might too.

Hosted by Phil Goff and Chris Finlayson, this is a special bonus episode of Cross Party Lines — the live Q&A from the Featherston Booktown Festival, released separately so nothing from that remarkable afternoon gets left on the cutting room floor.

Before the questions, Sam takes the temperature of the 400-strong room with four quick audience polls.

The audience then takes over:

* Could the Opportunity Party break Winston Peters’ cycle?

* Should political parties be state funded?

* The Electoral Act rollback — disenfranchisement by design?

* Is voting for the two big parties really enough to stop populism?

Along the way: Trevor Mallard in the audience demanding short questions, Judith Tizard’s advice on grand coalitions, Marion Hobbs telling Chris not to read The Economist during Question Time and Sam’s emotional farewell to his first and last live audience.

This bonus episode is a reminder that when you put 400 curious New Zealanders in a room and give them a microphone, something rather good happens.

Cross Party Lines exists to lift political literacy and create space for calm, good-faith political conversation. New episodes every Tuesday. If you value thoughtful debate, follow the podcast and share it with someone who might too.

Hosted by Phil Goff and Chris Finlayson, Cross Party Lines goes live for the first time — recorded on stage at the Featherston Booktown Festival, with Sam Collins moderating one final time before he heads to the campaign trail as Labour’s North Shore candidate.

All thanks to our foundational partner Frank Risk Management, the 100% Kiwi owned insurance brokerage.

In this episode:

* Council amalgamation — good idea, terrible process — The government’s three-month ultimatum to councils to amalgamate or be reorganised from Wellington draws a forensic dissection from both Phil and Chris. Phil draws on his experience overseeing the Auckland supercity — broadly a success, but built on a Royal Commission, proper legislation, and time. Chris notes the Local Government Act 2002 is long overdue for reform, and that no minister in recent memory has been willing to do the unglamorous work of actually fixing it.

* Policy by press release — BSA, citizenship tests and the art of bad lawmaking — A slew of government announcements prompts Chris to lay out what good lawmaking actually looks like, drawing on the intelligence legislation reform he led under Key — two years, bipartisan support, no urgency, proper select committee process. The proposed scrapping of the Broadcasting Standards Authority gets short shrift from Phil: abolish something, fine, but replace it with something that works better, not voluntary self-regulation with 1.25 staff members and eight meetings a year.

* Populism, Farage, One Nation and the Iran quagmire — The live audience gets the full international picture. Reform UK’s surge in the UK local elections gives Chris the heebie-jeebies. Phil traces the money: Gina Rinehart bankrolling Pauline Hanson with a $1 million donation and a $1.5 million plane; a British tech expat dropping £5 million on Farage; Elon Musk contributing $251 million to Trump. These are not insurgents — they are billionaires buying political movements that claim to fight elites.

Along the way: the mayor of South Wairarapa’s legendary gravy, Trevor Mallard spotted in the audience, the CIA being politely addressed for the benefit of anyone listening.

Cross Party Lines exists to lift political literacy and create space for calm, good-faith political conversation. New episodes every Tuesday. If you value thoughtful debate, follow the podcast and share it with someone who might too.

🎙 This was our first ever live show. If you were there — thank you. If you weren’t — follow us so you don’t miss the next one.

Hosted by Phil Goff and Chris Finlayson, Cross Party Lines returns with an episode that moves from a coalition-shaking email leak to the demographic time bomb nobody in government wants to defuse — and closes with a verdict on King Charles III’s Washington masterclass. All thanks to our foundational partner, Frank Risk Management, the 100% Kiwi-owned insurance brokerage.

In this episode:

* The Peters email — deliberate sabotage or massive inadvertence? — The release of emails showing Christopher Luxon privately pushing for a different stance on the US strikes on Iran has cracked the coalition open. Phil is unequivocal: this was deliberate. Peters saw the emails, knew they would damage Luxon, and released them anyway. Chris is slightly more measured on process, but equally clear that this kind of behaviour simply never happened in his time as a minister, or Phil’s.

* New Zealand’s demographic time bomb — and the politicians who won’t touch it — The Koi Tū population report lands with a stark set of numbers: fertility at 1.55, well below the 2.1 needed for replacement; a workforce-to-retiree ratio collapsing from seven-to-one in the 1960s to two-to-one by 2065; and a superannuation and healthcare bill that simply cannot be funded without sustained quality immigration. Phil and Chris ask the question neither Peters nor Seymour will answer: if you’re against immigration, what exactly is your plan?

* King Charles in Washington — a masterclass, nine out of ten — Last week Phil predicted Charles would do well. This week, the verdict is in. Multiple standing ovations from Congress. Subtle but unmistakable defences of constitutional democracy, checks and balances, NATO and Ukraine — delivered with wit, warmth and an Oscar Wilde quote. The final score: Charles one, Trump nil.

Along the way: Chris getting a telling off from Marion Hobbs for using the word “excrescence” in Parliament, Phil revealing Helen Clark used to ring him at half past midnight from two floors up, Singapore recycling wastewater through 150 kidneys before it reaches your hotel tap, and Chris announcing the winner of his warship competition — a copy of his book is on its way to Whanganui.

Cross Party Lines exists to lift political literacy and create space for calm, good-faith political conversation. New episodes every Tuesday. If you value thoughtful debate, follow the podcast and share it with someone who might too.