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morgan godfery

@morgangodfery.bsky.social
4.2K followers 542 following 601 posts

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Reposted by morgan godfery
deb te kawa @debtekawa-ao.bsky.social · 20h
Add the roll to this. The Māori roll is 7.3% above its 2023 election count (311,547 against 290,300) with three weeks of enrolment left, mostly Māori choosing it over the general roll. Since April, the biggest rise on it has been among 18 to 24s.
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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 20h
I think the Mata poll showing a surge in support for the Greens among Māori voters signals a structural shift as millennials/Gen X Māori rapidly outnumber the older population. This shift was emerging 10 years ago, and for the foreseeable Labour/Greens/and TPM will roughly share support in thirds
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Reposted by morgan godfery
Jolisa Gracewood @nzdodo.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Another busy day at the all-you-can-eat word salad bar… 🥗 www.thepost.co.nz/nz-news/3610... #nzpol
Prime Minister addressing a State of Auckland event on Friday, as reported by Jonathan Killick for The Post (1/4) 

“The challenge for all of us in this room is to come together, get it gripped up, sorted and joined up with one plan and then execute and execute.”

“It’s a mindset thing,” he told them.(2/4) Luxon repeatedly returned to what he called five “strategic thrusts” – world-class education, science and technology, modern infrastructure, less red tape, and more trade and investment.

“Let’s take those thrusts and execute like hell against them, and get it done. That would be my advice,” he told the city’s business leaders.(3/4) Luxon said New Zealand had a “really big problem” reaching long-term agreement on infrastructure, pointing to the Cambridge to Piarere expressway as an example.

“It’s on, off, on, off … It’s not sending men or women to the moon or doing Middle East peace or anything. It’s like, building a road.”(4/4) “And remember we’re really bad at asset management, you know, the worst of the world … Don’t freak out or take that as criticism. It’s just, you’ve got to know where you’re starting from so you can actually try and professionalise the joint.”
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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
TPM is a party largely without political content. The pitch - “believe in you, believe in me, believe in Māori” - is a local version of American-style psychobabble that defined 2010s social media. JT’s speech to the conference, which he published on FB, is largely meaningless psychobabble too
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Reposted by morgan godfery
Lew @lewsos.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
If you wanted to undermine public confidence in MMP and give life to Luxo's wacky referendum notion, probably the easiest way would be to do what Te Pati Māori is proposing here and exploit the overhang to try to game MMP for cynical partisan advantage thespinoff.co.nz/the-bulletin...
The overhang
This electorate-seat focus connects to a mechanism The Spinoff’s Toby Manhire explored last month: MMP’s overhang rule. If Te Pāti Māori wins more electorates than its party vote share would normally entitle it to, those extra MPs don’t get taken away – they expand parliament beyond 120 seats.

Political scientist Lara Greaves told Manhire that some had floated encouraging supporters to split their vote – Te Pāti Māori for the electorate, Labour for the party vote – potentially generating several extra left-leaning MPs via overhang. But she warned the tactic carries real risk in the public’s view of the legitimacy of our electoral system.
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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
TPM’s implicit strategy to engineer an overhang is, of course, genius - and I think it’ll be enough to return the Māori electorates (except IR and TTT) to TPM. But I worry the democratic cynicism within it will, in time, sink the strategy and maybe the electorates too. So classically JT
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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
Labour’s small target strategy will probably mean they can cobble together a government post-November, but it guarantees a loss in 2029 in the same way Jacinda’s small target strategy in 2020 meant Labour had no mandate for even the limited changes they pursued
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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
I’ve been in Sydney this week, and Melbourne and the Sunshine Coast earlier in the year, and the downturn is apparent here too, albeit softer. The wages are better, but house prices seem higher (even relative to incomes), and food costs don’t appear dramatically lower than in New Zealand
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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
There are well theorised critiques of the public service as the “permanent government” and what that entails, but that structural critique is entirely separate from impressionistic judgements of bloated and overpaid individuals within the public service
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Reposted by morgan godfery
Keith Ng @keithng.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
And that's the rub: Technocratic rationalism as an ideology leads us to believe we don't need to do the messy work to make it a reality, because the merits of the policies are so self-evident.
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Reposted by morgan godfery
Keith Ng @keithng.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
More of an admission than an accusation, but: the thing that makes them attractive (techocratic rationalism) is also what makes them questionable. I *love* "why don't we just do things gud"! But what I've discovered is that trying to do rationalism without relationships and community is a dead end.
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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
It’s going to be terrifying when Mr Hooton turns the Post’s guns on the left, but for now, this is just electric stuff www.thepost.co.nz/politics/361...
thepost.co.nz
Watch: ‘They bottled it’ ‒ Hooton and Vance break down National’s vote to back Luxon
It was a big day for National’s election aspirations. The Post editor-in-chief Matthew Hooton and national affairs editor Andrea Vance discuss the ins and outs of the vote to keep Christopher Luxon as...
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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
Go out there and smack it
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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
Erica Stanford will almost certainly lift National’s party vote, and almost certainly enforce her will upon the Act and New Zealand First parties. She will make mince meat of Mr Hipkins
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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
I hope Sir John Key is working the phones not on behalf of Luxon, but in preparation for his own return to the leadership
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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
Please tell me the photographs of Kieran in communist memorabilia are not AI. Please,
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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
The first technocratic centrist party under MMP was the Māori Party 2008-2017, not Opportunity. It will eventually end the same way for Opportunity as it did the Māori Party. Some interesting historical context if you need: e-tangata.co.nz/comment-and-...
e-tangata.co.nz
Did the Māori electorates decide the 2017 election? | E-Tangata
“Labour’s Māori MPs live and work in two worlds, relating to Māori voters as Māori, but also as workers, citizens and more. The problem for the Māori Party is it never did the same.” —Morgan Godfery, ...
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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
That guy who shall not be named is not only dumb as a sack of hammers, he’s also a piece of shit
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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 10/07/2026
I didn’t miss Twitter until someone described to me this incredible new poster, Joseph Mooney MP
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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
Another round of infrastructure-destroying storms. Not even a few months after the last round of destructive storms. These rain events are quarterly now. But no one in politics or media is prepared to say it
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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
My observation of Labour and National government frustrations with the public service is that, contrary to what the last Labour government believed, the public service didn’t resist their agenda. Instead the PS institutional inertia, sclerosis, meant they simply didn’t have the know how to do it
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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
The Golden Mile looks like total shit, which is uniquely offensive to New Zealand’s ancestral (English) instinct for orderly and tidy town square spaces. Unfortunately, equally offensive to our ancestral instincts is spending any money whatsoever in order to improve any given situation
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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
Every serious socialist will nominate the Financial Times as their newspaper of choice because of its ideological clarity. In New Zealand, every serious socialist may soon see the Post as their newspaper of choice because of the ideological clarity Mr Hooton will imminently bring
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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 08/06/2026
The speeding ticket story has arrived in just in time to arrest the Green Party’s decline in the polls
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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 06/06/2026
Drop a huge take. Log out for a period of time. Return. Oh yeah. Still hits just as good as it used to
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Reposted by morgan godfery
Tze Ming Mok 莫志明 @tzemingdynasty.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
AKL: held together by the Axis of Asian
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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
there are only two cities in new zealand with cosmopolitan cultures: dunedin, because of the historic role of finance and the contemporary role of higher education; and wellington because of its dense urban core and role as a government town. auckland is a series of small town cultures in one city
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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
easily getting defence spending to 3.5% of GDP by counting the RONS as arterial routes for the military
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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 02/05/2026
New Zealand is probably the most successful settler colony: the demographic weight of the Māori population is significant, so too the length and potential of its grievances, but all resistance has been institutionalised via the Māori seats, Waitangi Tribunal, Treaty settlements, RMA, and so on
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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 29/04/2026
Among a certain cohort, TVNZ is simply a cipher for “woke”, so the incentive for confrontation is in the government’s favour if it wishes to reinforce the loyalty of said cohort
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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 26/04/2026
It’s low IQ behaviour to compose a racist haka denigrating Indians as a people as opposed to simply criticising one specific individual whose race and ethnicity is actually irrelevant
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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 25/04/2026
Barry, just let it go x
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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 24/04/2026
I assume the complaint about the conduct of a TVNZ journalist in Parliament involves Benedict Collins, who is a picture of civility compared to the Mad Dog days of 3 News under Duncan Garner, Patrick Gower, and Tova O’Brien
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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 23/04/2026
Every election year I think about the time Curwen visited the grave of Sir Robert Muldoon in 2017 to ask for his spiritual intervention in coalition negotiations, pleading for his statist hand to guide the preferences of New Zealand First
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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 22/04/2026
Half of the votes National has lost since the election have gone to NZF, so National has to say NZF will go with Labour. Half of NZF new votes have come from National, so NZF has to rule out Labour (at least until the day after the election). This dynamic will repeat until election day
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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 20/04/2026
Th government isn’t amending Treaty clauses in good faith, obviously, but it’s true that descriptive/specific clauses are preferable to general/operative clauses
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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 19/04/2026
The age of, to use the British parlance, “big beasts” is over: Clark, Key, and Ardern’s dominance of their parties and PPM polls seems like a relic now
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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 19/04/2026
NZ First is cutting the left’s lunch: structural separation of both the gentailers and the supermarket duopoly. This is actually based
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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 17/04/2026
It may not be scientific and yet it’s an empirical fact that the Scottish genetic material will overpower any and all admixtures. Intermarriage between Māori and the Scots is proof of this
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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 17/04/2026
I remember I once missed an AKL-WGTN flight and I was on the “final call” list of shame and people were tweeting at me to get on my flight. This is a very small country
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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 13/04/2026
Blockbuster start by John Campbell on Morning Report. In the course of a single morning he’s back to serving triple shot black coffee. The cold, soggy porridge of old is off the menu
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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 11/04/2026
Let’s say that I’m on a 9.30am flight from Dunedin to Auckland (scheduled landing at 11.20am). What do punters reckon the chances are this flight will actually still go ahead tomorrow?
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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
In the midst of the war on Iran, it’s clear the end of the Long 2016, and its attendant interregnum, was October 7. It wasn’t Trump’s first election, or the pandemic, or AI-led growth. The end of the Western artifice was in Gaza in 2023, and history will remember it as the turning point of the 21C
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Reposted by morgan godfery
Keith Ng @keithng.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
We just read news stories from RNZ and forget the concept of political columns even exists.
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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
Now that Stuff’s mastheads are behind a paywall, and the Herald’s premium content too, where do normal people get their political news when Stuff’s website is just a portal to TradeMe Property and the Herald’s to OneRoof? The political journalism is usually behind the paywall…
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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 30/03/2026
Asking for a factcheck on the following vibes - highly developed countries are unlikely to experience dramatic *physical* fuel shortages, but they’ll pay through the nose - these huge price rises will be felt across almost every product in the economy; and - the least developed countries will starve
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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 28/03/2026
MBIE’s snapshot on stocks in-country and on the water are worse than useless. We need the curve - what is the depletion timeline if supply reduces? Sensible countries including Australia are identifying trade in strategic resources to vouchsafe at least some diesel. We need to plan the same for food
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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 27/03/2026
He’s so back
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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 26/03/2026
Mr Hooton is obviously correct that diesel rationing must begin at once, and that the consequences of a diesel shortage are catastrophic, and that a “diesel for food” arrangement is New Zealand’s best leverage, and thus the chances of the government actually acting now are low to nil
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morgan godfery @morgangodfery.bsky.social · 26/03/2026
There is a great deal to be said in favour of a highly educated, competent, and morally robust governing class, as opposed to whatever it is the English-speaking world has
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