Jane Patterson

The one-off payment to help businesses cover rent and other fixed costs will be extended to new businesses.

Power Play - Covid-19 can make or break political leaders and Judith Collins looks like a leader in danger of cracking, writes Jane Patterson.

Power Play - Parliament's select committees have been given the weighty responsibility of providing the sole line of parliamentary scrutiny this week and the government must refrain from petty…

Power Play- If you're in Auckland, prepare to be in alert level 4 a while longer, and possibly Wellington with six active cases at last count, writes Political Editor Jane Patterson.

Top-ranking officials have warned that with more than 1000 troops staffing MIQ and quarantine, or preparing to go, it would not be able to respond at the same scale and speed as in the past.

Power Play - Out with the old - in with the new? Not the case for the National Party which still has in place the leadership team which oversaw last year's election drubbing.

Former Speaker and Cabinet minister David Carter says he has "zero confidence" in re-elected National Party President, Peter Goodfellow, after abruptly resigning from the board.

There will be little to celebrate at the National Party annual conference this weekend as the party still nurses its wounds from the 2020 election, Jane Patterson writes.

Wellington's district health board says the region will finish Covid-19 vaccinations by the end of the year, and an earlier projection it would take until February 2022 is out of date.

Power Play - New Zealand may now be claiming the moral high ground as it grudgingly accepts Suhayra Aden and her two children, but its hands are tied, Jane Patterson writes.

In a highly unusual move, National has given a Labour MP one of its slots to speak in Parliament on mental health.

Parliament's education committee says school attendance has been dropping since 2015 across "all regions, all ethnicities, all deciles and all year levels".

The government is relying on people entering emergency housing to tell them whether they are in gangs, National says.

Power Play - Senior politicians indulged in taunting opponents in the Chamber this afternoon, prompting the Speaker to remark about negative public feedback about question time, Jane Patterson writes.

Work on a new public media entity continues at pace and the head of the governance group says they are now getting into the "real nitty gritty" - the management case.

The $20 billion spend-up on defence is the latest Covid-19 casualty, with a range of options to scale it down now before the finance minister.

Internal police documents show emergency housing has been flagged as an area of increasing concern, but neither they nor the government will reveal the full extent of the problem.

The prime minister has made a promise to China as she flatly rejects the most recent accusations from Beijing in the wake of this week's trans-Tasman leaders' meeting.

China has aimed its sights at Australia and New Zealand, accusing their prime ministers of making "groundless accusations" and "grossly interfering in its internal affairs".

The delicate balancing act New Zealand is engaged in between its closest partner and ally, Australia, and China will be a feature of formal discussions today between Jacinda Ardern and Scott Morrison.

The Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, has touched down in Queenstown, saying extending the trans-Tasman bubble into the Pacific is a "real possibility".

The Australian Prime Minister flies into Queenstown this afternoon, for one of Jacinda Ardern's first face to face leaders' meeting since Covid-19.

There is widespread alarm about what might happen to highly sensitive patient and staff information from Waikato DHB, that hackers claim to have obtained.

Today is Budget Day and all signs are it will deliver more money into the pockets of New Zealand's poorest and those hit hardest by Covid-19. Audio

Power Play: Calls for another look at the rules for party political donations are a cop-out, writes Jane Patterson.