A weekly tracker tracing the stories, figures and policies driving media and social coverage in the 2026 New Zealand General Election across Online News, TV, Radio, Newspaper, Magazine, X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Threads and Forums. This edition covers conversations and coverage from 1st – 8th October, highlighting what’s shaping the election conversation.
1. Election Conversation
2. Media Issue of the Week
National Proposes Drug Testing and Benefit Cuts for Jobseekers
National announced a five-point welfare policy: random drug testing for JobSeeker recipients (with sanctions for repeat failures), reduced payments for long-term beneficiaries, and a doubled stand-down period for repeatedly leaving jobs without good reason. Labour and the Greens called it “punching down” and “cruel”; ACT proposed going even further; Luxon defended it as “fairness” for taxpayers.
The single largest media cluster this week (183 of 600 sampled items) was generic “campaigning intensifies as election day nears” coverage. This welfare policy, while smaller by volume (29 items), is a genuine flashpoint: a specific, controversial announcement that sharply divided every major party and will likely keep generating reaction into next week.
3. What’s happening across media and social?
4,360 media items · 17,277 social items · share of each channel’s own conversation, so the two bars are directly comparable
15.8%
24.5%
19.4%
13.4%
10.5%
7.7%
8.5%
9.3%
9.8%
7.1%
8.2%
8%
25.5%
31.3%
18.9%
25.9%
18.3%
17.2%
10.3%
20.8%
11%
3.9%
The Greens get more than twice the relative attention on social media as in the news. On social, the Greens are 20.8% of party conversation; in the news, they’re 10.3%.
Health is a top-four issue on social but not in the news this week – Infrastructure takes its place in media’s top four instead. Social conversation is tilting toward the health system while media coverage stays on economy, cost of living and infrastructure announcements.
4. Party Share of Conversation
Share of conversation measures attention and mentions only – it is not polling and should not be read as an indication of electoral success.
5. Top candidates this week
Luxon and Hipkins remain close at the top as the campaign enters its final stretch. Peters follows, still driven by coalition speculation. Seymour moves up to fourth on the back of ACT’s economic-reform push (including floating a higher superannuation age), overtaking Swarbrick, whose fifth-place mentions continue to track the Greens’ polling strength.
6. Election Issues
Top 4 themes this week
How are policies landing for each party?
Each major party’s most prominent specific policy, and how social conversation reacted to it
Volume and sentiment above are based on social media data only.
7. Issues to Watch
- National’s welfare drug-testing policy is a fresh, sharply divisive flashpoint – the “punching down” framing from Labour and the Greens, and ACT signalling it wants to go further still, both point to more reaction next week.
- Labour’s capital gains tax remains the week’s clearest negative outlier (85.5% negative on social). National’s own infrastructure pledge is also net-negative this week (42.3% vs 21.2% positive), despite infrastructure announcements usually landing on safer ground than tax policy. ACT’s KiwiSaver policy, by contrast, remains clearly positive (91.3%).
- On social, discussion of the Greens is mostly about polling results and tactical voting rather than their own policy: 14% of their social conversation is coalition/tactical-voting framing (which bloc to “party vote” for), versus just 2% specifically about their wealth tax policy – their polling surge is driving attention more than their platform is.
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