Tuesday 25th of November 2025
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a detour via new zealand....

All we had to do was survive until 25. Remember that jaunty little phrase? Now, here we are, limping to the end of a year in which we’ve experienced the highest unemployment numbers since 1994 and felt GDP contract like we were 10cm dilated. 

Living in New Zealand in 2025 has resembled living in a dying marriage. You can remember a time when things were good, but that feels so long ago now and you’re struggling to see a future. 

 

Surviving New Zealand’s economy feels like living in a dying marriage

 

Veronica Schmidt

It’s a dangerous place to be. When night after night you’re eating dinner in silence – tossing weak smiles at the kids – you start longing to be somewhere else, with anyone else. Then, one night, there’s Australia in a tight-fitting top and you find yourself ogling its assets.

In the year to September, a record number of New Zealand citizens – almost 73,000 – left the country, with an estimated 58% of them heading to Australia.

The rest of us just keep hanging on, hoping – even after years of high inflation followed by a slow grind through economic wasteland – that we can still work it out. 

New Zealand, with its dead marriage vibes, desperately needs a rom-com, act-three turning point. Flag down a taxi, dammit. Follow that car, leap out in the rain and tell us you’ve changed, that it’s all going to be different now.

But, we all know we’re unlikely to feel a dramatic change before the end of this miserable year, which was talked up to such great heights, whence it squatted and shat on us. 

As December closes in, we must, instead, turn our rheumy eyes to 2026 and attempt to gather a fresh bunch of hope. Some have attempted a new rallying cry: Stay in the mix until 26. Bwa bwa bwaah. Even the type of folk who like coining phrases are too ground down to do their best work.

It will fall to next year’s campaigning politicians to convince us they are the key to turning it all around, and soon. When voters continue to rank the cost of living, the economy, the price of housing and unemployment in their top six concerns, they have to – never mind that no government can control the dicey international landscape, the AI bubble risk or the Reserve Bank’s decisions. 

It will be quite the assignment given we’re now primed for suspicion. Haven’t we been told every few months there are green shoots, only to watch as they failed to flower? How many times have we heard we’re at the bottom, that we’ve reached the turning point, that the building blocks are all moving into position for a recovery? We’re over being reminded what a win it is to have inflation under control and interest rates down, when buying butter remains a stretch goal.

It’s a particularly difficult mission for prime minister Christopher Luxon and finance minister Nicola Willis, who have spent two years telling us they’re cooking up a solution before emerging from the kitchen to ladle out another serving of damp squib.

In March, Willis put out a media release with an opening line that must now haunt her dreams: “Finance minister Nicola Willis has welcomed confirmation the economy has turned the corner.” It was quarterly GDP growth to December 2024 of 0.7% (later revised to 0.9%) that had her calling the act-three climax. Six months later she was left blaming Trump’s tariffs when GDP caught us all off-guard (and hollering for an epidural) by contracting 0.9% in the June quarter.

So, how, next year, do they convince us that this time the recovery really is coming? Surely, the only way they’ll shake their boy-who-cried-wolf reputation is if the wolf appears. If we see convincing signs earlyish next year, indicators then keep tracking up through 2026 and, crucially, we actually feel the effects, they can dance through the election campaign, bragging, “See! See! We totally told you there was a wolf and there is! Trust us with all your future wolf-related needs.”

But while the long, slow grind through the economic doldrums continues, their opposition (does coalition partner NZ First now count as opposition given leader Winston Peters is publicly savaging the government’s attempts at fixing the economy? Will Te Pāti Māori even exist come the election?) has the ideal election year script, already testing well in preview performances. They appear, stage left, a concerned look on their face and offer us all a shoulder to cry on. “There, there,” they say, as they pat our collective backs. “This whole economic situation has been awful for you and they’ve done nothing to help you, even kicked you when you were down! Don’t worry, we’re here now and we’ve got some ideas for how to clear all this up.”

It will be a much harder task for Labour, if, come election time, the recovery party is already in full swing and we’ve all had a few drinks. The faithful aside, no one with a gullet full of lager, dusting off their dance moves, wants to listen to Chris Hipkins telling them that Barbara Edmonds would be better on the decks and if he was in charge of party planning, he’d have strung up more fairy lights. 

The sell will be even harder if National is propping up the bar, telling the same old story of how the last Labour government overcooked its fiscal response to Covid and ruined the economy, but finally with the compelling ending the party has been missing: “Then we came along and cleaned up the mess.” 

All of which is to say, while there’s a year of policy releases and posturing ahead, much of election 2026 will be determined by when the economy turns and how fast it gathers steam. But if “survive until 25” has taught us anything, it’s that trying to guess the timing is a fool’s game. So instead, let’s all join hands and pray to the gods of next year: please deliver us the fucken fix some time in 2026.

https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/24-11-2025/surviving-new-zealands-economy-feels-like-living-in-a-dying-marriage

 

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

only in NZ....

When the political pranksters at the McGillicuddy Serious Party launched in the mid 1980s, they campaigned on a series of absurd policies. Their demands included decreasing the speed of light to 100km/h, raising the age of school leavers to 65 and the big one: replacing money with chocolate fish. While the party never achieved parliamentary representation, the vision lives on. Just this year, their spiritual successors at the Silly Hat Party also proposed that moving to an entirely chocolate fish-based economy would eradicate generational wealth. 

“It will entirely be gone if we have chocolate fish, because obviously you can’t just keep them,” Dunedin candidate ‘King’ Flynn Nisvett told RNZ. “They go off. They go yuck.” 

Where this policy falls down, aside from the obvious, is that the chocolate fish already is a form of currency far more powerful than the New Zealand dollar. For over a century, the marshmallow-filled, chocolate-covered sea creature has been a coveted reward for achievements big and small, be they dished out to children at Pohinga Valley rifle club in the 20s, presented to “crab dancers” on stage in Wellington in the 30s, gorged upon by Canterbury students during O-Week in the 80s, and used to sweeten Mazda deals in the 90s.  

The chocolate fish story is widely believed to start with British-born Richard Hudson, who expanded his biscuit and cake factory in Dunedin to chocolate manufacturing in 1884. While there is no precise chocolate fish launch date, an early mould was found at a former Hudson’s site and ads suggest they had become popular by the early 1900s (“BOYS! You can buy your girl a chocolate fish for a half-penny”). A 1929 visit to the competing Heard’s factory in Parnell revealed a machine “turning out shoals of chocolate fish as numerous as herrings in the Gulf.”

In 1930 Hudson & Co underwent a “CHOCOLATE MERGER” with Cadbury Bros Ltd to become Cadbury Fry Hudson Co, which would establish them as the local home of the chocolate fish for the rest of the 20th century – until Cadbury relocated to Australia, but more about that later.

Aotearoa’s chocolate fish industry was thriving, but there was also a dark underbelly of crime emerging. In 1926, Rice’s sweet shop in Whanganui suffered a spate of late night burglaries, after which “a number of tell-tale teeth marks were found in the chocolate fish.” A confectioner’s on Dominion Road suffered a similar fate in 1930, when chocolate fish were “tossed on the floor” by thieves. In 1937, two Christchurch shopowners were fined £8 for illegally trading on a Sunday. Their defence? The single item sold was a chocolate fish for a hospital patient. 

In the late 1960s, the country transitioned from using pound sterling to the New Zealand dollar, and chocolate fish customers were perturbed to find an accompanying price mark-up for their favourite treat. “Sir, we are very fond of chocolate fish (ie: Pisces marshmallocis var. chocolatus),” one aggrieved reader wrote to the Press in 1967. “On Decimal Currency day we were alarmed to find we were the victims of a price increase. However, we were consoled by a suspected genetic mutation which enabled the evolution of fatter fish.” 

Others were not so gracious, such as this complainant in 1969 who described the price hike from three pence to four cents as “flagrant profiteering” by Big Choccy Fish: “This represents an increase in cost of 60 percent over a period of two years – an unjustifiably large inflation. The public should protest against the exploitation of a minority group who consider chocolate fish an essential, but now prohibitively expensive, part of their diet.” The furore even made it to question time in Parliament, when Labour MP Ron Barclay inquired about the excessive price hike. 

“What about gobstoppers?” interjected National’s Frank Gill.

“The member needs a gobstopper,” replied Barclay. 

A period of economic tumult for the chocolate fish made way for an era of fun and frivolity in the 80s and 90s, beginning with Jim Bolger giving delegates chocolate fish in their lunchboxes at the 1989 National conference (listen to Juggernaut S2 here). Commemorative chocolate fish were sold at the opening of aptly novel giant brown trout in Gore, and were even suggested as offerings to Hamilton’s controversial Egyptian god statues in 1991. “People should bring whatever they think is appropriate,” said Graeme Cairns. “I for one am bringing chocolate fish.” 

The 90s was also when the chocolate-fish-as-reward concept began to spawn headlines, dangled as an incentive for everything from a University of Otago psychology study, to solving a mystery about a woman cyclist, to winning the Canterbury senior basketball championship. Its use in low-stakes gambling may have been cemented into culture before that, with Bob Jones revealing that he and Roger Douglas made a bet of “one chocolate fish” that Jones would never speak in public again after he punched Rod Vaughan on Eyewitness news.

Speaking of the National Party, in 1992 The Coalition Against Benefit Cuts marked the anniversary of 1991’s benefit cuts by awarding then-minister of social welfare Jenny Shipley with the Order of the Chocolate Fish for her “unsurpassed generosity”. In Christchurch, a giant papier-mache chocolate fish was carried around Cathedral Square on a stretcher before being presented to the Social Welfare Department as a symbol of the one percent increase in income-tested benefits – aka $1.86, or enough money to purchase three chocolate fish. 

The chocolate fish was gaining power in politics, but also in popular culture. The 1990 dictionary of New Zealand English included “chocolate fish” for the first time, while actor Jay Laga’aia flirtily asked “If I was a chocolate fish, how would you eat me?” on TV3’s dating show Perfect Match. That same year, Gaylene Preston’s Ruby and Rata also incorporated the marine morsel, with eight-year-old character Willie drawn to “the old witch” Ruby through chocolate fish. Preston herself even described the movie as “a going down to the dairy to buy a chocolate fish film.”

All this, and yet no pop culture figure made quite the impact on chocolate fish stocks in the 90s as Thingee, the friendly grey alien on The Son the Gunn Show who lived exclusively on chocolate-covered marshmallow. “Thingee just loved chocolate fish,” Jason Gunn told me over the phone. “Maybe it was because he had no teeth and no ability to bite, so there was a certain softness there, but also there was something slightly abnormal and curious about the chocolate fish, which is what many people would also say about Thingee. The two just went together hand in hand.” 

The Son of a Gunn show would receive “thousands” of chocolate fish addressed to Thingee every week from New Zealand kids. Would Gunn ever indulge? “I’m not a big marshmallow fan,” he said. “I’m a hard caramel fan from way back.” But decades later, particularly following the passing of Thingee’s “right-hand man” Alan Henderson, Gunn has a newfound appreciation for the treat. “I will never turn down a chocolate fish now,” he said. “I don’t enjoy the taste any more than I did before, but I love how it always brings back many memories of a very dear friend.” 

Gunn commends the chocolate fish for staying the course in our culture where other confectionery could not. “So many great things have disappeared – Jaffas have gone, and the biggest crime is Tangy Fruits,” he says. “And we can argue forever over Crowded House and pavlova, but we’ll always have the chocolate fish.” Indeed, even when Cadbury announced they would be relocating from Dunedin to Australia in 2018, several smaller makers stepped up to ensure that the humble chocolate fish would still be manufactured on New Zealand shores. 

One of these people was Bridgette Yates, co-owner of The Chocolate Fish Company. Having worked for government agencies and with her business partner David Shaw working in medicine, they both were aware of the enduring value of the chocolate fish. “It’s a currency,” she says. “It’s a reward for a deed well done in so many different circles of our society.” Where their fish differ is that they are solid milk chocolate, and shaped like the endangered giant kōkopu. “We give money from the sale of each chocolate fish to help save them and the waterways.” 

Even with Cadbury ceasing the manufacturing of their large-sized fish, claiming “either fewer good deeds are being done or people just haven’t been following through with their promise,” Yates maintains that the chocolate fish will never die out. In 2019, an Auckland petrol station stopped selling cigarettes, handing out free chocolate fish to smokers instead. In 2021, Seven Sharp’s Hilary Barry posted hundreds of chocolate fish as a reward for people getting their Covid-19 vaccination, while Bay of Plenty councillors spent $188 on a “supply of chocolate fish”. 

Just last month, Marlborough District mayor Nadine Taylor faced an unofficial “chocolate fish fine” after her phone rang in a council meeting. After a second cellphone rang later in the meeting, Taylor reportedly said “I’m going to be so chocolate fished by the end of this.” It’s that kind of levity that Yates says is the secret weapon of the chocolate fish. “I think something about it that really connects with New Zealand humour,” she says, referencing cricketer John Bracewell who once claimed to have worked as a “chocolate fish boner” in an interview. 

Beyond the many, many jokes (just one more from , Yates adds that the chocolate fish also is an important homegrown symbol of goodness and decency in these fractious, uncertain times. “It’s really awful, everything that’s going on, but I really think that the message behind the chocolate fish is relevant to the world today,” she says. “There’s a kindness to it, there’s a respect for other people, and there’s an awareness and acknowledgement of rewarding good behaviour.” It’s a simple idea, she adds, but an exceedingly powerful one:

“A small thank you goes a long way.”

https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/22-11-2025/its-a-currency-how-did-chocolate-fish-become-our-default-reward

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.