From speaking to people in real life who have told me they’re considering TOP, it seems like a lot of this sentiment is coming from disenchantment with the established parties and a mood to change.

Luxon’s clearly weak with no principles, and act and NZ First are extreme in their own ways. Ordinary people don’t like the government cutting funding for health or school lunches, and there’s a whiff of white supremacy around the current government with the anti-Te Reo bent that they’ve adopted and Winston’s recent comments about the Chinese. Add to that the persistently gloomy economy and is easy to want a change from the current lot.

What will be a concern for Labour is that people don’t see them as a viable alternative, and rightly or wrongly I think that is because people are not particularly enamoured with Chris Hipkins. To me he seems like a competent politician, but he doesn’t have the sparkle that Jacinda did when she first came into power and convinced people that change for the better was possible. That’s the niche that TOP seems to be capturing to some extent.

Greens and TPM are niche enough that I don’t think they’ll expand their slices of the voting pie much, and I say this as a Green voter who would like to see the party polling better.

I wonder who TOP voters are hoping will end up in power?

I’m not too sure how different this is from the status quo, except maybe it technically removes some discretion from school in cases of assault — though I think schools would suspend kids for gross misconduct in those circumstances anyway, which they are already empowered to do.

I think ACT has really just found a way to bang the law and order drum, while appealing to their voters who think that the education system is woke and useless, and slipping in the dog-whistle of schools being full of misbehaving ‘little shits’: guess who they mean by that.

I find most kids quite receptive to a discussion about the effect that phone use has on cognition and social aspects (eg. cyber bullying, stranger danger). There’s hope yet!

Ah, the ‘are we there yet?’ problem. I suspect parents will always do what they have to do in that situation. It also sounds like you’re teaching healthy phone usage.

The big difference between phones and TVs is that phones serve up short-form content on the TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube type apps that kids just flick through. There is no need to watch them for a sustained amount of time to figure out what’s interesting about each piece of media, and they’re addictive: people choose to spend time on these apps rather than doing other things. I believe that kids these days have a shorter attention span as a result of the increased consumption of short-form media vs traditional tv shows and movies.

I’m a teacher so I guess I’m on the front lines here. The thing that worries me most is that some parents use phones and tablets to replace parenting for their babies and younger children. In high school, I don’t see many kids these days choosing to read books for fun anymore. It’s really sad, and it all definitely affects the way that our kids function (or don’t) in schools.

Governments will tinker with the educational system to try and fix the growing problem of student academic underachievement, but will shy away from the real problem, which is that the level of parental involvement in and support of their child’s learning has decreased. Parents are addicted to their phones too, after all. It’s made me determined as a parent not to let phone use come between me and my own child as she grows up.

I wouldn’t be surprised if in 50 years people react in shock to the idea that people allowed their babies and children to have free access to smartphones. There is lots of evidence to show that smartphones are harmful to our young ones.

You’d think that there ought to be a teal voter: conservative, both in terms of conserving economic resources and in terms of conserving our natural resources. But I guess there are not many big businesses lobbying for these types of policies, whereas the fossil fuel industry goes hard with lobbying.

They have managed to work with Labour before. I’d be intrigued by what a ‘teal’ coalition between the Greens and National could possibly look like in NZ: I think both parties would have to swallow some bitter pills when it comes to negotiating a coalition agreement, and I suspect many Green supporters would see it as a betrayal.

To be fair, they have to aim to be in government or they’re not doing their jobs, so she’s stating the obvious. They’re not a protest party that only wants to make noise.