Gone By Lunchtime

Gone by Lunchtime has been talking about New Zealand politics for over a decade, which the show itself finds slightly alarming. It comes from The Spinoff. Toby Manhire hosts, with Annabelle Lee-Mather and Ben Thomas alongside him, Ben often piping in from Wellington. The chemistry is the format. An episode might begin with the three of them arguing about interruptions, or noting that it is Annabelle's birthday, before turning to the week's actual business. That business is usually serious. Party polling gets close attention: what New Zealand First is doing at ten or eleven percent while in government, how National and Labour compete over which one looks like the more credible economic manager, whether a left bloc could form a government by a whisker. Coalition politics is a recurring thread, as is the question of who is really running the opposition. Foreign policy turns up too, and not as an afterthought. One episode traces how a global supply shock reaches a country that is the last stop before Antarctica, and what a punitive date in late April would mean for fuel. A special episode with Anna Fifield covered Iran, the bombing campaign in southern Lebanon and Beirut, the roughly 800,000 people displaced in the south, and how much of that had gone unnoticed while attention stayed on Trump and Iran. Domestic legal fights get the same treatment, including a High Court ruling on tikanga and what the objection to it actually is. Ben once recorded while standing in a flooded Wellington control room, describing water somewhere between knee and thigh, and the panel pressed on with the podcast anyway. That is a fair summary of the tone. Politicians are quoted closely and then examined. A claim about having people in the UK to process polling gets read back and turned over. A line about which cabinet member holds a Samoan chiefly title is credited to the person who wrote it. Live episodes happen, including a tenth birthday show with Wayne Brown and Andrew Little. Listeners are pointed toward related Spinoff reporting when it is worth reading. The show is independent and openly says so, including its appeals to members, which sit alongside a candid account of a hard year for local media. Nothing here is dumbed down and nothing is treated as sacred. It suits anyone who follows Wellington closely enough to want the arithmetic and the gossip in the same episode.