Full Show Podcast: 16 October 2026

[upbeat music] Pressing the newsmakers to get the real story. It's Heather Duplessis Allen Drive with One New Zealand. Phone dollars are for phones, obviously. Newstalk ZB.

[upbeat music] Afternoon. Welcome to the show. Coming up today, the ethics of the AI attack ad on Chippy, why Wellington ratepayers are not paying their water bills, and it's a lot of people refusing to do it, Simon Gault on why his health insurer wouldn't cover his operation, and Wally Lewis, the King, on the Kiwis versus Kangaroo game last night.

Heather Duplessis Allen.

Right. So the question today is whether the Taxpayers Union have gone too far with their AI advert about Chris Hipkins. Now, if you haven't seen this ad yet, let me explain it to you. The video starts, a short video, but it starts with a man, a ginger-haired man, in a suit and a red tie, running full tilt down a suburban street. He kicks in a door. Inside the, the house is a family having dinner. He runs up to them, and he takes all their wallets off the table and then runs off, and then he kicks in the door of another house. A woman is watching telly in there. He runs up, takes her wallet, bolts it out the door. Then he takes a wallet at a reno site, and then he takes all the money lying on a table at a barbecue, and then he runs out, uh, back onto the street to a clapped-out red Toyota, gets in, looks in the rear-view mirror, and it's Chippy, and then the ad says, "We can't afford Labor." Now, as you can imagine, commentators on the left are absolutely losing their minds over this ad. Hipkins has called it nasty and desperate, and he says it's showing how out of touch the rich boys who run the Taxpayers Union are. Frankly, [laughs] I, uh, I think it's brilliant. I think it's a brilliant ad. I saw this ad weeks ago, funnily enough, before the Taxpayers Union released it. I thought it was very, very funny the first time I saw it. It doesn't cross ethical lines at all. No one will think it really is Hipkins, not just because the AI actor doesn't actually look like Hipkins, but because the behavior [laughs] is just so bloody outrageous. There's no way this is actually Chris Hipkins doing it. You'd have to be an idiot to think that this is real. The use of AI also is perfectly acceptable, and in fact, political parties would be idiots not to use something this cheap and this effective, and that, I think, is the key thing here. This is the most effective attack ad on Labor yet. This is 1,000 times more effective than every single one of the national MPs go, uh, going nine new taxes on some kind of 1995 strategy in the hope that someone is gonna take their false claim seriously. This ad takes an idea, that Chippy is after your money, which you know is true, and then exaggerates it to the point of being funny. But because it's funny and because it's visual, it sticks. Now, you might not like the Taxpayers Union. You might not like their politics. You might not like their strategies, but you have got to admit that they are some of the best in the business at campaigning and making a political point with a little bit of humor. My advice to Chippy would be stop talking about the ad, mate, because you are only