Episode
Peters' Dying Light, Data Debate and Disappearing Commissioners
- Podcast
- Cross Party Lines
- Published
- Aug 3, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2823
- Processing state
not_requested
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/cross-party-lines-7562106/episodes/peters-dying-light-data-debate-and-disappearing-commissioners/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/cross-party-lines-7562106/peters-dying-light-data-debate-and-disappearing-commissioners.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
Hosted by Phil Goff and Chris Finlayson, Cross Party Lines returns with an episode that opens on Winston Peters telling a Green MP to go back to his own country and calling China’s leaders liars — and asks why the Prime Minister is applying a different standard to racism than he did to sexism. Proudly brought to you by Frank Risk Management, the 100% kiwi-owned insurance brokerage. Find out more at frankrisk.co.nz. In this episode: * Peters goes off the rails — again, and possibly for the last time — Winston Peters told Lawrence Xu-Nan, a Green MP who has lived in New Zealand for most of his life, to go back to his own country. He then labelled China’s leadership — New Zealand’s biggest trading partner — a bunch of liars, prompting a formal rebuke from the Chinese Embassy that neither Phil nor Chris can recall happening before in their combined decades in politics. Chris reaches for Dylan Thomas — do not go gentle into that good night — and reads the whole episode as a career in its dying convulsions: disproportionate, extreme and politically self-destructive. * Economies of Doubt and Data of Hope — $3.5 billion, 280 megawatts and a debate nobody is having — DataGrid, a Singapore-based company, is planning a data centre near Invercargill that would consume more than twice the power of all 62 existing data centres in New Zealand combined. Both Phil and Chris land cautiously in favour — New Zealand would effectively be exporting sustainable energy in the form of data, worth potentially $50-70 billion in economic benefits according to the Boston Consulting Group — but both are frustrated that neither the government nor the company is making the public case. * Too many commissioners? — The episode closes on a genuine disagreement: Children’s Commissioner Claire Achmed has…