contest the seat<\/a> against National’s Katie Nimon in November.<\/p>\nThe party said in a statement released this afternoon that Lawrence currently works as an outreach advisor in the NZ First leader’s office, and had built a career around “serving people, strengthening communities, and delivering practical results”.<\/p>\n
She was elected to the Napier City Council last year and works on committees covering risk and assurance, community-led initiatives, flood resilience and waste planning.<\/p>\n
National\u2019s Chris Bishop and Labour\u2019s Kieran McAnulty both agreed that Nash\u2019s comments were “unbelievable” and “unforgiveable”. (Source: Breakfast)<\/p>\n
“Her earlier career included roles in health, business management, architecture, and the wool industry, giving her broad experience across both the public and private sectors.”<\/p>\n
Nash quit on Wednesday night<\/p>\n
Nash, a former Labour Cabinet minister, stood down hours after opting not to apologise for a text message about Nimon’s maternity leave.<\/p>\n
Peters confirmed the resignation on X on Wednesday evening. “Stuart Nash has offered his resignation as a candidate and we have accepted,” he said.<\/p>\n
PM Christopher Luxon had earlier in the evening ruled out Nash from serving as a minister under any government he leads in the future.<\/p>\n
National’s MP for Napier Katie Nimon said Nash “acts before he thinks”, and that he has made his views on women very clear. (Source: Breakfast)<\/p>\n
The text, sent to podcaster and former attorney-general Chris Finlayson on July 14 and seen by 1News, described Nimon as the “laziest MP I have ever come across” and said she was “ill-suited to the rigours of being an electorate MP”.<\/p>\n
Finlayson read the message out on his Cross Party Lines podcast last week.<\/p>\n
Senior National MP Chris Bishop, who later called Nash a “sexist dickhead” in a social media post, said Nimon was one of the hardest-working MPs he knew.<\/p>\n
Finance Minister Nicola Willis said the suggestion that people raising children could not cope with the rigours of leadership was “such an outdated view”.<\/p>\n
Stuart Nash is “channelling\u00a0the manosphere,” says Christopher Luxon in response to Nash’s remarks about an MP’s\u00a0maternity leave.\u00a0 (Source: 1News)<\/p>\n
“I had to watch the video of the text message being read twice to believe that it was real. And frankly, it’s not something I would have ever expected to hear in 2026,” she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NZ First has moved quickly to replace the again-disgraced Stuart Nash in Napier, naming sitting city councillor Te…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":539560,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[20277,111,137,43,139,69,135],"class_list":["post-539559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-hawke-s-bay","tag-new-zealand","tag-new-zealand-first","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=539559"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539559\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/539560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=539559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=539559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=539559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}