{"id":622304,"date":"2026-10-06T13:24:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-06T13:24:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/622304\/"},"modified":"2026-10-06T13:24:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-06T13:24:10","slug":"election-2026-luxon-faces-hipkins-in-first-leaders-debate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/622304\/","title":{"rendered":"Election 2026: Luxon faces Hipkins in first leaders&#8217; debate"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">RNZ&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rnz.co.nz\/news\/politics_election-2026\/1749693\/rnz-reid-research-poll-national-crashes-greens-surge-opportunity-kingmaker\" class=\"underline-brand-hover visited:text-foreground-secondary hover:visited:text-foreground-primary\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">latest political poll<\/a> &#8211; the first during the election campaign &#8211; is out, hours before the two major party leaders face off in TVNZ&#8217;s debate.<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">National&#8217;s campaign chair Simeon Brown is acknowledging little more than that the election <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rnz.co.nz\/news\/politics_election-2026\/1749723\/rnz-reid-research-poll-how-politicians-reacted-to-the-latest-stats\" class=\"underline-brand-hover visited:text-foreground-secondary hover:visited:text-foreground-primary\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">will be a tight one<\/a> off the back of its crushing poll result.<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">On Tuesday evening, Christopher Luxon and Chris Hipkins will have the first opportunity in TVNZ&#8217;s leader debate to go head-to-head on the issues that matter most to New Zealanders.<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">Follow the latest with RNZ&#8217;s live coverage above.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"RNZ&#8217;s latest political poll &#8211; the first during the election campaign &#8211; is out, hours before the two&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":622305,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-622304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/622304","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=622304"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/622304\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/622305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=622304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=622304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=622304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}