Quotes of the year

Work without hope is as bad as hope without work. We need both the shovel and the inspiration. –Nikki Verbeet

At heart, both the excessive respect and disrespect for Nature are the products of sentimentality, a sentimentality that leads to a failure to make proper distinctions. Both the excessively respectful and the disrespectful suppose that Nature has intentions toward us, good or evil as the case may be. Excessive respect supposes that Nature is so benevolent that nothing in it can harm Man, provided only that he is worshipful toward it; disrespect supposes that Man knows best and can perfect not only himself but the universe.  – Theodore Dalrymple

But, on the Left, casting our adversaries as stupid bigots strikes me as obviously misguided. Likewise, our tendency to lord it over others with a hyper-abundance of certainty in our superior virtue is obnoxious; our refusal to contemplate the possibility of good faith among those with whom we disagree, alienating. Liberal condescension, paired with an unforgiving approach to ideological purity, risks sending perfectly well-meaning people into the arms of our adversaries or to retreat from politics altogether. – Phil Quin

So if you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech. You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg. So, if you win, come up, accept your little award, thank your agent and your god, and fuck off. – Ricky Gervais

It’s easy to understand how expensive gift bags and millions of dollars would make anyone feel qualified to lecture other people on public policy, private morality, global warming, or the complex geopolitical issues in the Middle East. – Bridget Phetasy

We are cautious around the bereaved, as though pain is contagious, as though keeping a distance will make the loss smaller. Yet again, I find the opposite to be true – the nearness of things, the nearness of others, is really all that matters for now. We move from numbness to the littleness of the everyday, knowing that this is life going on, that no grand gestures are needed, that compassion is in a nod, a wave, a smile, all the gentle tokens. I count my blessings.  – Suzanne Moore

Freedom of opinion is a very good thing, but so is freedom from opinion—since a very high proportion of opinions, especially among publicly funded academic intellectuals, do not even rise to the value of drunken barroom talk. Oh for a world free from opinion!—or at least freer from opinion.

Alas, the social media have provided an echo chamber for cranks, monomaniacs, extremists, psychotics, enthusiasts of every stripe, the unheard whose prior muteness was their greatest virtue and highest quality, the echo chamber being the whole world. – Theodore Dalrymple

There are a range of ways that have always been used to hold people to account. We’ve now added these extra dimension where some people actually want the total destruction of that person. – Russell Blackford

Nevertheless there’s been no wars between nations this century. The last was in the 1990s between Armenia and Azerbaijan over a disputed territory. Knowing each country I’d heavily back the Dannevirke rugby club against both their armies. – Sir Bob Jones

In other words: all knowledge has a hierarchy. Inversion of this hierarchy turns children who were ready to begin learning “into passive parrots able to recite – and unable to think.” Teaching conclusions about complex processes without the platform of knowledge to understand or assess how those conclusions were derived violates that hierarchy, rendering students able to repeat the propaganda those conclusions, but not able to understand how they were arrived at. They become simply Pavlovian puppets. Peter Cresswell 

There is an insidious crusade afoot aiming at controlling what the public sees, hears, thinks and believes. This project, which seeks hegemony in various Western cultures, is no less pervasive and thoroughgoing than previous attempts at thought control by totalitarian and theocratic regimes.

But since this campaign to control the narrative has no name, and does not promote an explicit ideology, its significance tends to be underestimated, even by those who oppose the many attempts to police language and thought. – Frank Furedi

The paradox is that while an increasing number of people reject the idea of the Christian God in favour of a range of secular belief systems, Christian values still underpin Western concepts of justice, freedom, human rights, democracy and the rule of law. It’s no coincidence that the world’s freest, fairest and most prosperous countries all have Christian roots.

Granted, Christian teaching has been twisted and corrupted for reasons that have little to do with God and a lot to do with human vanity, greed and the desire to exercise power and control. But although no longer a Christian myself, I don’t think we should discount the possibility that our God-fearing forebears recognised transcendental truths that we, the best-educated generations in human history, are too myopic or conceited to see. – Karl du Fresne

For those New Zealanders not lucky enough to earn a politician’s salary, a five dollar note represents a meal, or the bus fare for a job interview. That small sheet of polypropylene can be the difference between hunger and happiness, poverty and opportunity. – Louis Houlbrooke

If climate change alarmism is the new religion, then scepticism – or denialism, to use the more damning term favoured by climate-change activists – is the new heresy.

There’s a disturbing whiff of totalitarianism in the way this secular religion permits no dissent. If you believe that it’s dangerous in a democracy to allow one view to hold complete and unchallenged sway, denialism starts to look like an honourable stance, purely on principle. – Karl du Fresne

Environmental problems are certainly real, but alarmists do a disservice to the cause of tackling those challenges when they use cataclysmic language to describe the near future. . . . Environmental challenges should be taken seriously. And just as with so many other problems humanity has faced, environmental problems should be solvable given the right technology and spreading prosperity. The world will still exist a dozen years from now. – Chelsea Follett

Americans wrongly think the rest of the world is hurting us with unfair trade practices, but New Zealand really is hurt badly by the unfair trade practices of others (which protect farmers in rich countries.) – Scott Sumner

Sir, Simon Pegg states that he and other well-paid people should pay more tax (Thunderer, Jan 23). Fine and dandy, but he should do it first. Whether in the US or the UK, it is possible to pay more than the legal minimum in tax. Both countries will send thank-you letters. When Pegg shows us his, perhaps we’ll listen to his calls. Until then, I’m not bothering. –Tim Worstall

Who cares about being accurate. The point of being a journalist is to tell people what to do. But after twenty years of propaganda the punters are still not getting the message, so Faye Flam (her real name) thinks it’s time to stop using “climate change” and switch back to “global warming”. Apparently a five year old Yale Study suggests that it’s more scary, and Flam has discovered it just in time to wring a bit more propaganda value out of the Australian fires. “Lucky”. eh? –  Jo Nova (Hat Tip Not PC)

To make housing affordable, we need to liberalise our planning regime, incentivise councils for housing development and, if privately, fund new infrastructure. If we don’t implement these reforms, Demographia’s future reports will continue to document our housing crisis. – Oliver Hartwich

I knew what I wanted and I knew that you’ve got to do a bit of work to get there. – Paul Whakatutu 

So is it time to write Peters off?  Peters has cleverly played up his part as Labour’s handbrake, just as he once pitched himself as a bulwark against National’s extremes.  It’s how he has survived so long in politics – even after the “baubles of office'” fiasco, or Owen Glenn donations scandal.

But you can only play one side against the other for so long and it feels like Peters has played one too many hands. – Tracy Watkins

Rapidly expanding welfare is Labour’s record. It flies in the face of all of the posturing on well-being. Hard metrics don’t lie. Entrenching dependence and sapping the will to work by surrendering on sanctions and failing to enforce work-test obligations is simply indefensible.Mike Yardley

There is something speech restrictions can do; in fact, it’s the only thing they can do. They can help you win political arguments by limiting the parameters of discussion. That’s assuming the argument is able to take place at all.

Speech restrictions aren’t a solution to racism. What they are is an expression of reactionary tribal politics, and a solution to dissenting thought.  – Dane Giraud

Capitalism is the best system for creating wealth we’ve been able to find in the last 300 to 400 years, and we should want to create wealth. But it has no regard for how that wealth is created, so for instance it can be created by children going up chimneys and working in factories. Nor does it care how wealth is distributed. So we’ve always known that there needs to be other systems that deal with those two issues. – David Kirk

Hallelujah! A victory for sanity and the reasonable belief of most New Zealanders that personal mobility in the form of cars, trucks and motorbikes will continue to be the norm well into the future, even as the fuel that drives those vehicles radically changes for the better. – Steven Joyce

When they’re older, Anahera and Māia can look at that image knowing they are descendants of the Māori chief in it and the English-born photographer who took it. However, I hope they will recognise the multifaceted aspects of their whakapapa and understand they are first and foremost themselves – individuals who have the freedom to determine their own paths in life without being constrained by historical events that occurred before they were born.

That’s right, none of us was there when the treaty was signed, nor were we there when some of our ancestors stole land from some of our other ancestors, and I’m talking about my Māori ancestors – don’t get me started on the Pākehā ones. Complicated isn’t it? And, no, I’m not proposing “we are one people”, aka Hobson’s Pledge. How about “we are individuals”? – Steve Elers

It’s customary these days to criticise politics as too tribal but, the case of the New Zealand Labour Party, at least, it’s the wrong analogy: in practice, it’s less tribe than sect.

Whereas tribes tend to protect their own, and forgive individual sins in service of the collective good, a sect is unforgiving of perceived heretics. Shane Te Pou

Children in arts-rich schools do significantly better at the basics than schools which focus on measuring literacy and numeracy outcomes. The arts build the key skills that employers value most highly: risk taking, collaboration, curiosity and an ability to think across rather than in disciplinary silos.

The arts train the imagination. The imagination is vital for individual and social well-being because we can only make our own and others’ lives better if we can imagine a different, a better world. The arts are carriers of hope, and young people need hope like a fish needs unpolluted water.

When schools deny children the arts, they deny them their imagination. We know the arts train us to think critically, to see things in different and multiple ways, that creativity is part of the puzzle of making democracy work. Education systems that train children how to answer questions rather than question answers leads us into the traps of demagogues and their easy recipes. –  Peter O’Connor

But the point is most Kiwis – most humans – want to earn what they own, not take it from those who already have it. – Kerre McIvor

We’ve become so consumed by climate change, we’ve lost the ability to think rationally. Which is why everyone is running around panicking about Huawei and no one is wondering about a much bigger problem: where their next sandwich is coming from. – Jeremy Clarkson

I’ve said many times before I’m proud of my whakapapa, I’m proud of my English, my British heritage. Ultimately… I’m a New Zealander first and foremost … if I think about Waitangi Day, what I see is a day that yes, that is historic in its significance but is ultimately, at its most basic, about good relations between New Zealanders. – Simon Bridges

For whereas the Left generally prefers to discharge its moral obligation to others through the transformation of society, the Right — sceptical of the grand plan — prefers to discharge it through particular acts of individual kindness and practical generosity.  Though not ever believing that such acts will totally change the world, the Right fights back against the darkness nonetheless, little by little and at local level. Without the showy drama of the revolutionary, the Conservative responds on the human scale, organically.– Giles Fraser

Which is all a long and convoluted way of saying that lamenting Waitangi Day for not being a day of national unity misses the point. There are many great things about our country’s history that we can celebrate in an unadulterated way, but the events and subsequent history of Waitangi do not lend themselves to that. They are occasions for introspection, discussion and – yes – argument.

And there’s nothing wrong with having one day in the year for that.  – Liam Hehir

In fact, it’s a stretch to call the arts a “community”. In politics, a community tends to be defined, however broadly, in terms of its interests. Those interests could be based on geography, ethnicity, sexual orientation or gender identity, or economic imperatives. The arts are a community more in the sense of the Balkans after the fall of communism – an intractable, internecine turf war based on ancient and obscure grudges. – Ben Thomas

We need people to see that this is not Paharakeke (Flaxmere) , this is not what we do behind closed doors. And to bring the mana back, the aroha back, because unfortunately, from what’s happened to that baby, it’s just gone and broken. – Lynsey Abbott

If there is a solution, it cannot be legislated. If there is a solution you won’t find it in Wellington. If there is a solution, you won’t find it in council … we need to take a look in the mirror. – Henare O’Keefe

Paharakeke deserves better, Flaxmere families deserve better. Each and every one of us deserves better. . . Whānau isn’t harden up, it isn’t hide. It’s open up, share. It’s where you be vulnerable. If we can change our family unit, we change our community.  – Michael Ngahuka

The city of sails? Sadly no, the city of fails . . . in a world of work-life balance, it’s all work, little balance. – Mike Hosking

In a zinger that already sounds dated the ascendant John Key described Clark and Cullen’s administration as “a Walkman government in an iPod world.” As Ardern and Robertson consider the influence of their former employers and political forebears, they may think Key was being too kind: the ghosts of the fifth Labour government are still firmly tuned in to the wireless. – Ben Thomas

I don’t think New Zealand as a whole has particularly valued research in science and therefore things like opportunities and funding and chances to grow are really quite limited in this country. – Professor Jane Harding

Kids will do better when the adults and the country they live in does better. – Lindsay Mitchell

You can recover from an economic recession, but you can’t recover from a President who thinks the job of the Justice Department is to only apply the law to his political opponents. – David Farrar

I am no right-winger, but I find myself unusually in the space occupied by the right – that is, I cannot fathom how property rights can be trampled on in this way, nor how Labour and the Greens can tolerate it. – Sue Bradford

The Washington Post observed after Ardern hobnobbed with the wealthy worthy in Davos that, while many were enthralled, ­others saw the NZ PM as being cut from the same poseur cloth as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, only less annoying and with an easier country to run. – Graham Lloyd

But let me be really clear: we cannot afford to panic. When we panic, we actively harm our ability to respond to difficult situations. So, let’s stay calm and start preparing. What happens in the months to come is going to depend on how we all behave. Siouxsie Wiles

NZ is the Possible. We care equally about our environment, our consumers, our people, our animals and hope to make enough profit to keep going again next year. We are genuinely world leading in our approach. – Trish Rankin

So one way to think about Covid-19 is as a test of various systems around the world — political, medical and economic. Markets believe those systems are failing that test. – Tyler Cowen

A coalition government that struggles to implement meaningful policies. A prime minister at ease schmoozing with other leaders amid the glitz and glamour of the world stage. A second-in-charge who clearly sees himself as a co-prime minister. – Liam Hehir

There are far fewer people out there celebrating the real, powerful stories of Indian migrants. Like my sister-in-law, who moved to South Auckland from India as a kid, won top of the year at Auckland Uni, won a full PhD scholarship to Cambridge University, was awarded a Leader of Tomorrow at the Gellen Symposium of Switzerland, and is currently lecturing at Harvard while running a start-up. She’s probably the best poster girl you could possibly find for everything New Zealanders want to be known as: smart, determined, ballsy … and proudly Kiwi. – Verity Johnson

We were focused on being statistically safe, rather than being actually safe, which is a trap we are all guilty of falling into. . . They all said we put far too much focus on paperwork and forms and controls and not enough on engagement with people.  Jono Brent

After three years, we have books of inquiries and less than a pamphlet of implementation. Richard Prebble

But the epidemic might well have effects far beyond any that its death rate could account for. The world has suddenly woken up to the dangers of allowing China to be the workshop of the world and of relying on it as the ultimate source for supply chains for almost everything, from cars to medicines, from computers to telephones. No doubt normal service will soon resume once the epidemic is over, even if at a lower level, but at the very least supply chains should be diversified politically and perhaps geographically; dependence on a single country is to industry what dependence on monoculture is to agriculture. And just as the heart has its reasons that reason knows not of, so countries may have strategic reasons that economic reasons know not of.

The danger is that the epidemic will be used as a justification for beggar-my-neighbour protectionism, and for zero-sum game economics, to the great impoverishment of the world. Judgment, that mysterious faculty that is so difficult to define or quantify, but which undoubtedly exists, will be needed to adjudicate the claims of strategic security and economic efficiency. Even in situations in which there is hard scientific evidence to guide us, such as the present epidemic, judgment is still required. The present highly-charged political atmosphere, in which opponents can hardly bear the sight of one another, or conceded any value to their ideas, is not conducive to its exercise.– Theodore Dalrymple

Remember what they’ve suffered and don’t make other people suffer the way some of them have been suffering because they are no different, while they may look different and they may sound different but we’re all the same. – John Sato 

Donald Trump takes comfort from the fact that it has killed only a handful of Americans so far. He forgets that the chart of an epidemic is exponential, as each person infects several people, and the power of such compound interest is, as Albert Einstein supposedly said, the eighth wonder of the world. The economist Tyler Cowan points out that it’s hard to beat an exponential process once a certain point has passed.

Last week Greta Thunberg was still telling the European Parliament that climate change is the greatest threat humanity faces. This week Extinction Rebellion’s upper-class twits were baring their breasts on Waterloo bridge in protest at the billions of people who they wrongly think may die from global warming in the next decade. These people are demonstrating their insensitivity. They are spooked by a spaniel when there’s a wolf on the loose. – Matt Ridley

Dairying was an economic sword for New Zealand against the GFC. Now we will be looking to exporter Fonterra and the dairy industry it leads to wield that sword again against a pandemic scourge. – Andrea Fox

Clearly,  however  much  New Zealanders  might  believe  there is  much to gain  from a united  front  in this  time of  crisis,  the  role of a  vigilant   Opposition   is  perhaps  just  as  vital. – tutere44

He waka eke noa – the canoe which we are all in without exception. We are all in this together. – Simon Bridges

Farming has been unloved and beaten up by the Government for the last two or three years but the Government is going to need farmers for the next few years. Cameron Bagrie

The world has not “completely changed.” What was good economics last month is good economic policy today. To come out of this recession we need to reform the Resource Management Act, have more flexible and less onerous employment laws. We need a welfare system that discourages dependence and an education system that does not turn out one in five functionally illiterate. We desperately need a health system that is not crippled with deficits.  – Richard Prebble

I also expect to see increasing but at times grudging acknowledgement over the next six months that agriculture and food are the fundamentals of the economy that provide the funds for most of the items we have to import. Further, within agriculture, it is our pastoral products that are the products with most reliable international demand. Unfortunately, there will still be some who remain unwilling to acknowledge that reality. – Keith Woodford

The size of a bureaucracy is not necessarily a sign of its strength or efficiency, any more than the selling of an oedematous leg is a sign of its strength and efficiency; rather the reverse. A small bureaucracy concentrates intelligence, while a large one disperses it. – Theodore Dalrymple

Farmers are an optimistic bunch. We’re used to things going in cycles: weather patterns, commodity prices, market demand … but we also know that sometimes the wheel doesn’t turn the whole way round, sometimes the change is permanent. – Philip Todhunter

We who are adults need to be exactly that: adults. Not spread panic or rumours. No one is alone in this crisis, but each person has a heavy responsibility. – Stefan Löfven

I have long thought that if it were not for complaint, we should have very little to talk about. Complaint is like crime in the theories of the first real sociologist, Émile Durkheim: It is the glue of society. Without opposition to crime, society would fall apart. Without complaint, most of us would remain silent and have no relations with others at all. – Theodore Dalrymple

But the fact is that writing helps one to endure what might otherwise be unendurable. I suppose I should know exactly why, but I don’t, except to say that the knowledge that you are going to write about something unpleasant puts a screen between yourself and your own experience. – Theodore Dalrymple

Laughing together is as close as you can get without touching. – Gina Barreca

Humour rewards originality, offers diversion, enhances intellectual functioning, encourages emotional endurance, promotes a sense of alliance and releases tension without dismissing the seriousness of the situation.

Out of emotional chaos, humour devises a form and crafts a meaningful sense of control.

Humour insists on the most significant forms of freedom of assembly: the assembly of souls and minds, the community of the anxious and the brave (all of us at different moments), the gathering of storytellers, truth-tellers and eager listeners. – Gina Barreca

The most galling aspect of the current lock down is that we could’ve prevented it. If we had introduced strict quarantine at the border and made provision for widespread testing much earlier, like South Korea and others, we probably wouldn’t be in the situation we now find ourselves. We all have to pay a high price to bring this disease under control and that cost is now as much in our liberty as our wallets. I don’t think there is anything to be gained at this time in castigating the Government for their earlier inaction, but let’s not give them undue credit either. Hopefully there will be a reckoning after all this is over. – Kiwiwit

  Do you really need to drown those people in red tape and bureaucracy? I think we’re going t ave to look to lighten the load on them and let business start to flourish a bit. These aren’t normal times – John Key

One should never underestimate the power of amnesia in human affairs. Even catastrophes on a vast scale are often soon forgotten, at least by those who were not directly affected by them. The young in Eastern Europe, it is said, know nothing of the ravages of communism, though they lasted decades and still exert an influence, and quite a lot think that socialism might be a good thing to try, as if it had never been tried before. Moreover, no memory exerts a salutary effect by itself unaided by thought and reflection: memory (even where accurate) has to be interpreted, and where there is interpretation there is the possibility of error and disagreement. – Theodore Dalrymple

With a full belly, everyone knows better than farmers how to manage land, and how to care for the countryside. – James Rebanks

This is our wake-up call to respect farming once more — not uncritically: we have an absolute right to want more nature on farmland, high welfare standards for farm animals, and safe and healthy food. –James Rebanks

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a column in the Listener in which I was too dismissive of the health risks of the Covid-19 threat. The reaction was furious and often vituperative – which is another thing we have all become accustomed to these days. My column that would normally be spinning off the printing press right now, said, “I got it wrong”.

I did get it wrong, but our job is to scrutinise, and I remain more afraid of the economic fallout of New Zealand’s response to Covid-19 than I am of the virus itself. – Joanne Black

I don’t jeer at smokers, though. Nicotine is a drug, you get hooked on it, and it takes a lot of effort to stop – I had someone doing it with me and we could console and help each other when it got too hard. It was also a time when I didn’t have any money worries, but really, in the end I kept it up because I was determined I wasn’t going through withdrawal symptoms ever again. I hated that I couldn’t just stop without enduring what seemed like punishment instead of the congratulations I deserved. Renée

That cast iron aversion to enforcing personal responsibility is baked in to our law in numerous areas. . . Shame (whakaama) is the mechanism at the cultural heart of nearly all successful systems for control of anti-social behaviour.  – Stephen Franks

It is as if the government is afraid of confronting and dealing with real hard choices –  and being honest on what they value, what they don’t –  and just prefers now to deal in simplistic rhetorical absolutes, when not much is very absolute at all. – Michael Reddell

 Bauer’s exit is further evidence that foreign control of New Zealand media is generally ruinous. Australian ownership did grave – some would say irreparable – damage to both our major print media companies and it seems the Germans are no better. Overseas owners have no emotional stake in the country and no long-term commitment to our wellbeing. They don’t understand our culture and ethos and are largely indifferent to New Zealand affairs. They are interested in us only for as long as they can make a profit, and when that ceases, they cut and run. – Karl du Fresne

Many politicians and voters don’t seem to appreciate the reality that every dollar spent by the government needs to come from taxpayers, who need to earn that dollar in order for the government to take and spend it. Even when the government borrows money to fund its splurge, it is just postponing the bill to future taxpayers. – Kiwiwit

As a nation, we will be changed. The economy will have changed. We will be changed socially, politically and constitutionally.

We will decide to end social isolation and take to the cafes (those that have survived) with gusto. It will be our duty to support what is left of the economy and keep people employed. We will rush to businesses that the COVID-19 Czars deemed non-essential and hope we have the cash to spend and hope they survived. – Judith Collins

Consistency, at least in matters of public policy, is no doubt the hobgoblin of little minds, and not every argument has to be followed to its logical conclusion. Philosophical abstractions cannot be the sole guide to our political actions, though neither can they be entirely disregarded. The man with no principles is a scoundrel; the man with only principles is a fanatic. – Theodore Dalrymple

The feminization of society isn’t  the overlay of feminist values. No. It’s the overlay of natural feminine tendencies. Don’t tell me they don’t exist. Most females become mothers. They are biologically designed to nurture. To bond through touch and soft murmurs. To provide their bodies to their babies (and lovers) as cushions and warmth. They placate, they adjudicate. They practice kindness with reasonable ease because that is at the core of the jigsaw puzzle piece they are.

Mine is a traditional but organic view of what a women is. She is not less than a man. And she is not more. – Lindsay Mitchell

When the New Zealand public looks back on the response to Covid-19 they won’t be judging success by whether we went ‘faster’ or ‘harder’ than other governments. Instead, we will want to know whether the Government’s response was balanced and proportionate.

Specifically, was the response proportionate to the risks posed to the citizenry from the virus? Were the short-term and long-term consequences to health and wellbeing appropriately balanced? Were the impacts on younger members of society who bear the brunt of the financial consequences appropriately weighed against the interests of the elderly members who carry the highest health risks? And were the impacts on low-paid wage earners and disadvantaged communities who will fall deeper into poverty appropriately considered and compensated?

Certainly, extending the lockdown beyond four weeks and prolonging border closures would be the right thing to do only if it saves more lives than it costs. – Grant Guilford

 I get home and just try to catch up on all the news I missed while I was writing it. As with March 15, I find filtering the horrible events through the filter of a news story that I am writing the best way to numb myself to their power. If you have to sit back and think about the world shutting all its borders for years to come, of a recession deeper than any we’ve felt in a century, of needless deaths if we don’t resist all the things that make us feel alive, then it all gets a bit much. When you get to write it out as a news story its just data to feed into a well-worn formula, a coping mechanism that also happens to be your job. – Henry Cooke

 The best battery of all is a lake. Water management allows more investment in plant based proteins, better management of waterways, and more green industry. If we want this renewable future then as a country we need to have a mature discussion about water storage which must be, and will be, a net positive for the environment. – Rod Drury

One of the lessons from the animal world, is that every disease has its unique characteristics that determine the specific strategy. But every time, one way or another, it requires a track and trace that is carried out with speed and rigour. – Keith Woodford

I write my way into a story, a poem, a play and I write my way out. One thing I know for sure – there’ll be sticking points, hurdles. Writing that flows like it was effortless and easy to write comes only after hard work. Renée

There must be many other people in these strange times who find that having the time, no longer trying to stuff too many duties and activities into their day, they can now discover the world of small things around them, and find it utterly loveable. Birds singing, leaves unfolding, spiders spinning their miraculous webs – all these things can be food for the soul and can remind us of the goodness of life even in ‘these interesting times’, in the words of the Chinese proverb. –  Valerie Davies

What other industry is allowed to steal the product of another industry’s endeavour and pay nothing for it, while at the same time steal their livelihood through advertising? Because that’s what social media does. They pay absolutely nothing for the product that is the lifeblood of their operation and that is the news content made and paid for by news media organisations.

“I know of no other industry where you can steal something and not only get paid for it through advertising but get the government’s backing for it as well. – Gavin Ellis

So let’s use every nuanced tool we have available to us. Let’s protect the vulnerable, require businesses to prove they can operate safely before reopening, seriously consider regional alert levels, and continue with our physical distancing and virus hygiene protocols. But let’s also move quickly to staunch the bleeding of our troubled economy. Otherwise, we may need to start including suicide statistics, domestic violence call-outs and bankruptcy numbers in our daily briefings. – Lizzie Marvelly

My mum has probably never shown up in the GDP. Men can be pretty shit with a tape measure when it comes to women. No offence. But she could help you with that. Run it down your arm. Around the cuff. Calculate costs in an instant. Show you where you went wrong. Pins askew in her mouth. Glen Colquhoun

We’ve been bemoaning the fact that no one wants to listen to the good stories for years. Who would have thought it would take a global pandemic to give us a window to be able to have that voice again? It seems bad taste to be observing silver linings and opportunities whilst so many are suffering however, an opportunity to connect and support our country can only be a positive for everyone in my books. The primary sector’s social licence and our economy depends on it.  – Penny Clark-Hall

The people that we are talking about now are not the sports stars, not the celebrities, they are the people at the front line -the health workers – the Jenny’s from Invercargill, they are the special people. – Sean Fitzpatrick

One of the problems with Government money is that it always feels like other people’s money, doesn’t it? At the end of the day it’s ours or at least future generations’, who will have to pay it back in some way. We ought to be just as cautious with that money as we would be in our own businesses.

If you give cheap or free Government money to enable businesses to continue, in doing so you may be destroying the very thing that is valuable in business, which is the ability to evaluate risks and to take risk where the benefits that flow are greater than the costs. – Rob Campbell

Not all deaths have the same social cost. The death of a 90 year old can be sad, but the death of a child or young adult is almost always a tragedy. Burden of disease estimates often adjust for the number of life years lost and this adjustment should be made in assessments of the benefits of intervention options. – Ian Harrison

Is there any rail network in a sparsely populated narrow and skinny country like ours that has ever paid its way? Perhaps the Greens can enlighten us if there is. The Greens will probably say that there is a financial cost to an economy where climate change is front and centre, but we already know what a carbon-free economy in the year 2020 is like – we just have to reflect on the economic destruction that has taken place during the Covid-19 lockdown.

Rail is not an asset – it’s a liability. And it’s not a stimulus package, any more than spending money on people digging holes in the ground is. Stimulus money should be spent on work that will facilitate commerce and enhance the economy in the long-term, not destroy it, which is what the Greens are proposing. – Frank Newman

If the government wants to build on its success so far and continue running an effective public health campaign against Covid-19 at minimal cost to the economy, it needs a robust decision-making framework that will allow rapid response to changing circumstances and reflect a broad range of health, social and economic considerations. – Sarah Hogan

The more the government can show it is learning and carefully considering the complex sectoral, health, social and economic trade-offs at each alert level – most likely by comparison with a ‘no intervention’ alternative – the more likely it is that decisions will prove durable.

Without more structure, rigour and intense communication effort, the gains won so far against the virus risk unravelling if public scepticism and weariness combine to thwart the battle in the months ahead. – Pattrick Smellie

We shouldn’t take our culture and heritage for granted because it has helped us to strengthen our resolve and courage in such an uncertain time.

I have found that looking out for each other and valuing our culture makes us stronger and although it has been tough we will come out stronger as a community. – Hana Halalele

It does stick in my craw that even the most self-reliant of us have all become dependent on the state. I can’t help thinking that this is seen by those in power as a useful by-product of their Covid-19 response. The metaphysical basis of almost all political belief today is social, cultural and economic collectivism. We are all just part of one big, global village, and, as in any village, every person should be concerned with everyone else’s business. Self-reliance is seen as selfishness and is not to be tolerated, and if you think you know what is best for your own life, you simply don’t know what is good for you. – Kiwiwit

As leader of the nation, Ardern is unparalleled. But her performance as leader of the government is less flash. – Matthew Hooton

Amid the coronavirus implosion I’m guessing productivity failures won’t even get much attention this election.  But they should, and any serious recovery plan should go hand in hand with a strategy that has some credible chance of finally beginning to reverse decades of failure.  Turning inwards and looking more heavily to the state is most unlikely to be such an answer. – Michael Reddell

Any one country trying them will quickly find that tariffs meant to protect domestic steel producers, for example, ruin domestic industries that use steel. And when everyone turns protectionist, the complex international supply networks that deliver us everything from cars to phones seize up. –Eric Crampton

Given that a supply chain these days can take in the entire globe, how is the official to know whose making “essential” parts and who’s not? How, even, are manufacturer’s to know, if the screws they’re making are just the ones that are needed to hold together this machine that when running properly makes that machine, and that machine is the one that makes ventilators, say. – Peter Cresswell

Here’s what politicians don’t understand: The economy isn’t a lightswitch that can be turned off quickly, then turned back on without consequence. Economic freedom isn’t just an integral part of the American dream, it’s a prerequisite for prosperity.

Most importantly right now? Everyone’s livelihood is essential to them.

Economic activity is, at its heart, a human activity. To disregard some as non-essential is a mistake with heavy consequences. – Amanda Snell 

I find myself wondering if people can identify with what I have written about how it feels to be diagnosed with cancer and whether they have found themselves glimpsing the world I live in. In some strange way it could be possible that people are experiencing to one degree or another, what it feels like to have the rug abruptly pulled from under their feet and to wonder if they are going to die. Right now, people are facing one of the greatest challenges in life that they could ever imagine, just as I and many like me faced when we were given our cancer diagnosis. No words can ever describe what it’s like living with cancer but maybe an experience such as what we’re currently living through might provide a glimpse. Like with a cancer diagnosis, this pandemic will change lives and for many life will never return to what they have always known. It will change the way they view their lives and the world, perhaps even their priorities so post-pandemic life becomes a new normal for them. That phrase is one that everyone who has experienced cancer will have heard at some point because life post-cancer is never the same again, it actually does become a “new normal”.  – Diane Evans-Wood

You know, the theatre has kept going through the plague in the 1600s and it has a 2000 year-old history. Performers are part of that whakapapa and there will always be a need for human beings to connect…and, of course, that is what the arts does for us. – Jennifer Ward-Lealand.

We need to balance the ability to be financially sustainable while being environmentally sustainable, not be expected to reach lofty targets set when the world was burning more fossil fuels and living beyond its means before the pandemic.

For NZ those targets need to be readdressed as soon as possible. We must lift the lid on the pressure cooker the primary industries have been under as we look to the future. – Craig Wiggins

One thing I do know is that what has become important now has always been important – food, shelter and good company – Craig Wiggins

Everyone who has a job in this economy is an essential worker. Every single job that is being done in our economy with these severe restrictions that are taking place is essential. . .People stacking shelves, that is essential. People earning money in their family when another member of their family may have lost their job and can no longer earn, that’s an essential job. Jobs are essential.- Scott Morrison

Merit of action should be based on decisions made (or not made), the application of reason and science, and of course, the final results. Merit and accolade should never be given simply because of person’s age, gender, belief system, or political leanings. Sadly, we are seeing a commentariat very willing to continue its pursuit of identity politics where the ‘who’ is more important than the ‘what’ and ‘how’.  Simon O’Connor

Whether a farmer, café owner or self-employed plumber, the driving force behind most small businesses is the dignity of self-employment. For some people (me for starters) that’s a huge factor overwhelming any other consideration. – Sir Bob Jones

And yet, if there are any two countries that could pull off a clear if hermetically sealed victory — offering a model of recovery that elevates competence over ego and restores some confidence in democratic government — it may be these two Pacific neighbors with their sparsely populated islands, history of pragmatism and underdogs’ craving for recognition. – Damien Cave

You are going to be part of a team facing tradeoffs.  Will we cancel the upgrading of the Tauranga to Katikati highway where there are too many road deaths so we can plant trees on good farm land to suck up CO2?  Will we delay buying equipment for an isolation strategy in a probable flu epidemic or build a cycleway on the Auckland harbour bridge?  Should we introduce tough new water quality measures while farmers are struggling and suiciding?  Will Pharmac get more money for new drugs to save five to ten lives or will we build a tramline to the airport?  Can we afford to close maternity hospitals in Southland risking mothers and babies lives so we can shift the Port of Auckland to Whangarei? – Owen Jennings

I have been alarmed to see that disdain for the mainstream media has spread to the mainstream media itself. Recently I was contacted by people who should know better, asking me to send them a copy of my column because they refused to fork out the readies to breach this paper’s paywall. The total required at the time was $1 a week. This much they would not sacrifice because of their aversion to one columnist. They would forgo the fine work produced by many excellent writers who did not have that columnist’s attention-grabbing profile and gift for alienating readers. . . .

Now more than ever, mainstream media which, for all its flaws, continues to uphold basic journalistic standards has a vital role to play in society.

As I explained at the time, refusing to share my column with my stingy friends, if you think life without magazines is bad, wait until you live in a world without newspapers. – Paul Little

We must never again allow a situation where the law allows a young woman with much charm and little real world experience, to legally take such dictatorial powers.

The current legislation needs to be reconsidered in Parliament. While it’s conceivable such situations could arise in the future requiring such a heavy-handed approach, the supporting legislation should require say a 75% Parliamentary vote. Sir Bob Jones

There are two clear dangers for New Zealand.

The first is the virus – or more specifically, the prime minister’s strategy of eliminating the virus; how many lockdowns can we endure?

And the second is our prime minister, who fundamentally believes in state control, and is being given a free rein to embed her agenda deep into the heart of our democracy.  – Muriel Newman

Instead of adding to the deficit by throwing expensive shovels at projects, and thereby taking the public sector’s share of total spending up even further than its current, very high, level of 40 per cent of GDP, let’s hold the line on spending and cut tax revenues for a while, and let the households and the business sector sort out the shovelling for themselves. – Tim Hazeldine

For a Government, public confidence is the most precious of commodities. In ordinary times, it allows businesspeople to take more risks, invest in plant and technology, open new markets, start new ventures, employ more staff. It allows householders to decide yes, we will buy the new fridge, take a bigger holiday, eat out more often. Confidence turns the wheels of the economy. Simon Wilson

We are right to take a strong stand to value life and be against premature death. What we should now ask of our leaders is that they be consistent and place equal value on the risks, both physical and mental, for all people. One of the important roles of teachers in a crisis situation is to hear students’ questions and concerns with an open mind and allow them to work their way through things. Suppressing this process can only lead to conformity for the sake of it and a deep sense of helplessness. – Alwyn Poole

We’ve flattened the curve; we don’t need to flatten our country. Indeed, we now need another curve, an upward growth curve – growth, jobs, and a track back to normality. – Simon Bridges

 The instinct of the Labour/ New Zealand First government will be to assume that a committee of Wellington politicians and officials, with a couple of business folk, a union rep and two iwi leaders should steer our path into the new economy. The likes of Shane Jones and Phil Twyford will implement it. . .

But the core engine of growth will always be private sector investment – men, women and their businesses taking on new ventures, rebuilding their businesses, expanding, hiring people – taking mad risks. No committee would have thought Kiwis should get into rockets, or into online accounting systems.

The recipe hasn’t changed. Successful economies make it easy for the investment to flow to more productive activities – they welcome investment, they don’t over regulate or over tax, they provide clear and consistent rules, properly enforced, and don’t go changing them all the time. – Paul Goldsmith

This is not a time to panic or point fingers. It is time for us to reveal our true character. Sir Don McKinnon

We need to speak very plainly about this: these three career politicians have absolutely no idea what sectors of the economy are doomed, which have a future, and whether any particular commercial proposal makes sense. Add Economic Development Phil Twyford to the mix, and it risks the appearance of a circus run by clowns. . .

Free-market capitalism works not because it is individualistic — although it is — but because it collectivises everyone’s best guesses and analysis. In contrast, collectivist economic systems reply on the brilliance of individuals or, worse, committees. Again, we should speak plainly: central planners are not just often wrong, but invariably wrong, just like most of us. – Matthew Hooton 

If you have one tenth the number of intensive care beds per capita that Germany does, if you don’t have contact tracing in place, then if you don’t have that level of resourcing available, you’ve got to focus very hard on the keep-it-out strategy. The fact that we’ve had to work so hard to stamp it out can only mean we’ve failed to keep it out. – Des Gorman

Our primary industries are the ones that have propped it [the economy] up. We can’t keep borrowing money. Money doesn’t come from out of thin air and if there are jobs there, let us work.

“Don’t give us job centres for queues of people lining up for jobs that aren’t there. We have these jobs sitting under our noses. – Tania Gibson

We need you to accept that there is a problem, see what the problem is, and fix the problem and make sure that the problem never happens again. – Dr Jan White

Vaccine shortages have dogged previous flu and measles campaigns, and doctors have called this year’s flu campaign a “complete debacle”.

It has become abundantly clear that despite the Government’s rejection of such an assertion, a debacle is exactly what it is.  Michael Morrah

The stakes are higher than any election since 1984 because a second-term Ardern Government will have a mandate and an appetite for the largest expansion of the state since Robert Muldoon’s Think Big schemes and endless tinkering beggared the country.  – Damien Grant

The public is putting an immense amount of trust in the Government as it circumvents the usual checks and balances to get us through this crisis. But trust is earned. It’s also key to maintaining social cohesion. – Jenée Tibshraeny

The calamitous way in which Parliament turned Inland Revenue into a small business lender , without a single MP realising they were doing so, is a sign that the time is well past for greater scrutiny to return.

The Government’s refusal to release the advice it used as the basis of its decision to place New Zealand into a highly restrictive lockdown is coming close to an abuse of the extraordinary trust the public has granted it. – Hamish Rutherford

No policy decision is costless. Advocates of a longer extension expound the benefits of the approach they advocate; they often are less forthcoming on the costs. The costs of our lockdown could well be slower coming through than the corona virus itself, they are costs that we as the citizens will sooner or later have to bear. – Wyatt Creech

He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum. – Nate White

One of the worst effects of a lack of understanding of risk management is the precautionary principle. This is the belief that unless you have complete knowledge about the likelihood and impact of the risk, either you shouldn’t take any action at all (e.g. not allowing the trial of a new drug) or you should go all-out to prevent the risk eventuating (e.g. locking down the population in a pandemic). – Kiwiwit

We’ve elected politicians without enough prior life tests and career leadership experience  to exercise democratic control. Without authoritative experienced oversight, some official cultures will inevitably become immune to their own convenient cruelty. “Be kind” means nothing without the leadership diligence that makes it practical, everyday, and integrated among all the other demands of hard decision-making.  – Stephen Franks

People talk a big game about moving away from eating meat, and no doubt tell researchers they are vegetarian when asked – but when they get home they are tucking into a big porterhouse. – Trent Thorne

We are very good at managing weeds and pests. Had the Department of Conservation taken it over I don’t know that the same standard of management would have been there to look after it. They don’t have the budget.

“And it would be devastating to watch it fill up with wildings and be overrun by rabbits again.

“They’re very complex places to run and if all of the high country farmers stopped farming it would be a huge burden on the taxpayer to actually manage that land. – Andrew Simpson

A lot of farmers, particularly our young farmers, have found themselves in a very lonely place in the last five years.

“I like to think the understanding might shift as people get to understand where their food comes from.

“And it’s our interests to tell our story so that people do understand. We still grow food, and we love the land. The two can coexist. – Andrew Simpson

A human life, it will be said, is of incalculable value, and in some metaphysical sense this is so. Usually we do not value people’s lives in dollars and cents, and we would regard anyone who did so with horror or disgust. But at the same time, we know that in practice we do place a value on people’s lives. We would think it right to spend more on saving a child’s life at the age of 3 than to spend it on prolonging the life of a 95-year-old by five minutes. The relative values of human lives may not be calculable in any precise sense, but where choices have to be made and resources are scarce (as they always are), we make them.

Sacrificing life to maintain normal life may not therefore be a monstrous policy, though the question of how much life can be sacrificed for how much normality is very difficult to answer, because neither the quantity of life sacrificed nor the amount of normality preserved can be known, certainly not in advance, and perhaps not even in retrospect, for there are so many variables that might account for differences. Besides, the two—life lost and economic collapse—are incommensurable. – Theodore Dalrymple

The shackles should be discarded and ministers should be open to scrutiny. If they can’t be trusted to answer questions about their portfolios, they shouldn’t be ministers. – Derek Cheng

Fundamentally, this is a story of two governments and their differing response to the crisis. The Australian Government has committed to preserving jobs by keeping the economy going, no doubt aware that creating a job is so much harder than preserving one. On the other hand, the New Zealand Government chose instead to shut down the economy. As a result, I believe thousands of businesses will close or drastically shrink, and unemployment will grow significantly.

The initial focus by Governments in both countries was quite rightly the health and well-being of the citizens. Australia and New Zealand have achieved admirable results compared to many other countries, particularly the comparatively low number and rate of deaths from COVID-19. The number of deaths per 100,000 population in both countries is much the same. However, the big difference is that Australia will emerge with their economy virtually intact, while we have done serious damage to ours. There is significant business failure happening now in New Zealand that could have been avoided, and still can be in my opinion. –  Lee Short

I see a stark difference between the wealth creators and those untouched and shielded from the impact on the business world. They are not having their pay slashed and are not suffering unemployment or the threat of it. Business owners and employees provide the wealth that funds those in the public service. They take risks, many borrowing substantial sums, some making sacrifices for years. The result is companies that pay tax and employ staff who pay tax. These taxes keep those in public service in employment.Lee Short

Those of us whose adult lives have largely played out over the last four decades should be grateful that we have lived through the best of times, but we owe it to our children and grandchildren to give them at least the same opportunities that we have had to enjoy happy, healthy and fulfilling lives. How we handle the recovery from Covid-19 will determine whether we do so. – Kiwiwit

There is not one person in the Government that has a plan or can articulate a plan.  A plan has a start, a process and a goal….not one Minister can articulate what that plan is. Instead, it’s panic and continue to employ as many people as possible. That is not a plan’s arsehole. – Paul Henry

No opinion is worth expressing that is not also worth contradicting (except, perhaps, this one); nevertheless, clichés have their attraction. They are the teddy-bears of the mind, or, to change the metaphor slightly, the mental lifebuoys we cling to in times of stormy intellectual or political weather. They are the sovereign remedy for thought, which is always a rather painful activity. –  Theodore Dalrymple

 Is mastery of this kind of meaningless verbalisation, eloquently empty and passionately delivered, the key to political success? And if so what does it say of us, the citizens of democracies? – Theodore Dalrymple

As is quite often the case, hiding in the great mound of high-sounding bilge are quite nasty sentiments that would, if taken seriously (which thankfully they will not be), lead straight to a totalitarian society. . . It has long been my opinion that inside every sentimentalist there is a despot trying to get out. – Theodore Dalrymple

Except that people will remember the sectors that helped them get through – agriculture and horticulture. They might also remember that the air became cleaner during the pandemic, and that the rivers ran clear. The environmental impact of reduction in transport has been noticed globally. The clarity of waterways has featured on RNZ with commentators noting bird song and clear water… because building and roadworks had stopped. No mention was made of the fact that agriculture and horticulture continued, nor that there had been no reduction in animals. – Jacqueline Rowarth

I would go so far as to compare the Prime Minister to Rob Muldoon. She is Rob Muldoon with slogans and kindness. Michael Woodhouse

How have we got to a stage where we think this is fine. Where we accept rules that say only 10 people are allowed at funerals but 100 people can go to a pub? Where families can’t get out of quarantine to say goodbye to dying family members and people in hospitals die without any loved ones holding their hands? – Heather du Plessis-Allan

You can’t spend your way back to surplus. You can’t tax your back to surplus (without decreasing economic growth). You need to grow your way back to surplus. So most important of all we need policies that will not just get us through the recession but lead to a strong growing economy for the decade that follows. – David Farrar

The budget was heavy in numbers. A few hundred million here, a few billion here – there were big spending initiatives for everything.

But it was light on demonstrating how these programmes will help repair the country. As KiwiBuild showed, good intentions plus government money do not automatically equate to success. But that lesson appears to have been forgotten and Budget 2020 is just KiwiBuild on steroids. – Oliver Hartwich

It’s easy to get lost in all of the big numbers today. The four-year projections of spending, the extra of billions in debt, the debt-to-GDP ratio.

We forget that each of those numbers, all of the numbers in fact, represents a bigger challenge. The burden we place on New Zealanders and the responsibility we have to them.

We forget that a decade of deficits and debt means fewer choices for our kids down the road.

The obligation we as Parliamentarians have to make sure the next generation is better off than we were. That they have more choices, more opportunities, and more ability to succeed in the world because we back them, not burden them with debt. – Simon Bridges

Next time, with substantial administrative improvement and a whole lot more political honesty (surely an oxymoron if ever there was one!), there may be some justification in claiming the government’s responses and directives as a  “masterclass of communication” – but definitely not this time. – Henry Armstrong

Whether the virus is quelled or not, in four months’ time the wreckage of New Zealand’s economy will be visible from space. Last week, leaked documents showed the Ministry of Social Development is preparing for an extra 300,000 benefit applications in response to mass unemployment generated by the pandemic.

You don’t have to be a seer to guess that material concerns and a desire for economic and logistical competence will likely trump all other considerations — including abstract notions of “wellbeing” and admonitions to “be kind” — in choosing the next government. – Graham Adams

You have had the five million locked up in Cindy’s Kindy with a daily political party broadcast with an incredibly compliant media who have been in her bubble. – Michelle Boag

Our Prime Minister is daily lauded for her leadership in times of crisis.  In the immediate glare of publicity, kindness and empathy are endearing qualities.  The cold reality is that those qualities will not pay the bills.  Gestures of 20% pay cuts are welcomed but 20% of a heck of a lot is no real sacrifice.  Real leadership involves more than optics and safeguarding political gains. It requires tough and hurtful decisions. – Owen Jennings

If ‘helicopter’ cash and ‘shovel ready’ projects are the best you can come up with, think again.  If dressing up green initiatives and sneaking through climate change penalties are on the menu, forget it.  If asking us to pay new taxes is in the budget, pull it out again.  Our burden is already too heavy.  Focus on what might hold back private sector initiatives, frustrate investors, limit progress and delay the recovery.  Prune such fearlessly.  Waiting seven years for a consent to increase a water take when your city is running dry isn’t helping anything – the environment, the economy, thirsty businesses or my vegetable garden. –  Owen Jennings

I would like to change the way we treated our farmers and our primary industries for the last while. ‘They are the heroes of our economy and I think they are being treated as though they were the villains.  It is really important to show how valuable the agriculture and primary industries are to New Zealand. They are the basis of our economy, and valuing that is really important to me.  – Penny Simmonds 

I’m afraid it’s too late to put Ardern’s debt genie back in the bottle. I apologise on behalf of my generation and older that you and your kids will carry this debt for all of us. My advice to you is to do what this government should have done. Cut costs and minimise your liabilities. Spend only on the essentials and invest in assets that will produce a safe dividend. Perhaps most important of all, stay engaged in our democracy and encourage your friends to do the same. If COVID-19 has taught the world anything it is this: politicians need to be closely scrutinised at all times but especially in crises like these. – Heather Roy

Australia is currently co-optimising the wellbeing of the Covid outbreak and the wellbeing consequences of the economy better than New Zealand.  If we don’t martial the best possible team for both recovery and reform, we will exacerbate the slide against our greatest comparator and lose even more of our most precious asset, our people.That risks a younger generation not only inheriting greater debt, but also makes Aotearoa a less desirable place to live with substantially less wellbeing. Fraser Whineray

I trust the prime minister a lot more than her critics do. But I also believe that a lot of her cabinet ministers are incompetent, and others are highly unscrupulous, and that this government makes operational and policy blunders on a scale we haven’t seen in our last few decades of technocratic centrism (as I was writing this the news broke that the entire lockdown may have been illegal). And they’re currently making huge decisions based on incomplete information because there is no expert consensus or reliable data available. – Danyl Mclauchlan

So I think there’s value to disrespectful questions and politicised critiques, and even some of the contrarianism, even if a lot of it is misguided or in bad faith, or simply wrong. And I think we need a space for those critiques in our mainstream politics and media instead of shouting it down and leaving it to circulate on the shadowy fringes of the internet. Because the experts are not always right and the government is not always trustworthy. If contrarians warn about the danger to our freedom in this moment, and it makes us more vigilant and we remain free, does it mean the contrarians were wrong? – Danyl Mclauchlan

What drives me is community – the people who help their elderly neighbours with the lawns on the weekend; The Dad who does the food stall at the annual school fair; The Mum who coaches a touch rugby team; This election will be about the economy, but not the economy the bureaucracy talks about. It’ll be about the economy that you live in – the economy in your community – your job, your main street, your marae, your tourism business, your local rugby league club, your local butcher, your kura, your netball courts, your farms, your shops and your families.  This is the economy National MPs are grounded in, and the one that matters most to New Zealand. – Todd Muller

The problem with this government is they’ve two or three strong performers and 17 empty seats in Cabinet – Todd Muller

Poker machines are a de facto tax on the brain-dead. As a taxpayer I resent having to support no-hopers when in the case of these addictions, their problems are self-inflicted. – Bob Jones

A modern democracy, we should not forget, is a people of the government, by the government, and for the government. – Theodore Dalrymple

What the “employed and unemployed workers” of 1935 would be scandalised by is being forced to support other people’s children whose father’s pay nothing. They would be outraged that someone who has committed a crime can come out of a prison and get immediate recourse to welfare – repeatedly! They would be angry that  entire isolated rural communities could turn their local economies on welfare. – Lindsay Mitchell

New Zealand’s economy is in strife. Without major change, our constitutional cousin is in decline. Its public finances are in tatters, its biggest export, tourism, has been obliterated — Air New Zealand announced 4000 job losses this week — and New Zealand police now can enter people’s homes without a warrant. – Adam Creighton

In one year, New Zealand has blown 30 years of hard-fought ­fiscal rectitude. Its public debt will explode from the equivalent of 19 per cent of gross domestic product last year to 54 per cent by 2022, on the government’s own figures. – Adam Creighton

The Prime Minister and Finance Minister, who have not worked in the private sector, spruik the totems of modern left governments — renewable energy, trees, higher tax, equality — but without much to show for it. Plans for a billion trees and 100,000 houses have come close to almost naught, and a capital-gains tax was dumped. Labour made a song and dance about reducing child poverty too, but on six out of nine measures tracked by Statistics New Zealand it is unchanged or worse since 2017, including the share of children living in “material hardship”, which has risen to 13.4 per cent. – Adam Creighton

The real problem with the Ardern government is they have no idea whatsoever apart from how to throw money at things, – Roger Douglas

In any case, it wasn’t outsized compassion that drove the lockdown sledgehammer but the ­brutal reality of an underfunded health system. With about 140 intensive care unit beds and few ventilators — far fewer than Australia per capita — it was woefully underprepared. Ardern is more popular than ever, and by all accounts is a good person and a great communicator. But if a COVID-19 vaccine remains elusive, New Zealanders may come to question her wisdom as they fall further down the global pecking order. Without economic growth, there won’t be money for more ICU beds. – Adam Creighton

The world doesn’t need more examples of the progressive social direction of NZ so we can learn from their utter failure sad as it is. She’s all hat and no cattle, just a charismatic executioner of her country’s future prospects.  – Alfred

They’ll make excuses for her, that’s what left supporters and the media do to prop up failed politicians. It’s not about results, it’s about virtuous ideas and statements. The voters least affected – the latte sipping urbanites will keep supporting her, while the poorer people, whom she has vowed are the ones she’s trying to help, will suffer. – Melanie

If you, as small business owners, give just one of your newly unemployed neighbours a job before Christmas, you will be the heroes of the economic crisis, the way that our nurses and doctors and all five million of us who stayed at home and washed our hands were the heroes of the health crisis, –  Todd Muller

National does not start by saying everything should be closed unless the Government says it can be open. Instead, our guiding principle is that everything should be open unless there is good reason for it to be closed. – Todd Muller

Ethnic communities don’t want tokenism or special treatment; we simply want to be treated as equals and live in an inclusive society. We don’t wish to question or demonise anybody’s “whiteness”. We should all be able to celebrate who we are without fear or favour. – Gregory Fortuin

Muller is still an unknown quantity and has taken over National at the worst possible time for a prime ministerial aspirant. His best hope is that by the election on September 19, unemployment has rocketed, the cult of Winston has shattered, the economy has tanked and voters are starting to worry about how the country will ever pay the billions back.

Then voters might start to think empathy is all very well, but we need a leader capable of some hard- headed decisions that look beyond the lens of political correctness. – Martin van Beynen

Don’t be fooled, Winston Peters declarations are not about principle. His game is political expediency. . . Will Winston Peters last the distance or are we seeing the tactic that’s been so successful in the past being reeled out for a third time? Peters shows yet again he will call the shots and for a party polling well below the 5 percent threshold he has nothing to lose. – Heather Roy

Months of monotony, with nothing to look forward to and nothing to distinguish one day from another, is an experience which fundamentally conflicts with most of the ways societies throughout history have found to give structure to the passage of time. Most religions recognise the importance of marking time: celebrating rites of passage, appointing seasons for feasting and fasting, getting together at set times to celebrate, pray, or mourn. As religious holidays die away, secular society invents its own alternatives.

Over the past few months, we’ve been stripped of all that. Those keeping Easter, Passover, Ramadan or other commemorations have had to do so at home and online, for many a very imperfect substitute, and non-believers have lost their rituals too: no birthday parties, no graduations, not even the weekly trip to a favourite coffee shop. We’ve been deprived of almost every conceivable form of public, shared experience — perhaps most painfully of all, with restrictions on funerals, the rituals of grieving. These are anchors, and without them we drift. – Eleanor Parker

We’re all hypocrites. Outrage is selective. Personally I’m much more concerned with the fact we’re staring down mass unemployment and a generation-defining economic crisis than the fact Todd Muller has a Trump hat. – Jack Tame

In the face of soaring unemployment and plummeting house prices, middle voters may pause for thought. People who care passionately about inequality, over-tourism and climate change in the good times, tend to be less progressive when their personal economic circumstances are shaken. – Andrea Vance

The government needed to go big, leaning on the government balance sheet is the best response in the near-term. I have two concerns. I don’t think we have a well thought out economic plan on the other side and I think people will get increasingly concerned about how we’ll get debt down – Cameron Bagrie

I was a good soldier under levels 4 and 3; I obeyed all the rules but now – there’s an oppositionally defiant child in me, screaming to be let out. – Kerry McIvor

Do you honestly think the bright and resourceful, the skilled and experienced, having lost their jobs in a fashion they could never see coming, are going to sit by and watch their prospects, futures and dreams be put on hold … or even worse … welfare? Especially when just three hours away is a country that offers work, a future, and an attitude to Covid and adversity that’s a lesson in balance, risk, common sense, and will ultimately pay greater economic dividends. – Mike Hosking

I think it is also important that farmers feel part of the nation’s family, that they are valued and are not ostracised. Not only for their own businesses, but also the downstream businesses that they support [with] their own farming and horticultural operations. – David Bennett

Belonging is a fundamental human need. When this need is not met, it is hard to feel a sense of purpose. Right now, farmers and food producers are starting to feel they belong again; they have a clear sense of purpose – to feed the nation and deliver economic stability. – Lindy Nelson

The mixed messages of recent days notwithstanding, most New Zealanders will welcome and take in their stride the pending return to something approaching the normality they knew, albeit with a typically quiet sense of pride at what they have been able to achieve. They will be hoping Covid19 shows no sign of a significant return during the coming winter months, as we begin to reopen our border. So too will the government and the public health authorities. For they know only too well that the level of sudden public compliance and acquiescence achieved during the lockdowns was but a moment in time – a shocked reaction to what was happening overseas and the abrupt arrival of circumstances that no-one had properly anticipated. It is unlikely to be achievable to the same extent even if future circumstances warrant it. – Peter Dunne

I believe the word success is so important and that word success covers winning or it covers growing. – Dame Lois Muir

After suffering a housefire, an underinsured household would likely need to take on debt to deal with the problem – and that could be fine. But if it then took the opportunity to add a swimming pool to the property, while pushing the mortgage amount to the upper limit, one might wonder about the household’s prudence.

Similarly, the elected Government has been adding metaphorical swimming pools to its shopping list by extending the 2020 Budget beyond what was necessary to deal with the Covid crisis. This raises sharp questions about the Government’s commitment both to fiscal prudence and the Public Finance Act. – Eric Crampton

Changes in usage and semantics, when imposed, are usually exercises in power. These days, pressure for their adoption, like censorship, comes not from government but from pressure groups, small but well-organised and determined. Resistance in small things to monomania not being worth the effort among the better balance, the changes first go by default and then become habitual. – Theodore Dalrymple

Taking down statues and hiding our history is often not the answer to this problem. Instead, why not discuss moving statues to more appropriate locations? Why not add information around these monuments to present a more complete view of these figures? Take this opportunity to learn and understand the context in which the events commemorated by the monument occurred. . . Equally importantly, we must think and learn about the absent figures. Which people and events are not commemorated in public monuments and why is this the case? Absences can tell us as much about people’s understanding of history as the figures that were chosen. Absences can also show us where there are opportunities for future commemorations: to add these missing groups to our historical understanding as well as to our public record.  . . .

There is no right answer to how we should remember these figures – they come with significant achievements and often major failings. The only answer, for me, is that neither aspect of these figures should be forgotten. History must be allowed to be told in full – warts and all. Let discussion and debate take the place of anger and resentment. Let us use this opportunity as a time to change the way we view history; to shift our understanding of the past and to give future generations the opportunity to see history from a different perspective. . . Let our statues and monuments provoke debate and challenge us to think deeply about our past – let us not hide them all away to be forgotten. – Hayden Thorne

For most journalists, reporting the truth is an art form that leaves no margin for error. You either get it right the first time or your readers become confused about their own responsibilities when reacting to stories that must be taken at face value. Sadly, many in this ancient honourable profession have recently thrown in their lot with political forces that share their personal ideological persuasion with a result that truth is the casualty and the instability that is a consequence continues unchecked. – Clive Bibby

There is great danger in judging history by our standards, or rewriting it to modern tastes. It is simply bad history to morally look down on people who were not equipped to think differently. It’s our failure of imagination not to grasp this. It misses the really important question: why did those societies change? . . . The genius of Western civilisation is its progress through self-awareness and self-criticism. That created the endless debates that led to empirical science, protection under the rule of law, and self-rule through democracy. This allowed it to fix its errors and aberrations, ending slavery, propagating the ideas that undermined its own colonialism, making the sexes equal, and outlawing racial discrimination and intolerance. – AFR View

History, it is what it is. Good, bad and ugly, but I think it’s a good impetus for our country to learn our history. – Meng Foon

Once we stop laughing at ourselves we begin to lose our souls – Paddy Briggs

There is now an immediate need to assign accountability to the individuals or groups responsible for putting the community at risk. And this leads to the greater need for a royal commission to critically examine this current problem and many others, in the overall way that Covid-19 had been dealt with.

From the first national diagnosis of the Covid-19 crisis all the way to the recovery processes, a royal commission should be tasked with reviewing it all: the health, scientific, economic, constitutional, legal and cultural elements of the event.

This would provide a public record of what worked, what didn’t, what gaps were apparent and what could be improved next time. And it is the next time we have to be particularly worried about. Pandemics are an intergenerational problem, and what we are enduring will not be the last such experience. – Alexander Gillespie

The management of people arriving at the border has cost the government $81 million so far. That’s a lot of money to spend on a sieve when you needed – and thought you were buying – a top-quality bucket.  – Point of Order

Many people — and especially those who live in Bristol — have discovered Newton’s Third Law of Statues. Put crudely, it amounts to ‘you wreck one of ours, we wreck one of yours’. . . From the beginning, any protest outside the US reeked of entitlement and thrill-seeking. Everyone involved desperately needs to look up ‘negative externalities’ in the dictionary, although ‘doing something you like while shitting on other people’ is a useful definition. Antifa especially combines monstrous privilege with what philosopher John Gray calls ‘the problem of being lightly educated’.  Helen Dale

Kindness isn’t achievable without action. – Andrea Vance

In saying, “we don’t want a witch hunt” what you’re really saying is: We expect you in the private sector to follow all the rules but we won’t. – Kate Hawkesby

Now when I feel sad, I’m gentle with myself, I don’t run from sadness.  I don’t seek to lift myself out of sadness. I have to sit with it. I think about self care, snuggly clothes, being kind to myself.I – Lotta Dann

Even if a prime minister is not technically responsible for the blunders of her ministries, the idea that someone can be in charge but not responsible will seem plainly wrong to most people. In fact, most people’s ideas about leadership can be summed up by the sign that US President Harry Truman’s kept on his desk in the Oval Office: “The buck stops here.” – Graham Adams

To reiterate, we believe in freedom of speech for all; these clients have decided to leave because we did not meet their demands to be re-educated to their point of view.  – Blair Partnership

“In light of the bungles at the border, it’s become abundantly clear that we didn’t beat Covid-19 with competence. . . But good luck won’t build smart borders, get the economy restarted, or pay back the debt. – David Seymour

I make mistakes at work too. And some mornings, around this time of year, after the weather’s changed and the city is wreathed in rain and drowned in mist and I have to commute to campus via a public transport system that’s a chaotic, unreliable mess, I try to persuade myself I should “work from home”. I generally force myself to go into work. But if I do stay home, then find myself making mistakes that might kill hundreds of people and cause billions of dollars damage to the economy, I like to think I’ll go back into the office. Even if it’s raining. – Danyl Mclauchlan 

“Operational matters” aren’t a get-out-of-responsibility-free card. “Operational matters” can be substituted in most sentences for “things that happened”. – Toby Manhire

Is there ever a time when the job of the media, the Opposition and academia should be diverted from the task of speaking truth to power? That’s debatable – but holding back is not what we need now. – Liam Hehir

I’m sick of these politicians making grand promises that we can all see are completely unachievable. Thinking we believe them means two things. They’re either deluded and incompetent. Or they think we’re all stupid and we’ll never notice. It’s probably a bit of both – Andrew Dickens

Holding the powerful to account is the cornerstone of journalism. It is not the only reason for our existence; I like to think we also contribute to the sense of community that binds us; I saw many lovely examples of that during the pandemic. And mostly we like to tell interesting stories about the people and places around us. But we also believe passionately in the power of the written word and its ability to challenge our assumptions. We need that during this election campaign more than any other, surely? – Tracy Watkins

You know, the 17-year-old solo mum who dropped out of school ended up being deputy prime minister of this country, and when I looked at that and what I’d achieve I knew that I could draw a line very proudly and comfortably under that and move on to my next challenge. – Paula Bennett

I set about reforming the welfare system, with more emphasis on what people could do, increasing our expectation on people to get work-ready and look for a job and changing the system so more help was available for them. . . I get that people won’t agree with everything that we did, but we were ambitious and I believed in people and their abilities, and I do despair at the moment that there’s an expectation that a lifetime on welfare can be an option for people and it almost feels encouraged, whereas I think it should be a backstop. – Paula Bennett

I was forced to think about what leadership means – what is the basic statement one can use to describe at a fundamental basis what leadership is. What I came up with, while not anything earth-shattering, was that “leadership is about giving the credit and taking the blame”. – Ben Kepes

She was the galah in a cage of budgies. – Claire Trevett

Government essentially reinvented the wheel, and when the wheel eventually turned up, it was wonky. – Louis Houlbrooke

Too many politicians these days are too manufactured, too inauthentic, spend too much time on focus group research and advice on how to talk to people. Here’s a tip – just talk. Be yourself. – Kate Hawkesby

Nearly every day….I get a random stranger go out of their way to walk up to me in the street and say ‘I want to let you know I’m very grateful for what you do’. So at some point you decide do you want to listen to the one negative person, or 50 positive people?.’ – Paula Bennett

Homeowners in Kelburn who like the idea that we lead the world in banning plastic bags (we don’t) and seeing statues of Captain Cook replaced with Pohutukawa trees are going to spill their almond milk at the prospect of paying an annual two per cent tax on their unrealised capital gains. Wealthy Green voters, I am willing to wager, prefer looking good to doing good. – Damien Grant

Let’s understand that dying is an intrinsic part of life. Let’s talk about what end-of-life care actually is and strengthen, extend and improve what we already have in our palliative care. Such care is a commitment, one we need to make. Euthanasia is an avoidance of this commitment. – Serena Jones

Without food, there is no life. The trick is to produce it in ways that also yield rich soils, thriving forests, healthy waterways and flourishing communities. As the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment pointed out 10 years ago, in tackling climate change, it’s vital to avoid perverse incentives and bad ecological outcomes. he farmers are right. At present, the incentives in the ETS are perverse, and they’re taking us in the wrong direction. It needs to be fixed before it’s too late. – Dame Anne Salmond

 Don’t jack up taxes during an economic crisis. Don’t add to the burden. Give us a break. What’s the better alternative? Blitz the low-quality spending and accelerate economic growth to generate the revenue to deal to the debt. – Mike Yardley

If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction. If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased. I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives. It isn’t hate to speak the truth.” – J.K. Rowling

When transgender women and women are indistinguishable, women are unable to access the rights they would have if they were distinctive. . . Yet being tolerant of transgender women does not mean that one loses the ability to defend the rights of women who were born female. . . The main reason for this silence, as I see it, is the twisted logic of identity politics and its adherents. This ideology promotes a worldview that is wholly based on power structures and relationships. All of society is viewed through the prism of oppressors and oppressed. The ideology focuses on traits, such as race, gender or sexual orientation, some of which are deemed unalterable, others a matter of personal choice. Yet individual agency is generally devalued, to the benefit of collective identities that are increasingly ideologically fixed. An individual has less and less room to carve out room for her own views within each collective. A matrix has formed where those who have a higher number of marginalized traits rank higher on the victimhood ladder; their “truth” therefore counts more. – Ayaan Hirsi Ali

More funding does not address the issues of choice, accountability, value for money, and individual and community needs. – Brooke van Velden

If your test is, it doesn’t matter whether someone is nice to the Labour Party, it matters if they are nice to the waiter, then Judith Collins is a very nice person. – Ben Thomas

Collins does not deal in ambiguity and nor is she likely to deliver it. – Liam Hehir

You can’t be focussed on New Zealanders when you’re busy playing politics.One of the things I’ve learned over the years is you only ever learn from your mistakes, you don’t learn from your successes. The National Party is very focussed on not repeating any mistakes.” – Judith Collins

Elections are the means by which the Government has legitimacy and power; not minor inconveniences on the path to Covid-19 recovery. – Henry Cooke

Collins, like Muldoon, speaks to a New Zealand that sees itself above class and race. She imagines a country where the language of political correctness has no place and anyone who works hard can get ahead. Don’t underestimate how many New Zealanders share that vision. – Josh Van Veen

Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions. I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative. – Bari Weiss

To me, the point of a strong economy is to enable New Zealanders to do the most basic things in life well. A strong economy improves our chances of finding satisfying and well-paying work so that we can look after ourselves and our families – the most fundamental task each of us have. A society based on the assumption that its average citizen can’t or shouldn’t be expected to look after themselves and their families is doomed. – Paul Goldsmith

Here we had intimations at least that the prim, prissy, prudish neo-Puritanism, the Woke-Fascism unleashed on the nation by the Marxist Jacinda Ardern might have met its match. – Lindsay Perigo

She is creating a climate of terror designed to keep people cowed and bowed. It’s cynical, and I believe she was acting in the best interest of the country in the beginning, and now it’s become almost a mania. – Kerre McIvor

National’s approach to infrastructure is simple: Make decisions, get projects funded and commissioned, and then get them delivered, at least a couple of years before they are expected to be needed. That is the approach that transformed the economies of Asia from the 1960s. – Judith Collins

It wasn’t that long ago when much of the global elite had conclusively decided that climate change was our world’s top priority. Then came a massive sideswiping by a global pandemic, of which we have only seen the first wave, along with an equally massive global recession. It serves as a timely reminder that an alarmism that cultivates one fear over others serves society poorly. – Bjorn Lomborg

I have no doubt that in the ranks of both main Parties there are numerous MPs with a strong Green personal agenda. If the Greens see a Parliamentary role then that should be to go into coalition with any majority Party so as to push their agenda. The indisputable fact is they’re frauds. – Sir Bob Jones

A wealth tax is far more punitive than a capital gains tax, since rather than being raised on profits after an asset is sold, it must be found each year by people who may be asset rich but cash poor. It would become an unaffordable burden on many New Zealanders, especially those who are retired. – Muriel Newman

Increasingly throwing money at dysfunctional families provides no assurance parents will suddenly become better budgeters, or not simply spend more on harmful behaviours. Gambling and substance abuse don’t just hurt the parent. They hurt the child directly (damage in the womb, physical abuse or neglect under the influence) not to mention indirectly through parental role-modelling that normalizes bad behaviours, especially violence, to their children. – Lindsay Mitchell

My warning, however, would be that it’d be dangerous for National to become a conservatives party rather than a party with conservatives in it. It’s better to share power in a party that governs more often than not than it is to be the dominant force in a party that reliably gets 35% of the vote. . . The National Party is not an ideological movement. It is a political framework that allows members unified by their opposition to state socialism to pursue their various goals incrementally and co-operatively. Nobody ever gets everything they want but that’s a fact of life. – Liam Hehir

And that defines the New Zealand First dilemma. They must now campaign on the basis that they were part of a Government so they can’t credibly attack it, but they were not a big enough part to have a major influence. Richard Harman

We think it’s very important that we have everybody involved in it (planning). But I think it’s really important too is that consultation actually should be consultation, not the farce we have at the moment where everybody gets a say, and nobody gets the answer. –  Judith Collins

For me every day is now what they refer to as ‘Blursday’ because I really wouldn’t know. – Melina Schamroth

Properly funded end of life care is what needs to happen before, in my opinion, we push the nuclear button on the option of euthanasia. – Maggie Barry

It is about this time in the election cycle that the media starts crying out for policy. They want to know exactly what a party will do if elected. The problem for parties has always been that the amount of effort that goes into writing an election policy is not reflected in the amount of consideration given to it by voters. – Brigitte Morton

Laying hundreds off is no different to laying one off if you’re that one. And the reason this will play into the way we vote is because the halcyon days of the lock down are well past, and we have moved on with the inevitable, what next scenario. . .If The Warehouse, having taken the wage subsidy, can still lay off the numbers they are, and they’re far from the only ones, how many more join that queue come September 1^st? And how many of those jobless quite rightly ask themselves whether teddy bears in windows, closed borders and a tanked economy with no real answer outside welfare is really worth voting for. – Mike Hosking

Hypocrisy is a normal but irritating aspect of human behaviour. We’re all hypocrites to some extent, but true hypocrites are almost admirable in their chutzpah because, unlike hypocrites who are caught doing what they try to hide, real hypocrites are outraged by vices which they themselves do in public. Their hypocrisy is so blatant that, after a while, nobody notices – it fades into the background like muzak in a shopping centre. – Roger Franklin

On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.  – Michael Shellenberger

Peters can only win if voters see only his crafted image and ignore the reality of who he really is. But once the tricks become obvious – when the threadbare curtain concealing him is pulled back – the show man can no longer pass himself off as the Wizard of Oz. – Andrea Vance

By any measure it is the coming together of the narcissist and the plain wacky coated in self-delusion. – The Veteran

A strong economy improves our chances of finding satisfying and well-paying work so that we can look after ourselves and our families – the most fundamental task each of us have.  A society based on the assumption that its average citizen can’t or shouldn’t be expected to look after themselves and their families is doomed.  – Paul Goldsmith

Just think about it, when you step into a polling booth on September 19 you will be a bit like a practising Catholic going into a cathedral, dipping your fingers into the holy water font and blessing yourself. After you’ve washed your hands with the sanitiser, you’ll bow over the ballot paper in the booth and be reminded how lucky you are to be alive.  – Barry Soper

Those on welfare don’t need sympathy. They need to be backed, encouraged, and supported to plan their future and see a path off welfare dependency. . . . I have always believed the answers to long-term dependency, child abuse, and neglect, and violence are in our communities. There is no programme that a politician or a bureaucrat can design that will solve these complex issues – Paula Bennett

Money is currently being thrown around but with no accountability. We have to be bold, brave. How can throwing millions and millions of dollars around and hoping some gets to those that need it most, through Government agencies and community organisations, and yet watching more people in despair be OK. – Paula Bennett

I’m far from perfect, and I know that, but my intent, my heart, my integrity has meant that I have slept well. This place is brutal. It will pick up the spade and bury you if you let it. It is relentless, but we sign up knowing that. So I went hard and full-on. For me to have not made a difference and not given it everything I’ve got would’ve been wasted time. So I end this chapter half the size but twice the woman thanks to this experience.  – Paula Bennett

Why is it through the toughest moments of our lives we learn the most, we feel the most, we have the greatest power to contribute and experience beauty? Through COVID, we saw this. Through fear, desperation, and hardship, heroes emerged. Teachers taught children from their living rooms while supporting their own families. Nurses, doctors, and checkout operators had the courage to turn up even when they were petrified. The lesson is: character and courage emerge out of trauma and hardship. The question for any generation of political leaders is: have we had the courage and character to step up and solve the hard economic and social issues of our time?  – Nikki Kaye

The National Party has been a strong force in New Zealand politics because of its values of freedom and personal responsibility—a place where social conservatives and social liberals can work for the common good. As a party, we are at our best when there is balance. That is when we are truly representative of this great nation. – Nikki Kaye

To the parliamentarians: I’ve always said I believe there are two types of parliamentarians in this place. Those that are in it for themselves and those that are in it for the country. Be the latter. Be brave and have courage. Don’t leave anything in the tank. – Nikki Kaye

In my three years as justice Minister, it very quickly became clear to me that the best thing we could do to reduce crime was to intervene many, many years before the offenders ever turn up in court. That was the basis of my absolute adoption of the importance of social investment as championed by Sir Bill English. Yes, it’s early intervention but it’s so much more and involves radical change to our delivery models if we’re going to make progress on the hard intergenerational issues.  – Amy Adams

Colleagues, the jobs we hold matter. They matter so much more than any one of us. We need good people to want to step into this arena, and we need them to do it for the best of reasons. I worry that increasingly the scorn and the vitriol that is heaped on politicians—often fairly—discourages those good people from stepping up. These jobs are tough. The life is brutal, and the public will never really see the hours, the stress, the impossibility of the perfection that is required, and the impact that life in the public eye has on our families. While you are here in your political role, it is your life. Friends, family, and our health get what’s left over, and often that’s not much. But this job deserves that level of devotion. – Amy Adams

If I have any advice for those who follow me, it would be pretty simple: do the right thing and let the politics take care of itself. Be brave, stand up on the divisive issues, and never lose sight of the difference you get to make in the time that we are here. – Amy Adams

I had the privilege of sharing a breakfast with Julia Gillard, the Australian Prime Minister at the time. Neither of us were into cold pastries or cold meat, so she ordered toast. I thought, “What are we going to put on this toast?” She said, “Don’t worry, Nathan. I’ve got it in hand.”, reached down—”Craft peanut butter. Vegemite.” We had a great discussion. The Anzac bond is incredibly strong. – Nathan Guy

It’s easy to sit on the side lines and criticise. It’s a lot more difficult to stand up and be counted. – Nathan Guy

If we can beat this virus, then we can beat most respiratory ones. The ridiculous way in which we tolerate cold-spreaders, mocking them for taking a day off and praising them for trudging into work while feeling miserable, has to stop. It should be socially unacceptable to go to a party with a cold, let alone kiss the host on the cheek when you get there. – Matt Ridley

In order that today’s middle-class and middle-aged are not required to pay the price of maintaining their current lifestyles we are stripping our children of the opportunities that we claim we want for them. – Damien Grant

The fact the economy is in tatters must not be focused on because as we have heard and you will continue to hear, .we are in the middle of a pandemic. The health freak out worked for them. The economic misery, not so much.  But here’s the truth the truth of today, not March, we are not in the middle of anything other than a recession the likes of which we have never seen. This country is not in a pandemic, we haven’t been for months. And even in its worst moments, of the 1000 beds we set aide for the tidal wave of death and ventilators, we hardly filled any.They’ve had their health curtain call, we’ve applauded. But they’re now milking the standing ovations for naked political advantage.   –  Mike Hosking

It’s very important that people are in jobs wherever possible and I have a huge commitment to people being in work. I have been in work pretty much all my adult life and my view has always been that work is not only good for the economy, it’s good for people, but it’s very good for people’s mental health and their sense of well-being. –Judith Collins

It is a useful reminder that strong emotion is not, of itself, a reason for doing something, let alone a useful guide to policy. The heart has its reasons that the head knows not of, Pascal said; but it is just as true that the head has its reasons that the heart knows not of. Reason and feeling must be in some kind of balance. At the moment, feeling in the ascendant, at least in the West, with disastrous results.  – Theodore Dalrymple

They picked the wrong person if they want an acquiescent member of caucus who doesn’t have the capacity to think. – Louisa Wall

Just because you can print the dollars that pay for lunch doesn’t make it free. – Pattrick Smellie

What most astonished me was the swiftness and completeness of the transformation of life, and the passivity with which it was accepted. Was this an instance of laudable social discipline, or a confirmation of Tocqueville’s characterization of the future citizens of democracy as a herd of sheep, which, accustomed to regulation in the smallest detail by a supposedly benevolent authority, has become incapable of independent thought and action? Theodore Dalrymple

When you smile, you just feel happy, and if you feel happy you can make other people happy. – Judith Collins

It’s really simply saying if you’ve got people who come from dysfunctional and difficult families, you’re going to end up spending more money on them, so put that effort in early on to try and keep them out of trouble later on, and also end up with better health and social outcomes. – Judith Collins

If you’re going to borrow, you need to do it now while the interest rates are low, and you’ve got things to do it with, but you can’t be so crazy that you end up leaving your children and grandchildren with debt to deal with, you’ve got to be able to pay it back. – Judith Collins

So when I finally leave this place, in another decade or so, it will be knowing that I’ve done my utter best for the country, and for the party I think and know should be leading the government. – Judith Collins

. . . the fact of progress is much less useful to political entrepreneurs than is the narrative of history as nothing but a nightmare that continues to the present day and, as Marx put it, weighs upon the brain of the living. Only by keeping the memory of the nightmare ever-present in the minds of their sheep, thereby stoking resentment, may the political shepherds herd, and then fleece, the flock. – Theodore Dalrymple

Because resentment has certain sour satisfactions, it is one of the few emotions that can persist unabated for years: indeed, it tends to increase, because it exists in a mental echo-chamber. One such sour satisfaction is that it allows the one who feels it to think himself morally superior to the world as it is at present constituted, even if he has done nothing to improve it, or done something to make it a little worse. And where resentment leads to action rather than to passivity, it is almost always action that is destructive rather than constructive. It leads also to a considerable quantity of humbug, insofar as it primes people to look for new justifications for their dissatisfactions, and to claim that they cannot be happy until there is no more unhappiness caused by injustice in the world. – Theodore Dalrymple

I live in what is perhaps the most successful country in dealing with Covid – barring Taiwan. And yet what I see around me is a total, total mess. – Eric Crampton

The over-arching communications policy from the Beehive and top officials seems to have been: if we get up on the yellow stripey podium and repeat statements that are not yet true enough times, by the umpteenth time we say them, hopefully they will be true. . . .While it’s obvious the authorities who address us daily have at times been kept in butt-protecting ignorance by their underlings, their suspiciously careful language suggests they’ve had a fair idea this was happening.  – Jane Clifton

The kind one is so very unkind when she relishes people hanging on to hear what is going to happen to their lives, their families, jobs and businesses, but blathers on endlessly. It’s so disrespectful, so self-centered and self-serving. – Lindsay Mitchell

“I’ve seen health systems manage medical emergencies worse than this but it takes some doing. It’s like we’re living in a parallel universe. Des Gorman

There is plenty of evidence in the bizarrely vague testing regime applied to New Zealanders working at the border that Pike River levels of incompetence and dysfunction lurk in the public health system and could yet be fatally exposed. – Pattrick Smellie

A campaign before an election is as critical as election day itself. As things are, there is nothing free or fair about the politicians’ ability to do that. . . It borders on being almost undemocratic to hold an election in the near future. – Claire Trevett

Uncertainty is like cancer to free enterprise and it can spread rapidly. Firms stop investing, stop hiring, stop planning and start acting with caution to preserve their arteries. – Ryan Bridge

Commentators dismiss such concerns as placing the economy ahead of lives but they fail to understand that the ‘economy’ is a word we use describe the aggregation of all our lives. It is the means by which we feed, clothe and educate ourselves. It is how we find fulfilment, enjoyment and entertainment.

The real problem of these intermittent lockdowns isn’t the temporary shock but the uncertainty they build into our commercial life. Businesses need to forecast revenue, especially if they are expanding or investing. This becomes impossible in the ferment of uncertainty created by our obsession with this coronavirus – Damien Grant

When did we all get so binary and, in some cases, bats*** crazy? Those who worship at the Church of St Jacinda and the Holy Bloomfield are blind to any wrongs or failings of their demigods.

You simply cannot have a free and frank exchange of views with some people – it’s like the Springbok tour all over again. If you dare to suggest the Government has made mistakes, the acolytes cast you into the camp of the conspiracy theorists who are alive and well and fomenting their madness all across social media. They – the acolytes and the tinfoil hat-wearers – are blind to reason and rationale. – Kerrie McIvor

Liberals virtue-signalling their praise for a leader who ‘puts people before money’ are like those who praise Venezuela or Cuba – they don’t have to deal with the misery caused by their idols. It seems they care far more about platitudes than people. – Matt Drake

Sure, if you’re after smiles and warm fuzzies, the PM’s a good communicator. But good communication must also contain facts, trust, and honesty. –  Kate Hawkesby

It shows the danger of policy by press release, that actually there needs to be follow-through. – Gerard Hehir

It’s an enormous red flag if Cabinet and the ministry have completely different ideas about what is meant to be happening. – Derek Cheng

This is a hard problem, and, sometimes, in situations like this, with huge complexity and many balls in the air, one of them gets dropped. When that happens, this Opposition will help pick up that ball and put it back in its correct place. There will be a time to understand how the ball was dropped, but first we will help put it back, and then we’ll figure out how not to drop it again. – Shane Reti

There is more at stake here than election year politicking. A serious communication breakdown between officials on the ground and ministers in the war room is unacceptable, but a failure to account for how it happened is worse. This is the second time assurances about testing at the border have turned out to be simply untrue, and the second time ministers have been caught by surprise. A government agency that can’t or won’t execute policy is an embarrassment in normal times, and a serious risk to public safety during a pandemic. Management of those bureaucrats is very squarely the responsibility of politicians. – Ben Thomas

I take issue with the Prime Minister’s constant mantra of “we went hard and fast”. If we’d gone fast – as in closing the border more quickly – we wouldn’t have had to go as hard in terms of lockdowns, businesses forced to shut their doors and Government borrowing an unprecedented amount to prop up the economy. – Heather Roy

It’s hard to imagine a much easier scenario for contact tracers than this. One cluster, one family, their contacts, caught early, as the Prime Minister says. So, if our health authorities can’t handle something this simple without locking down a city of 1.7 million, what hope is there that this is our last lockdown?

Lockdowns should not be the go-to option. They should be the last resort. They are too expensive. They cost people’s livelihoods, their jobs and their businesses.

This is not an objection to the attempts to prevent Covid’s spread. It is an objection to health authorities having no option but nuclear, because they weren’t ready for something they knew would happen. It is an objection to the failure of those authorities and the ministers in charge of them to prepare the safeguards to prevent another lockdown. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

The discovery of community transmission in Auckland not only rocked the smug complacency coming from the top down and affecting all of us, but also raised blunt, difficult questions that drew uncomfortable answers about how well the “team of five million” had actually been doing. It turns out the border control programme was not watertight after all, with personnel associated with the new arrivals not being tested at all, even though they were being potentially exposed on a daily basis to the virus. And the level of community testing was nothing like the government had led us to believe. – Peter Dunne

They’ve often hidden behind the fact that there’s no rule book for coping with a pandemic, but there are books with rules and they are called the statutes containing the laws of the land – and if the lawmakers don’t understand them, what hope is there for the rule of law in this country? – Barry Soper

We all have imperfections but it doesn’t doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be loved or shouldn’t love yourself. . . No matter where you’re from you can change people’s lives forever for the better. –  Dustin Luther

Child poverty was a national crisis before Covid-19 and without urgent action, it risks turning into a catastrophe. – Anita Baker

What happened, happened. You cannot “unhappen” history. – Henry Armstrong

Sometimes an issue is so serious or the failure so obvious that you have to drop the buzz phrases, quit the dissembling and level with the public. They may even thank you for it, and they’ll be more inclined to believe what you say in the future.

As it is, we are approaching a risky point where the public may stop believing the Government and its spin — which is tricky when you are dealing with a pandemic. – Steven Joyce

From the experience of those who served in Clark’s administration, A Visit From Heather was a phenomenon which, could it be distilled, would make a world-beating laxative and emetic combined.  – Jane Clifton

In this outbreak emergency, the daily briefings convey vital public health information. It is important we can trust in their veracity. But as long as they are led by ministers, the backdrop will always be politics. And, to paraphrase George Orwell, political language is often designed to make lies sound truthful. – Andrea Vance

One year I asked the administrator whether I could sit not five subjects but six subjects, like all my friends were. I remember the reply: ‘No, Shane. You’re a Māori boy. You’ll do five.’  

My internal response was a call to arms: ‘Right. I will show you.’

“My external response was to win the English prize that year. No, not for me six subjects. I was still allowed to sit only five. But many years later, when I was promoted to assistant professor at Harvard, I think I made my point.

I won, but many Maori do not. The educational aspirations of Maori must never ever be bound by the preconceptions of others. – Shane Reti

It’s been a wee while coming, but I’ve finally had enough of the platitudes, and sentimental psycho-babble. – Polly Gillespie

The lack of accountability is staggering. The Prime Minister refuses to blame anyone, now she’s blaming the trickiness of a virus. No one has talked to me like that since I was at Horohoro kindy. David Seymour

There is a hierarchy of news and I don’t put analysis at the top of it. I rank opinion even further down the scale. – Gavin Ellis

I decided to forgive you Mr Tarrant because I don’t have hate, I don’t have revenge. The damage is done, Hussein will never be here. I have only one choice but to forgive you.  – Janna Ezat

 Strong, stable families with intact work ethics. Those characteristics nurture and protect children to a much greater extent than cash hand-outs.  – Lindsay Mitchell

“Science is a mechanism,” refers to the idea that science is about applying experimentation and observation to those things about which we are uncertain. Its job is to lay the foundation for the development of theories, not facts. And, when we toss an existing theory into the bin because it isn’t supported by emerging data, that is a victory for science. Thus, true science requires us to keep an open mind… on an ongoing basis. – Lisa Taylor

As a parent, no matter how old your children are they will always be your babies forever. – Rashid Omar

I urge you to take a look around this courtroom and ask yourself, who exactly is the other here right now? Is it us, or is it you? – Sara Qasem 

If all humans have one characteristic in common it would be the ability to overcome and forget the past. Something we clearly can do, but something you clearly cannot do – for two reasons. The first reason is that you don’t have a future, so you don’t live anywhere but the past alone and lonely. The second reason is that you are not actually a human, not even an animal since animals are beneficial to the world. You are classified as someone who’s dumb enough not to realise beyond the skin all humans are the same. – Mustafa Boztas

Cant matters for a number of reasons that the authors enumerate. It destroys moderation. It is cruel and intolerant towards those who think differently. It divides people into the saved and the damned. Because it is one-sided and does not recognise the complexity of life, let alone the tragic dimension of life, it encourages bad policy in the name of some supposedly immaculate principle. People who cant are often willing to decimate a countryside because actual results as experienced by others do not interest them. What they are interested in is how they appear morally to others, and that only as a means to advancement. Cant is careerist. – Theodore Dalrymple

The leader of the Green Party, which purports publicly to be the party of the downtrodden and dispossessed, has inadvertently revealed itself for what many think it actually is – a party that mostly serves well-heeled Kiwis in secure and well-paid employment that care about the environment, climate change and want to go cycling and tramping on the weekend. – Luke Malpass

The self-employed are the equivalent of the small private lots of land that communist societies would allow farmers to tend for their own benefit. From these small plots of dirt was produced a vastly disproportionate amount of produce while the vast collective farms produced little. – Damien Grant

There is a limit to how much NZers are prepared to pay for cleaner water. – Chris Nixon

Just like KiwiBuild, Auckland Light Rail, the Capital Gains Tax and effective climate change policies, this Government got bogged down in a welter of working groups, coalition disputes, bureaucratic infighting and stonewalling, and an inability at the top level of Cabinet to direct the organs of Government to carry out its will. Weak and overwhelmed ministers accepted ‘Yes Minister’ for an answer and were not able to stop the initial energy and direction from dribbling away into the sands of endless consultation, trials and ways for officials to avoid taking risks or challenging the status quo.  Bernard Hickey

If Minister Faafoi thinks paying one hundred million dollars to keep Auckland out of level four for the past three weeks is a risk, then the other risk he’s just taken has just cost us way more. I have no idea why people are treating Sam the way they did and why Minister Faafoi seemed to dismiss Sam today as being sort of petulant. Minister Faafoi and those ministers, if they can’t respond fast and quickly enough they need to step aside. – Ian Taylor

Economic reform is all about the rules that businesses play under and it’s a bit like rugby. Make the rules too tight or confusing and the game collapses into a bunch of whistle and stop-start time-wasting. Loosen them up, the game flows, points can be scored and jobs created.  Steven Joyce

Did I need pills? No, I needed love, I needed aroha. I needed someone to provide the environment where I could be the best possible version of myself. – Tricia Walsh

And how powerful, once seen, is the knowledge of genuine commitment and love in smothering out the petty grievances and the misunderstandings! Love indeed covers a multitude of sins.  – John Anderson

 . . . one of the greatest predictors of how well we turn out as people, and how society turns out, is the presence of decent fathering. We need to end the silence on this. If we really care about our children, and our boys in particular, (the prison statistics alone tell us how serious their crisis is) we would own a simple truth whether convenient or not and start talking about the critical importance of fathering. John Anderson

When it came time to vote, I asked my grandfather, “Who should I vote for?” He said, “The National Party. They’ll back you.” And that’s been my experience. Shelley Pilkington

I know that the values of personal responsibility, hard work and reward for effort are not just political ideology; they actually work. But to achieve these things well, we also need strong families and caring communities – another key National Party value. We need to be surrounded by people who believe in us – like my grandad – who invest their time and attention to lift and encourage others to be everything they were meant to be; and to be supported by a government that gives people a hand up, not just a hand out. – Shelley Pilkington

The real lesson from this is, instead of saying this is an irritant that we’re going to deal with and bat out the way and life will go back to the way it used to be, we have to be a little more comfortable about taking a leaf out of the HIV book and saying that this is a new pathogen that’s going to change the environment within which we behave. That’s what life is – that’s evolution. – David Nabarro

Our farmers are efficient, effective and see farming as a long term commitment to the land and their communities. If the Government wants us to become one big Pamu-type corporate entity that ticks every audit box, has a farm technician on every corner, and contributes bugger all to the social, economic and environmental GDP of the country, then they are going the right way about it.- Jane Smith

What I think is really important to understand is that we cannot simply borrow our way out of a recession, what we need to do is build our way out of it. – Judith Collins

Despite the Ministry of Health lifting the Lockdown rules in line with New Zealand’s risk level, the messaging to the public has led to an acceptance of rules for rules sake. We are living in a community where rules based on fear, not science, are considered enough and questioning the logic of these rules is seen as rebellion.

The result is marginalising those in the community who respect evidence-based decision making. This is the status quo, and I do not think it is kind. Nor does it align with the can-do and curious nature that New Zealanders are known for. – Emily Broadmore

Let’s put essential industries aside. We should be looking at what’s a safe industry. Can anyone explain to me why a diary is allowed to open but the local butchers next door can’t? And the answer is because someone has decided that one is essential and the other’s not. – Judith Collins

You generally don’t have successful top-level athletes complaining about their treatment. They tend to live by the Hamish Bond philosophy of “make sure you are the best, then your ability is never questioned”. They are the types of athletes normally content with the outcome of their goals, who walk away from sport on their own terms. Eric Murray

For myself, all that I hope is that when I next consult with someone towards the end of their life, is that I have neither hastened or prolonged death; that I can offer effective pain relief and care; that I can create a space for important shared moments and know that our healthcare system have adequately developed services for supporting people near death. One that supports all people equally, when they are most at need. – Dr Carmen Chan

People need to understand Kiwibuild is not an aberration. It is the norm in terms of delivery vs rhetoric. – David Farrar

But posing and posturing have become a mass phenomenon, the tattooing of our time. Of nothing is this more true than contemporary Woke morality. Whereas not long ago young people of the middle classes sought to express their sympathy for the lower and supposedly oppressed orders by imitating their tattoos and way of dress, imitation being the highest form of empathy available to egotists, they now express the same desire by making Wokeness the touchstone of their morality. They think they are rebelling when, of course, they are conforming. They do not realize that it is more difficult, and more courageous, to contradict a friend than to criticize a society. – Theodore Dalrymple

 If anything has been institutionalized, it is not racism but guilt, though guilt of a peculiar, ersatz, dishonest kind. – Theodore Dalrymple

Nevertheless, posers and posturers prefer to concentrate on distant problems because they require nothing of them except the expression of the right opinions and sometimes a protest, demonstration, or even riot, which of course is a pleasure rather than a discipline, in the way that acting virtuously is a discipline. – Theodore Dalrymple

 No honest person who takes the trouble to read it can see the novel as transphobic. But then honest people are hard to find in a culture war. – Nick Cohen

The poor seldom come out of a crisis better off. Imagine if in 1938, when Michael Joseph Savage increased his majority, instead of creating the welfare state he promised a new holiday. That’s where we are now. – Josie Pagani

It is always better for a government to do everything possible, even if useless, than to do nothing, even if the results are no worse. It follows from all these considerations that to impose a quarantine was politically all but inevitable because the object of government is not to save lives but to save itself. No doubt this is not as it should be, ideally speaking, but it is the way of the world. – Theodore Dalrymple

The tapestry of the past is composed of dark and light, but by looking at the light, and acknowledging it, instead of focusing only on the dark, we can see how the light has showed us the way to a more just, more compassionate present. The light can inspire and lead us out of the darkness of injustice or cruelty into the possibilities of a fairer kinder future.  Valerie Davies

Under the government’s new projections, people will be poorer, opportunities will be more limited, communities will face increased pressure and home prices will continue climbing, unhampered by pandemic or recession. If you’re a millennial New Zealander and you haven’t purchased a home yet, this is as close as the government will come to telling you that part of the Kiwi dream is now dead and buried. – Justin Giovannetti

Kneecap farming exports by say 10% and expect unemployment to rise, tax revenues shrink and government debt to increase. – Wayne Mapp

You do not want to find yourself in the middle of next year, having just lost your job, relying on a bunch of people with a track record of dithering and not delivering,and wishing that you had voted National. – Judith Collins

 When it comes to politics, people will always prefer policy-based evidence to the evidence-based policy. – Liam Hehir

Well, yeah I do understand where money comes from. It comes from hard work, and other people’s often. I will not manage myself to conform to a view of women that we all need to be soft and cuddly. – Judith Collins

It’s conviction politics. You stand for something. If you stand for something, and you can proudly articulate it, and stand by it, that’s a significantly easier position to take, and to hold. Much more than one which depends on what a pollster says, or a focus group. I’ve never focus grouped, personally. – Judith Collins

The world is in the midst of a cultural war known as The Great Awokening. Armies of young progressives, media personalities, journalists, bureaucrats, and academics have seized the moment to demand that the rest of society must have only one set of correct thoughts about race, gender, and sex. Should you express the opinion that all lives matter instead of Black Lives Matter or call someone a coloured person instead of a person of colour, you risk losing your livelihood or being visited by a mob intent on changing your mind by intimidation.- Gerry Bowler

If from a great height of authority you tell people that they are helpless, that is what they will become, especially when they derive some kind of self-destructive short-term benefit from being or acting helpless, such as the ability to continue to take drugs in the knowledge that it is not their fault.  – Theodore Dalrymple

Farmers have enough on their plate with weather, interest rates, and international markets, they shouldn’t have to contend with a government who doesn’t understand their sector and restricts their growth.  New Zealand’s reputation as a producer of quality and sustainable agricultural products is well known around the world. When we form the next government, our pledge is to ensure that our agricultural policy focuses on allowing farmers the opportunity to farm their way to better outcomes, rather than being regulated into oblivion. – Judith Collins

You don’t trade off freedom for security. In fact it isn’t a trade off. Less freedom makes you less secure. – David Farrar

But beyond that, what did the debate tell us? It told me Judith Collins has life experience and not just in law. When social problems came up she could refer to her childhood in a sub-standard house and her husband feeling he should leave school too young. She grew up on a farm. When Jacinda Ardern talks on these subjects she sounds like a policy paper. – John Roughan

In fact actually she’s good in a disaster – I’d go so far as to call her a disaster Prime Minister. – David Seymour

Yet mercy is not a given. It is a value we must nurture and aspire to. Tolerance allows the spirit of enquiry the confidence to roam freely, to make mistakes, to self-correct, to be bold, to dare to doubt and in the process to chance upon new and more advanced ideas. Without mercy society grows inflexible, fearful, vindictive and humourless. – Nick Cave

As far as I can see, cancel culture is mercy’s antithesis. Political correctness has grown to become the unhappiest religion in the world. Its once honourable attempt to reimagine our society in a more equitable way now embodies all the worst aspects that religion has to offer (and none of the beauty) — moral certainty and self-righteousness shorn even of the capacity for redemption. It has become quite literally, bad religion run amuck. – Nick Cave

"Phil Twyford is my Asset, and @jacindaardern's liability" – 10/10 from @JudithCollinsMP #LeadersDebate

— NZ National Party (@NZNationalParty) September 30, 2020

‘If Jacinda Ardern is going to use my age against me, I’m happy to use my experience,’ Judith Collins says. #Leadersdebate

— Jason Walls (@Jasonwalls92) September 30, 2020

Late last year the National Farmers Federation set the laudable goal of increasing the value of farm production from about $60bn a year to $100bn a year by 2030. Good luck. The regulators and their enforcers have other ideas. Their intention is to limit the expansion of farming and, if possible, force it into retreat, turning farmers from food producers into unpaid stewards of native trees and grasses. – Nick Cater

From coronavirus to saving threatened species, absolutism, risk aversion and an absence of proportion are hallmarks of contemporary public policy. . . Ad hoc decisions are made in favour of assumed benefits without reference to the cost to farmers, farm output, export earnings or the cost of food.  – Nick Cater

God deliver us from the hands of zealots. They exist in different guises in every age, lay claim to being the era’s moral guardians and demand no more than complete obedience to their ordained order. They only burn heretics in sorrow, for their own good and that of society. . . .Now the bureaucratic state dictates morality and the devil is discrimination, in all his endlessly evolving forms. The crime is giving any perceived offence. The weapon is the law. – Chris Uhlmann

The truth is, if I do have sad eyes it’s because I live in a world where people with very superficial analysis are constantly impinging on each other with higher taxes and more regulations than would otherwise be necessary. – David Seymour

A vote for NZ First has always been a vote for disruption, chaos and a nihilistic anarchy to disrupt the status quo without any vision about what to put in its place. – Damien Grant

One of the best ways to tell a lie is to embed it in the midst of high-sounding verbiage. This is so common a method that one is sometimes unsure whether a lie is being told or an untruth merely enunciated. – Theodore Dalrymple

Many people can say fine words. That’s easy, but who can understand the detail and the workflow that can actually deliver it for you? – Shane Reti

We are creating our own hurdles at a rate higher than any other primary producer in the world. For every dollar spent on food worldwide, the farmer receives on average, less than 10 cents. – Jane Smith

This is not Monopoly money, it’s money that our kids and grandkids will have to pay back. – Judith Collins

Despite the Tramadol the pain is getting worse. Comes and goes but spikes at probably an 8.5/10 on the pain scale. Now to be fair that is the male pain scale, so probably just a 2.5 on the female pain scale, but nevertheless was enough for me to be actually yelling out loud. –  David Farrar

Age may be an imperfect proxy for maturity or competence; there will always be precocious children above, and incompetent adults below, the line wherever it is drawn.- Justice Jan-Marie Doogue 

Whatever this is, it’s not journalism as I understand it. It’s a continuation of a long-standing trend whereby journalists see themselves not as mere observers and reporters of the political process, but as active players and agitators. – Karl du Fresne

Onslow would save an average of 300,000 tonnes of CO2 per year at a cost of at least $1300/tonne. The current CO2 price is $32. Keeping the aluminium smelter in operation could save 2,500,000 tons of worldwide emissions each year at a cost of about $100 million or $40/tonne and has the potential to significantly minimise the dry year problem. – Bryan Leyland

There is a pit of doom major parties in New Zealand can fall into, when their soft centre supporters abandon them for their centrist opponent and another cohort of voters on the fringe deserts them for a more radical and exciting minor party. This happened to National in 2002, and to Labour in 2014, and Judith Collins has spent her three months as National leader grimly hanging onto the edge of this pit, trying to claw her way out while Jacinda Ardern stamps on her fingers and kicks at her hands, all the time smiling beatifically while reminding the rest of us to be kind. – Danyl Mclauchlan

Ardern has learned from her first term in government that if she promises anything substantive her caucus and the public service will fail to deliver it, so best to promise nothing. – Danyl Mclauchlan

When politicians call for reform of the tax system, they are really saying there needs to be more taxation in order to meet their expenditure. The perpetually aggrieved present an implausible argument that is deficient in equity and logic, which is – the more you distribute other people’s income, the wealthier the nation becomes.   –  Gerry Eckhoff

This year has illustrated for me that we are not a nation of dissenters, we are a nation of conformists. Margaret Thatcher once said that “when people have freedom to choose, they choose freedom”. Well, apparently not in New Zealand. Like so many other years in our history, 2020 is yet another year of compliance and conformity, and deference by individual New Zealanders to the power of the state. Even motorway road-signs ordering us to be kind don’t seem to arouse any concerns among the trusting, dependent New Zealand public. I have come to realise that those of us in whom those signs aroused Orwellian visions of the future are a very small minority indeed. – Chris Finlayson

We are trying to live a five star lifestyle on a two star income.   We spend like a fat cat and earn like an alley cat.  We want the cake with all the trimmings but we can barely afford the flour and sugar. – Owen Jennings

We are becoming a nation of low performing advisors.  Politicians from central Government to community boards cannot make decisions any more.  They don’t have the gumption or the training and they don’t have the guts to deliver. They hide behind faceless consultants and toothless committees.  Costs go up and productivity goes down. – Owen Jennings

Suddenly, the issues on which her government had previously been struggling to the point where election defeat looked more likely than not were totally forgotten. Two errant Ministers were got rid of, and, with the exception of a couple of overworked loyalists, the largely incompetent remainder were quickly put in the broom cupboard, until after the election. – Peter Dunne

Democratic values are under attack as never before in modern history. The breadth, intensity and viciousness of this attack is breathtaking. Where it will lead is impossible to say. That will largely depend on whether society recognises what’s at stake and has the will to dig in and resist it. – Karl du Fresne

Having realised decades ago that that the fight between capitalism and classical Marxist economics was lost, the extreme left opened a new front. They attacked liberal democracy’s soft underbelly: its values, conventions, institutions and philosophical foundations.Suddenly a whole range of bedrock values, from the right to free speech to belief in fixed biological gender, was under savage attack. The underlying purpose is to destabilise society and therefore render it amenable to radical change. – Karl du Fresne

Some woke ideas (most notably the belief that sexual identity is a mere societal construct, “assigned at birth” as if by some conscious and arbitrary human intervention) strike most New Zealanders as demonstrably barking mad, but that hasn’t stopped them being  embraced by radical zealots and championed by sympathetic polemicists in the news media. – Karl du Fresne

We hear a lot from such groups about the need to embrace diversity, but the one diversity they don’t tolerate is diversity of opinion. Yet free speech is the currency of liberal democracy. Once we accept curbs on our right to engage in free and robust discussion of contentious issues (but stopping short of advocating active discrimination or incitements to violence, which present law rightly prohibits anyway), we risk becoming what might be called an illiberal democracy: one in which we may still be free to vote for the politicians of our choice, but without our votes being informed by full and open debate. Putin-style democracy, in other words. – Karl du Fresne

I never vote early. If your candidate is arrested you cannot get your vote back. – Richard Prebble

History has shown that government-led recoveries don’t work. Regeneration has to be driven by business growth, not 50 shades of tax. You cannot tax your country into wealth. Urban New Zealand, when regulators are determined to drive your farming, energy and manufacturing sectors into the ground – we all pay the price. –  Jane Smith

Under the cover of Covid, I believe fear has overtaken free thinking, and we have forgotten that elections are not about the here and now – they are about deciding which pathway we take to protect future generations. –  Jane Smith

Electioneering is short, consequences are long. Our leaders should be running a country, not an arms race. How can we promise $11.7 M to a wealthy overseas owned “green” school but have child poverty at an all-time crisis level? –  Jane Smith

You don’t need a degree in telemetry to see that the myriad of policies touted on the electioneering circuit don’t add up, particularly the ones that not only bite the hand that feeds the country, but chop off both arms and legs – and then ask those food producing and manufacturing sectors to run an economic marathon. – Jane Smith

The great irony is that we were sold MMP on the basis that it made politicians more accountable, when the exact reverse is the case. It’s the very antithesis of transparency. – Karl du Fresne

Imagine someone scraping all the maddest bits from the carcass of Facebook — a reclaimed slurry of 5G alarmism, anti-vax propaganda and scaremongering about electromagnets — and turning it into a manifesto. That, very roughly, is the Public Party. – Sarah Ditum

Carve any subject down to its barest conflicts, and you won’t help people find enlightenment and resolution. Instead, you’ll make them feel attacked, embattled, inflexible. In a recent piece Amanda Ripley warned of the dangers of journalism that goes in pursuit of simplicity; and which has, unfortunately, the effect of making everyone more committed to the certainties they’ve already chosen. Instead, she says, they should look for complexity, arguing that “Complexity counters this craving, restoring the cracks and inconsistencies that had been air-brushed out of the picture. It’s less comforting, yes. But it’s also more interesting — and true.” – Sarah Ditum

But which aspect of inequality should we be worried about? There are inequalities of opportunity and inequalities of outcome; there is overall inequality and there is inequality at the tails of the distribution. Should we be more worried about absolute or relative positions – mobility or stability? What is really more important, the distribution of the economic pie or the level and growth of living standards? – Michael Boskin

It is time to start harnessing the power of the market rather than the government. That is how we will replace dependency with opportunity and upward mobility. – Michael Boskin

Well listen here people, and I say this as a Party loyalist and activist with a certain pedigree, I hold each and every one of you jointly and severally responsible for what happened last Saturday night.  Put bluntly. You had collectively forfeited the right to govern and we (the Party) paid the price. – The Veteran

A caucus that leaks is not and never can be an effective opposition. – The Veteran

The way in which we value food is mysterious. As an example, if you look at the price of apples in New Zealand in April (peak harvest time) and compare them with a takeaway coffee, the takeaway coffee is consistently higher: over the past 10 years the price of a takeaway coffee was 50 per cent higher than a kilo of apples. Interestingly, both apples and coffee are considered beneficial in getting you going in the morning (but there are around 10 apples in a kilo compared with one coffee). – Dr Helen Darling

Bad ideas owe their advance into mainstream thinking not just to bad people but also to otherwise decent people going along with such notions out of cowardice or other weakness. The censorship of any thinking which conflicts with the orthodoxies of identity politics is increasingly destroying the western university as the crucible of reason, along with its core purpose to advance knowledge through the free play of evidence, ideas and argument. – Melanie Phillips

Some might think that not just Lord of the Flies but George Orwell’s 1984 are no longer fiction but have become, terrifyingly, our contemporary reality. – Melanie Phillips

In no other country has the pendulum swung so far from traditional school knowledge towards more esoteric “21^st century skills.” Today, while nearly every school leaver gets a certificate, many of them – about two fifths – are functionally illiterate and innumerate.

The dumbing down of our school system is a scandal. And while those responsible probably had the best intentions, the bigger scandal is that they now try to explain away this poor performance.

It frankly baffles me that when someone points out our poor education results, they are routinely criticised of elitism, Eurocentrism or other such nonsense. The truth is that teaching a broad, knowledge-rich and stimulating education would help precisely those children without elite or privileged backgrounds.

The education system’s pursuit of noble and progressive goals has tragically sacrificed the future of Kiwi children. In doing so, it is not just cementing but widening ethnic and class divides. – Dr Oliver Hartwich

The only Green Party we have had in Parliament has been a collection of political activists far more energised by social concerns and antagonism to capitalism than environmental projects. – John Roughan

Genuine Greens understand that environmental values can very effectively be priced into business and market behaviour through carbon taxes or tradeable emissions permits under a descending cap. Some of the Greens in our Parliament have no idea how markets work. – John Roughan

The risks, as they say, are almost all to the downside. The question must be asked, are we all completely mis-pricing that risk?

Have we convinced ourselves that we are living in a hermetically sealed paradise, where nothing can touch us and what is happening in the rest of the world has no bearing on our jobs and livelihoods? If that is the case, we might be heading for a rude shock. – Steven Joyce

So how does this all end? Well, no matter what anyone says, there is no such thing as a free lunch. As the economic damage of Covid-19 plays out, asset prices will revert to more sensible numbers.

The only question seems to be whether it will happen gradually or suddenly. We will also pay for this massive fiscal and monetary stimulus in increased taxes, spending controls, higher inflation, more sluggish growth or a combination of all four. – Steven Joyce

Labour and the Greens have always wanted state funding of political parties, but they need to be careful of putting narrow political interest ahead of public interest. . . .Major changes to our electoral law need to have broad public support, Labour and the Greens need to remember that.- Nick Smith

The extreme abnormality of his behavior faded into simply Trump being Trump. He developed immunity to condemnation by way of lowered expectations. – James Hamblin

My takeaway is that a large number of people HATE the cultural left (not the econ left) and are willing to put up with almost anything, including incompetence, chaos, corruption and bad policy, to signal their views loud and clear.

— Alex Tabarrok 🛡️ (@ATabarrok) November 4, 2020

Whatever the result of the election, it’s always best to accept that and do so with good grace. Just as it is when someone wins an election, to act in the best interests of their country, and to show good grace in that too. – Judith Collins

The truth is that Trump himself is not America’s problem: he is a symptom of that nation’s problems. –Sir John Key

The challenge for the next President – whoever it is – is to get America’s mojo back, to reduce inequality and to harness the promise of the American dream. The challenge is that instead of trying to go it alone, the next US President again wears the mantle of the leader of the free world not as a burden to be shunned, but as a badge of honour to be celebrated. – Sir John Key

In like fashion, the word nostalgia, the melancholic or bittersweet looking back on the irrecoverable past, is nowadays wielded as a rhetorical weapon, as if the past were nothing but a chamber of horrors in a waxworks museum. Whoever is accused of nostalgia is a person of weak mind and probably of ill-will. The past is another country, where they do everything worse than we do now; we have nothing to learn from it, at least nothing of positive value, and we have only lessons to give it, tut-tutting at its deviation from our present state of complete and final enlightenment.

The fact that today is tomorrow’s past, and that if we teach no respect for history (except for those figures who were direct intellectual forerunners of ourselves), we too shall soon be consigned to that capacious repository, the dustbin of history, does not occur to those who reprehend both conservatism and nostalgia. But surely a person who has reached a certain age without feeling nostalgia has lived a very unfortunate, indeed a wretched, life. – Theodore Dalrymple 

By applying a single rate on the incomes of all taxpayers, the flat tax requires that voters impose a proportional tax increase on themselves while seeking to raise revenue from their high-income neighbors. Such a move, of course, proves less attractive. To be sure, the unlimited ability of the state to enact various transfer programs partially undermines the effectiveness of the flat tax. But progressives want to remove the constraint imposed by the flat tax because they know that people are less willing to raise taxes on others when they have to raise them on themselves. – Richard Epstein

Tolerance is one of those many qualities, such as bravery or originality, that in itself is neither good nor bad, but whose worth depends upon many other considerations. A precondition of tolerance, of course, is disapproval, for there is no need to exercise tolerance of what we approve of or are indifferent to. We can all tolerate what we approve of; it is in the exercise of control over the expression, verbal or in action, of our disapproval that tolerance lies. Such control may shade into stupidity or pusillanimity if it leads to tolerance of what ought not be tolerated; we call intolerant those people who do not accept what they ought to accept. Often our designation reveals as much about us as it reveals about them. – Theodore Dalrymple

As to equality of opportunity, no more horrible concept could be imagined, not only because a total absence of opportunity would be compatible with it, but because, even to try seriously to achieve it, official interference would have to be so great that it would make North Korea look like a libertarian paradise. A society can offer opportunity to almost everyone, but not equality of opportunity, and to aim at the impossible is often to miss the possible. – Theodore Dalrymple

I know that deep black hole that opens up in the middle of your chest and makes you feel like you’re being sucked into it. I know how mean, cruel, and unfair life can be sometimes… but I found the best way through pain, and loss and grief is to find purpose. – Joe Biden

I’m more worried about the tendency of progressive social movements to value their differences above their common goals or to seek economic advantage without working for a more sustainable economic system.  – Christopher Tremewan

At every funeral I’ve ever been to, necessary catharsis is often found in what my Irish-Catholic, rugby-loving family describe as the ‘after match’. Most cultures have evolved practices that, through the breaking of bread and the sharing of stories, pull us out of our isolation and individual grief and back into the collective experience of farewelling a loved one. It provides a kind of temporary, full stop to the profound intensity of loss. Irreverence counters reverence, jokes replace solemnity and food nourishes both body and soul. These communal experiences ground us, reminding us of the legacy of love left behind by the person we have said goodbye to. They exist not as frivolous excuses for a hooley but as a necessary part of moving us through to the next stage. –  Anna Rawhiti-Connell

When equality means equal outcomes, it removes individual effort and requires chopping everyone down to the same level. – Oliver Hartwich

When a society forgets what excellence is, it worships mediocrity. And the only way to notice the misstep is to look at other countries and compare. – Oliver Hartwich

Kiwis have mothballed their ambition. We have forgotten about growing the pie so we can share it. We have given up on excellence in favour of wellbeing, kindness and not rocking the boat. I am convinced this country can do better. But to achieve excellence, we must demand it. From our councils, our national politicians, our schools, our businesses – and, crucially, from ourselves. – Oliver Hartwich

The next question many people ask is what’s the difference between a median house price and an average house price? That’s a very good question which can be answered like this – the median house price is the price of just one house that you cannot afford to buy, whereas the average house price is the price of many houses that you cannot afford to buy.   – James Elliott

New Zealand is a victim of its own success. The low visibility of Covid-19 here means people are less likely to wear masks, scan QR codes, use hand sanitiser, get tested and stay home when sick. We’re stuck in something of a paradox – the better we handle Covid-19, the more our response is jeopardised in the future. – Marc Daalder

When considering whether life is getting better or worse, we need to remember to do the maths. The numbers show it’s not all bad news, and most of it is good news. Just because something is bad today doesn’t mean it was better in the past. We have reason be sceptical, but many more reasons to be optimistic, and especially to be grateful. – Andrew Taberner

I can see a guy hitting the face of one of my men. I’m playing for my country. That’s not respect. – Pablo Matera

Everything is hard in Argentina. At the moment it is one of the toughest times in our country. We wanted to show our people when you fight and work hard you get what you fight for. – Pablo Matera

MPs who are bitter, angry or disappointed need to suck it up and move on. Dwelling on the past few months will do nothing to win the election in 2023. The only way forward is through positivity.   – Monique Poirier

The simple fact is that under current policy settings, micro-economic policies that attempt to artificially boost incomes beyond what businesses and the economy can afford will simply end up driving a bigger wedge between the haves and the have nots in terms of asset prices and wealth, through the mechanism of ever lower interest rates. We are chasing our tails. – Steven Joyce

Our system – and worldwide it is the case – eliminates mavericks. How high does your tolerance for boredom need to be before you are willing to sit in Parliament under Trevor Mallard? How patient (or ambivalent to results) do you need to be to hold a Ministry and work with State sector leaders (all of whom seem to have grey as their favourite colour)? – Alwyn Poole

It’s accepting that while nobody can reasonably demand perfection, these leakages are too often and too many. It’s simply asking that those tasked with designing and overseeing the systems that keep us safe do so to the level whereby they will own any and all failures. Until that time, these cases will continue. There will be spiralling consequences radiating out from the incident and affecting huge numbers of people in and out of New Zealand, and eventually one – maybe this one, maybe the next – will spread further, and kill someone. – Duncan Grieve

The word austerity is already disingenuous, to put it no stronger. The word in this context means the attempt to align government expenditure a little more closely with government income. It certainly does not mean hair shirts and monastic silence in unheated stone-walled rooms. – Theodore Dalrymple

 It seemed to me that rather than be overwhelmed by times that try men’s souls, we can still dream of making a better world; that small happinesses, and committed kindnesses, and goodwill to all men can be the yeast that quietly help us all to rise above fear, judgement, grief, and anger, or despair, doubt and despondency during this turn of the wheel. These small happinesses bring us back to the present moment, and anchor us in the goodness of the world. – Valerie Davies 

If you do not get enough money to run your business, you haven’t got a business. If you can’t extract the money you need to survive, you go out of business. – Mike Chapman

You can dislike people and books without needing to publicly declare it. People do not need to be publicly punished for every statement you disagree with. Stop burning the books. Stop calling out every little thing. Stop performing virtue and purity and go out and behave like a decent human being. – Ani O’Brien

There is such power in the pages of a book. There is intrigue and excitement and bafflement, ideas and ideals that penetrate minds, even years later, even into adulthood. Books offer views of other worlds, they are windows into strangers’ souls, introducing us to characters who wear different shoes, different skins, different scars. Books are objects of art, too: their smell and their weight and their beautiful, tactile, tangible covers – Sonya Wilson

Details about the increased caring are yet to be revealed but experts predict it will be in line with the prime minister’s previous track record of looking thoughtful and sad whenever questioned about an issue in front of media, and will consist of furrowed brows, worried frowns, and empathic nodding. The furrowing, frowning and nodding, which Treasury refers to as F2N, will increase by one percentage point a year, aggregating each year to an astonishing 9% increase in Net Prime Ministerial Caring, or NPMC, by the end of the decade. –  Danyl Mclauchlan 

In her post-cabinet press conference, the prime minister would not be drawn on whether she would care passionately about child poverty but deeply about climate change, or the reverse. The adverb she would use to care about housing affordability was still being decided. “Intensely” and “strongly” are rumoured to be options and Ardern refused to rule them out, declaring, “I’m leaving every option on the table. I will choose a word ending in ly. That is my commitment to you.” – Danyl Mclauchlan 

The key to balancing tradeoffs between cooperation and parochialism lies in understanding that not all groups are created equal. Groups with voluntary memberships that allow people to be part of multiple, transient, and overlapping communities—for example, sports fans, chess clubs, or single-issue political organizations—tend to generate widespread cooperation both within and between groups because their members are also part of larger communities. . .  These types of groups allow diverse, large-scale societies to thrive by drawing people with varied beliefs, interests, opinions, and backgrounds together. These between-group connections encourage people to confront each other’s humanity and help to curtail out-group hatred. In contrast, groups that are formed around fixed, unchanging and non-overlapping identities—for example, sex, race, or ethnicity—while fostering tight bonds between their members, will tend to sow division and cultivate hatred between groups. These groups are likely to breed resentment, foment animosity, and promote tribalism.  – Robert Lynch

Nobody knows how history will unfold, but locking people into an unalterable hierarchy of suffering, pitting groups that we were born into against one another, nurturing persecution and offering up an overly simplistic interpretation of history all seem perfectly designed to prepare the field for another cataclysmic event. What will a nation enthralled by tribal identity do when a president refuses to concede regardless of the vote count? And once this process is set in motion, it might just shatter the fragile foundation on which our society rests. A politics based on membership in a particular religious, racial, or social group rather than broader groupings of people with the same political views was a dubious luxury that our species can simply no longer afford. Although E.O. Wilson originally intended “Wonderful theory, wrong species” to be a critique of Marxism, it is just as applicable to critical theory and its progeny—identity politics. – Robert Lynch

They tell us to stop flying; sell the car, ride a bike, stop eating meat, exist on mung beans and kombucha and there they are sipping carbonated water in business class, after stepping out of a taxi or Crown car at the airport.  – Ryan Bridge

For young people growing up in some of New Zealand’s most culturally diverse communities today, the nation is multicultural and looks and feels like them – less homogenous than prevailing attitudes suggest and less mono-cultural than previous generations. – Bronwyn Wood

First, we must stay true to our values. The National Party values of individual freedom and choice, personal responsibility, limited government, competitive enterprise, and equal citizenship and opportunity. They are the values I believe in. They are the values that you believe in. They are New Zealand values. They are the values that have made our country great and the values that our country needs now. – Judith Collins

People will not vote for change without reason. We need to convince them to have high hopes for themselves, to believe a better New Zealand is possible, to expect more from their Government. – Judith Collins

We will expose the government’s wasteful spending and the costs it is putting on businesses, the shackles holding back innovation and entrepreneurship, the closed thinking that hinders progress across so many policy areas, the failure of imagination, the lack of ambition, and the tolerance for bland mediocrity. That mediocrity is robbing too many New Zealanders of the opportunities and choices they deserve. –  Judith Collins

In a crisis, we need to be more than a modified status quo. There are so many areas where New Zealand needs better policy. Our education system is falling backwards, rapidly. More than one-in five-children are leaving our schools without the basic literacy and numeracy skills they need to succeed. Our next generation is learning less than the generation before. – Judith Collins

My fellow members, I believe National is at its best when we speak to the aspirations of New Zealanders, when we voice your hopes and give you reason to believe they can be realised. The belief that hard work should reap reward. That we can deliver our children greater opportunities than we had. That each of us has it within us to shape our own lives for the better if given the choices and responsibility to do so. That the solutions to our worst problems lie not in the hands of an ever–bigger State, but in stronger families and stronger communities. – Judith Collins

We need our leaders to lead. This is an occasion where the nature of leadership is to draw a path, to reassure people about the options that lie ahead, to create both the sense of urgent action but also the sense of a better world. This is not going to happen if people feel alienated and intimidated – they’re not going to participate actively if they don’t see the upside as well as some of the challenges we will face if we don’t move. Leadership is being prepared to stake a position, having gathered some evidence, to then coach and guide and reassure others on a journey. – Rod Carr

The science itself is open to discussion among well-informed scientists. And then the implications of that science for human activity and the impacts that policy change will have on human activity merge from science into judgment. I think we need to be very careful that the pursuit of perfect science doesn’t become the enemy of early action. – Rod Carr

In the agricultural sector, there is no or very little denial of climate change. It’s a long time since I’ve had a farmer [say] that the weather patterns which they are experiencing are similar to the patterns their parents or grandparents experienced if they’d been in the same geographic location for a century. It is warmer in parts, drier in parts, wetter in parts, windier in parts. They are obviously anxious and concerned about how they sustain a viable business if they are unable to continue practices that they are familiar with. In the agricultural sector there is a growing awareness of the need for change, but also a concern about what is the nature of the change that is needed. I think the agricultural sector is highly innovative, I don’t think they’re in denial. For my money, New Zealand should be substantially increasing its investment in agriculture research. – Rod Carr

We hear a lot about structural, aka “institutional”, racism. It falls into the same category as so-called unconscious bias, which can be defined as the bias you have when you didn’t know you had a bias. (So how do you know you have it? Because woke activists tell you. They recognise it even when you can’t.) – Karl du Fresne

New Zealand has to decide what type of place it wants to be: a diverse, harmonious, tolerant, multicultural country with a common interest in prosperity and freedom, or a splintered one in which multiple groups jostle for special treatment on the basis of real or imagined differences of ethnicity, sexual preference, culture, religion, gender or any one of the many other divisive “identities”. I think I know which society most New Zealanders would opt for. – Karl du Fresne

I still look at the fact that [after] two and a half years, traumatised children have been traumatised again by the processes of Oranga Tamariki. You’re re-traumatising all those children just so we’re ‘culturally safe’ now. Where’s the consideration of the trauma of doing that. I think that’s what’s missing from this whole picture. What will this do to those children? – Mark Solomon

Children are real live human beings, they’re not objects. They’re not parcels that we can move around. They have feelings, they have significant ties. Children’s very survival depends on their emotional connections to adults. I don’t want to be disrespectful, but it’s a simplistic belief that culture trumps all else. And so therefore it justifies the removal of these children from where they have been for two and a half years, and the movement to people who at this point in time are from a child’s perspective, strangers. – Nicola Atwool

This suggests to me (not a very original thought) that a free society can exist only where there is some cultural, and not merely a legalistic, understanding of a constitutional order: an acceptance of limits of outrage, for example, if you happen to be fortunate enough to live in a tolerably tolerant society, even when that society is not perfectly just or fair (as no society yet known to man is).

This cultural understanding is easily lost, and indeed seems to be in the process of decline in Western countries, most dangerously among the very class—the intelligentsia—in whom one might have expected or hoped it to be strongest. Our universities are becoming bastions of unfreedom, if my few young academic friends are to be believed, and we are raising up a generation of secular ayatollahs. – Theodore Dalrymple

The attempt to whittle this down to a story about bloodlines undermines the rights of that child to be themselves as a whole person. I will always advocate that the best thing for Māori is, by Māori for Māori, but if a Māori child is happy and loved; supported in their cultural identity and has access to knowledge of their whakapapa, then re-traumising them to rewrite the OT agenda is patronising; it is cynical and smacks of the state tokenising and recolonising these children. – A foster parent

As caregivers we commit to protecting the privacy of the child. We honour this – and know that if we break this trust; we put at jeopardy the secure placements the children we care for have – it is with fear that I tell the story below; but also with anger and most importantly with love. Love for the children that we try to do the best for. The children whom we know better than any social worker. That thrive and flourish in our care. The children whose lives are controlled and manipulated by OT to satisfy a process. To tick a box. I also have another story – but it cannot be told without identifying ourselves or the child and there are too many people who can be hurt by this and I do not feel I have the right to tell that story when it is not mine to tell. I started writing that story a year ago. I felt it needed to be told but I had no voice to tell it with. I think for now it needs to remain untold by me: I still do not have that voice. – A foster parent

I want our voice heard. Our whānau voice and most importantly the voices of the children. I want them to be able to feel they have the right to say what they want and to have that listened to and embedded in the plan that will shape their destinies. Because whatever happens their destinies will be changed and it is not them or the people who know them best that will do the shaping. OT controls that narrative. – A foster parent

It’s important that we act now to protect vulnerable consumers from the tyranny of surveillance capitalism. As the late internet activist Aaron Swartz once wrote, “Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves.” – Trent Smith

It is clear that a certain privileged layer of New Zealand society has learned nothing from the recent political convulsions besetting both the United Kingdom and the United States. Spit upon the most cherished beliefs and achievements of your “deplorables” and – eventually – they will spit back. – Chris Trotter

To judge the actions of historical actors by the prevailing moral precepts of the present is not only philosophically impermissible, but it also betrays the writer’s fundamental ignorance of the history he is purporting to condemn. – Chris Trotter

To apologise for one’s history is to invite those wronged by it to seek either restitution or retribution – or, maybe, both. The problem is, that what was taken by a combination of force and trickery is unlikely to be reclaimed by anything else. The children of the settlers who built “New Zealand” on the body of “Aotearoa”, understand in that special place known to all human-beings who love their homeland, that the apologies being offered by these radical journalists (who clearly despise everything “New Zealand” stands for) are a warning of deep and tragic upheavals to come. 

Some of these Pakeha will reluctantly abandon their country. Some will retreat deeper into what is still its racist heartland. And some will struggle to preserve the nation they have grown up in. A nation whose true history is one of Maori and Pakeha finding more and more to be proud of in the way each ethnicity has adapted to the presence of the other. In the course of that history many apologies have been earned, and some have been given, but not, in the end, for being caught up in historical forces too vast for blame, and too permanent for guilt. – Chris Trotter

We need to take back control of our language and of the agenda. A strong democracy is one that can conduct a civilised but serious and passionate debate about what matters to large blocks of opinion. Attempts to prevent topics and ban any view you disagree with is usually an unwelcome move to alienate significant parts of the electorate and impoverish decision taking. – Sir John Redwood

Arguments about regenerative agriculture illustrate the challenges of creating informed debate. More generally, democracies depend on voters understanding complex issues. – Keith Woodford 

Mainstream media is influenced by a perceived need to present things in black and white. The emphasis is on the sensational, and controversy always helps. – Keith Woodford

Muzzling opinions because they conflict with the opinions of editorial managers would be perturbing at the best of times.  Muzzling them when democratic governance arrangements are the critical matter at issue is shameful. – Point of Order

The price you pay for food in the store, and the price the farmer receives, do not reflect the real cost of producing that food — not even close. According to government statistics, 58% of a British farmer’s income is from subsidies (remarkably, that figure only drops to 46% for “very large” farms.) It doesn’t matter what kind of farmer you are, upland or lowland, arable or livestock, intensive or extensive, nature-friendly or monoculture: you can’t earn enough from commodity food prices, so your business is propped up by these payments.

It is bonkers, but it’s a global problem, because the commodity prices are set globally and farmers globally tend to be subsidised. The US has a particularly insane system that encourages terrible industrial farming and then dumps its excess stuff on world markets at beneath true cost. – James Rebanks

When I was a kid, a scrapman used to come to the farm in a white van and would occasionally buy machinery or old gates, or rolls of rusting wire for scrap money, or take it to “clean it up”. It was sometimes a useful function, because the scrap had to be got rid of, but the fella was dodgy, and my old man used to say “keep an eye on him, or we will find things missing when he’s gone”. I think I feel the same way about the Government’s plan for agriculture — it may do some good for rural England, but if I were you I’d keep an eye on it, because later on you might well notice that some valuable possessions have gone missing. – James Rebanks

These emotional attempts to suppress controversial or unpopular speech have increasingly made use of what I call the “Mourner’s Veto”—individuals will say that a speaker or a piece of writing has caused them to become distressed or sad or angry or frightened, and they will support these claims with allegations of “harm” or even threats to their “right to exist.” Reasonable debate and discussion then becomes impossible as activists make unfalsifiable but furiously emotive claims about alleged threats to their safety and wellbeing amid much weeping and claims of exhaustion and mental fragility. It is not healthy for the limits of permissible speech to be dictated by the most sensitive person in the room, nor to allow emotional appeals to supplant robust argument as the most effective strategy in a debate. – Christopher J. Ferguson

This kind of heightened emotional expressiveness can be difficult to contend with. A debate participant who dismisses the tear-streaked outbursts of an opponent can appear monstrously insensitive and callous, even if they happen to be right on the facts. On the other hand, indulging this kind of behavior only aggravates and encourages it and constitutes a surrender of reasoned argument to emotional blackmail—a lose-lose scenario for the person arguing from facts and figures. Social pressure and a desire to appear compassionate and empathetic may prevent us from challenging emotional narratives. Even requests for evidence are sometimes misconstrued as exercises in power and privilege even though they are the cornerstone of rational discourse. – Christopher J. Ferguson

Those who defend the authority of the most sensitive among us to censor the rest ought to consider what will happen when the same standard is employed by their opponents. We must work to restore clearer norms for civil debate, and diminish the power of emotional arguments. Emotions almost invariably lead to bad decisions and the sooner we recognize this in our public discourse, the sooner we’ll be able to tackle our formidable challenges with rational and empirically informed discussions about the many complex issues we face. – Christopher J. Ferguson

Such fragility is now to be expected, however, because crying at the first opportunity is the new heroism. To display one’s vulnerability to all and sundry is a manifestation of emotional authenticity, to hold anything inward a form of deceit and betrayal of the self. A cycle of competitive vulnerability is set up; the person who can withstand the least is now the strongest, and certainly the most moral. – Theodore Dalrymple

 But sentimentality comes in many forms, and one of them, nowadays the most prevalent, is the deliberate elevation of emotion over thought. This is not to say that emotion has no place in ratiocination. Indeed, it seems to me likely that thought requires some kind of emotion for it to take place at all; for, as Hume said, reason is the slave of the passions, and without a passion of even the most etiolated degree, we could hardly rouse ourselves to bother to think, or to choose to think, about one thing rather than another. – Theodore Dalrymple

There is no plumbing the shallows of the modern soul. – Theodore Dalrymple

We seem to be paying lip service to the value systems established at huge cost on battlefields throughout mankind’s recent history that emphasise equality of opportunity and representation as cornerstones of our heritage. The radicals who want to introduce a new world order are having a field day in a vacuum that is not conducive to those traditional societal standards we should be defending at every turn. There is only one way to push back and it will need to involve every free thinking person on the planet. We need to say “Enough” before it is too late. – Clive Bibby

Sustainable plant-based meat is made when cattle, sheep, goats, camels, deer and pigs graze natural free-range pasture which gathers solar energy via their green-leaf solar collectors. These grazing animals harvest plant biomass without using diesel and they also spread valuable plant fertiliser onto the ground and into the air. Real meat is greener and healthier than any fake “meat” manufactured by green alchemists. – Viv Forbes

The only hope for New Zealand now is that, whatever horrifying plans that Labour has in store, Jacinda Ardern is just as hopeless at actually implementing them in her second term as she was in her first. – Gideon Rozner

No one in New Zealand appears to be willing to simply tell it as it is. They are all too frightened of being labelled racist or whatever. Thus the corruption of our society continues its slide into a socialist politically correct oblivion, from which in my view there is no escape. Trying to legislate equality is like trying to stop the tide coming in with a bucket. Rob Sintes

The gun laws passed by this Government may have sent a powerful signal that an atrocity such as the one committed by the Christchurch shooter was abhorrent to New Zealanders. And it may have tightened up some loose legislation around gun procurement. But it did not and has not made New Zealand a safer place, despite the very best of intentions. – Kerre McIvor

I think there is some value in returning to blatant, all-out honesty. In my experience, life is easier when you do the right thing. When you front up. When you fix your mistakes. When you apologise for getting it wrong or when you accept the return of the product that didn’t work as you said it would. – Bruce Cotterill

The accusation of racism is an extremely serious slur – or would be, if the meaning of the word hadn’t been so weakened by overuse. . . If the accusation of racism still meant something, it would be damning. But in the 21^st century the word racist simply means anyone who doesn’t conform to the authoritarian orthodoxies of identity politics. – Karl du Fresne

A newspaper is an assembly of pages on which is printed news. The preposterous apologising nonsense of the past week was not news. It was fiction.  Sir Bob Jones

Insulting your customers has never been a smart commercial move. I say it again. Stuff is now stuffed. In one inane move they’ve reduced their one dollar purchase price for the entire fleet of newspapers to zilch. Sir Bob Jones

We need to boost productivity and improve wages across the economy, not tinker with minimum wage rises that could just as easily benefit a 16-year-old living at home (16-to-24-year-olds make up 55 per cent of all minimum wage earners) than it could a parent supporting a family. – Susan Edmunds

As illiberalism insidiously spreads, many people around the world are losing their jobs, being investigated by the police or harassed online for expressing commonly held opinions.  The most effective form of defence is silence.  – Point of Order

Criminalising “hate” might be superficially seductive, but should this amendment to the Crimes Act be passed, the repercussions will be chilling. Unlike other prohibitions, such as exceeding the speed limit, theft, and so forth, there will be no precise definition in the legislation as to what constitutes disharmonious or hateful speech, and where the threshold of criminal speech lies. Instead, it will be determined on a case-by-case basis, with the accused knowing whether they have broken the law only at the moment they are convicted – Paul Moon

Criminalising those who might insult a religion is a frightening prospect. It has the potential to stifle opinions and discussion, and increase misunderstandings about people’s faiths. Instead of honest examinations of religions, the ensuing climate of caution will merely prop up and perpetuate creedal caricatures, with only the brave or unwise few prepared to probe and challenge them.

There is something fundamentally infantile in trying to build a legislative wall around a belief system, as a means of shielding it from criticism. What if the tenets of a religion deserve ridicule or contempt? – Paul Moon

Of course, it is naive in the extreme to believe that “hate” can be mitigated by laws. Criminalising hateful views does not extinguish them. On the contrary, anyone with even a passing knowledge of history will be aware that prohibition simply drives opprobrious opinions underground, where they become transfigured, and then emerge in newly codified forms that camouflage their hate and consequently make them much harder to tackle.

The liberty to hold our own opinions, to debate them openly with others, to change our views, and to chisel out some truth from it all, is one of the great inheritances of the Enlightenment, and has been one of the most potent weapons in centuries of campaigns to achieve social justice (the abolition of slavery, the civil rights movement in the United States, and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa are all examples where disharmonious speech directed at systems of belief led to millions of people’s lives being improved).

Make no mistake, there is something deeply sinister in the plans to criminalise speech according to a definition that no jurist can even define with sufficient precision. And if what’s past is prologue, the recommended changes to the Crimes Act will have a suffocating effect on the free expression of honestly held views. – Paul Moon

Our way of life is being propped up by unprecedented and unsustainable levels of monetary and fiscal stimulus; and this is no time for economic complacency. – Steven Joyce

Kicking the can down the road yet again on a transtasman bubble and other urgent issues smacks of economic and political self-satisfaction. Real people are being hurt by things as they stand, and the economic scarring in places like Auckland, Rotorua, Queenstown and Southland is also real. These people are all members of the fabled team of five million. We should be acting with urgency to resurrect their livelihoods while we have the opportunity. – Steven Joyce

But to an anti-racist all things are racist, and everything is grist to his ideological mill. – Theodore Dalrymple

The reason, I suspect (though I cannot prove), is this: that in their heart of hearts, the over-promoters of the black actors and actresses believe that, unlike Indians and Chinese, blacks require administrative and political assistance to succeed, in other words that they, the over-promoters, are deeply, if subliminally, imbued with racist notions. Racism is in many places, but not always where the anti-racists perceive it. – Theodore Dalrymple

It was an opportunity to show character – a bit too much opportunity to show character in my opinion, but there we go. It’s hard. It was hard. It was physically very hard, very tiring. And it was just, it was hard.  But you know, I didn’t die. – Judith Collins

“I think it’s important to understand that it’s called Leader of the Opposition for a reason that in a democracy, you do need to actually have someone who’s not just going to say, ‘Well, if the Prime Minister said it that must be right’.

“You do actually have to have people who are going to say, ‘well, hang on, let’s look at this’. But where there’s areas where we can agree, then we will agree. – Judith Collins

Politicians around the world are notorious for apportioning blame after the publication of damning reports that highlight failures of leadership under their watch as long as the number of those who might lose their jobs doesn’t include themselves. – Clive Bibby

Maturity makes a big difference, but mostly it’s attitude. If you’ve got a good attitude, you’ll be right. You don’t mind persevering with someone with a good attitude. – Warren Temperton 

In Woke circles you must not use “woman” to refer to someone’s biological makeup, physical structure, or capacity to become pregnant. All that grossly mammalian business is somehow icky, beneath us. Why should we as spirits with infinite potential (or something) be defined by our toilet functions, or the oozing, smelly business of mere reproduction? Gnosticism, the ancient heresy that treated bodily existence as of the devil, and offered salvation by secret knowledge to a certain “awakened” (i.e., Woke) elite, has risen from its grave. – John Zmirak

If the capacity for real motherhood or fatherhood is not part of “gender” then what is? Lipstick, high heels, and a high-pitched voice on the one hand — and lumberjack shirts, work boots, and unashamed farts on the other? By “identifying” as some gender at odds with your genitals, are you simply indulging a stereotype? If so, must strangers honor that? Must we blow up women’s sports, strip women of privacy, and subject some to physical danger (like the fellow prisoners of a suddenly “female” rapist, or girls on a rugby field mowed down by a 6’ 3” “girl”)? – John Zmirak

But right now we seem to have come full circle, and collectivism is fashionable like never before. People hanker to be part of a group – especially those groups perceived as victimised. Grievance is earnestly sought and if the seekers can’t legitimately be part of the aggrieved group, they protest vigorously in the group’s name. Brand new groups are created and labelled, with the non-member creators then patting themselves on the back for embracing them! Unwittingly people are forced into groups of believers and deniers, enemies or allies. It’s almost comical. Almost…

Except the new collectivism is best characterised by its propensity to rapidly lash out at, denigrate and silence any party that questions. Despite their largely collective facelessness, through mass communication they are far more powerful and influential than any individual bigot. This monstrous movement changes the meaning of words and disregards facts. So detractors are left impotent. – Lindsay Mitchell

Resist. Communicate with your younger ones. Encourage them to think. Oddly, encourage them to rebel. That’s the prerogative of youth. Some of their world view has justified roots, and we should listen. But many of us do have something they don’t. A lifetime’s experience of the world and its many earlier bouts of madness and mayhem. – Lindsay Mitchell

I can, at times, cross into the territory of libertarian conservatism when it comes to issues like free speech.  In other words: it is possible to hold an ideology of the right without agreeing with every aspect of any one particular school of thought.  This is a real point of difference with the left, it seems, where one is often vilified or abused for expressing criticism of – or even a differing opinion to – a belief you are expected to hold. – Monique Poirier

It’s difficult to fathom that with more than 20,000 Kiwi families currently waiting for a home the Government is prepared to spend millions stopping 480 much-needed houses from being built. – Judith Collins 

Does it make any kind of sense that scarce MIQ spaces are being taken up by people who come from places that do not have Covid-19? Why couldn’t we just admit RSE workers as usual from places without Covid, on an understanding that the gate would be shut if their Covid-status changed? Does it seem plausible that the most valuable uses of scarce spaces in MIQ is for people coming in for fruit-picking, if those workers are coming in from places where Covid is prevalent? If it were the outcome of an auction for spaces, I’d take that seriously – I could too easily be wrong! The policy simultaneously plausibly lets too many RSE workers into MIQ, and too few RSE workers into the country. It seems unlikely that the highest valued use of an MIQ space is for someone who would come in to pick fruit at $22/hour, but it also makes no sense at all that they be required to be there in the first place. – Eric Crampton

I suspect, but cannot know, that the government is doing all of this deliberately, to kill the RSE programme. Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. – Eric Crampton

Every state possesses the means to keep its citizens under strict control. The democratic trick is to ensure that it receives no encouragement to use them. If governments are incited to believe the worst of their citizens, then those citizens will not be slow to live up to their masters’ expectations.  – Chris Trotter

The brief period of sitting this year has been atrocious, with nearly half of each Question Time spent watching Labour MPs ask themselves questions then gleefully clapping at the response like some banana republic legislature. – Thomas Coughlan

In short I think females get a comparatively rough deal, first by nature and also, if unintentionally, by cultural norms. – Sir Bob Jones

Taxpayers aren’t a bank to be called upon to clean up the Government’s poor decisions, particularly when it is meddling in private property rights. – Michael Woodhouse

Parenthood, in essence, is the relegation of one’s own interests below those of your child’s. – James Borrowdale

It is not of self-censorship that I speak, however, or even of that social censorship that demands that certain verbal taboos, in the name of good manners, are not lightly broken. I mean rather the increasing hold on public expression of specific little orthodoxies that, de facto though not de jure, may not be questioned or contradicted.

There is no midnight knock on the door, at least not yet, to ensure conformity, but those who question these little orthodoxies (whose content, incidentally, changes all the time, but also extends in scope, like multiplying starfish crawling over a coral reef) are subject to such punishments as ostracism or black-listing.

I am no martyr for the truth, and have no thirst for it either. There are certain things that I believe but would never say in public. But I passionately believe in the right of other people to say them. – Theodore Dalrymple 

Freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having. . . free speech encompasses the right to offend, and indeed to abuse another  – Lord Justice Bean and Mr Justice Warby 

Generally, the closer to Christmas a government announces something, the more unpopular that thing probably is. It’s the old trick of slipping out bad news while voters are too distracted by present-shopping and too worn out to care. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

Humanity’s recent past is pockmarked with tragedies on a scale beyond our current imagining, and they all were the result of unanticipated consequences of grand government programmes designed with noble intent; many of them less radical than that we have currently deployed.

So whilst the current prognosis looks positive I remain of the view that the risks we took were disproportionate to the evils we sought to avoid. We dodged a bullet; no question, but you will win at Russian Roulette five times out of six. This does not mean it was a good idea to spin the chamber. – Damien Grant

A couple of weeks back Jacinda Ardern came out and said no one in New Zealand should have to rely on their family to buy a home, and yet she doesn’t mind people in New Zealand relying on their family to have to stay alive. You know, there’s just an inequity in what she said that’s not right. – Chris Jackson

There has never been a council mayor or chairman, born, created, or cloned, who would prefer to officially open the valve on a new sewerage scheme in preference to turning the freshly polished handle on the front door of a new council office block. Gerry Eckhoff

The election to public office is a generous choice by the public which must always be met with an equal measure of accountability by the recipient. – Gerry Eckhoff

We let them down by failing to test them for Covid. We let them down by giving them the wrong facemasks. We must not again let down the border and managed isolation workers who go to work to risk their lives every day. – Dr Parmjeet Parmar

Finally, it seems more and more people are on Santa’s naughty list, waking up to the reality that biological sex cannot be changed by clothes or pronouns any more than a pair of Christmas antlers makes one a reindeer. All any of us gender heretics, ‘nasty’ feminists and free-thinkers want for Christmas is for politicians to show some common sense and to publicly state that a ‘woman is an adult human female’. – Jo Bartosch

Exactly one-in-three of all MPs in Parliament now is a newbie. That is a stunningly large proportion. They will be unruly, inexperienced, idealistic and in some cases wholly unsuited to representing themselves as legislators, let alone anyone else. – Pattrick Smellie

House price inflation is an absurd disgrace for which successive governments of the last 30 years bear responsibility and may take another 20 to fix.

Inequality is rampant, rivers are still dirty, the economy is still too heavily based on low wages and low productivity. From Ihumātao to local government reform to commissions of inquiry into terror attacks and abuse in state care, there were any number of issues that mattered this year.

But no issue mattered more than covid, and our politics have been shaped accordingly. – Pattrick Smellie

The point here is not that the government should borrow endless amounts of money to throw at all of the country’s issues, nor that greater state involvement is always a good thing. Instead, I make the simple observation that politicians make up their own rules about when the state should take decisive action. If it wanted to, the government could apply the same thinking to child poverty or climate change that it did to Covid-19: early intervention and spending to avoid future catastrophe. The pandemic may be a once-in-a-lifetime aberration, but strategic policy-making doesn’t have to be. Matt Bartlett

Climate policies also have costs that often vastly outweigh their climate benefits. The Paris Agreement, if fully implemented, will cost $819–$1,890 billion per year in 2030, yet will reduce emissions by just 1% of what is needed to limit average global temperature rise to 1.5°C. Each dollar spent on Paris will likely produce climate benefits worth 11¢. – Bjorn Lomborg

The world, of course, is always divided into WE and THEY. WE are innocent, good, well-meaning, helpless victims; THEY are guilty, bad, ill-intentioned, deliberate perpetrators. How neat and satisfying it all is, how well it explains everything! – Theodore Dalrymple

We who have suffered nothing more than the inconvenience of no overseas travel and one (or two) lockdowns should give some thought this holiday season for New Zealanders who have borne a much bigger burden so we have the luxury of feeling safe.

The people whose livelihoods have been destroyed, and often their life savings too, when their industries were decimated by the border closures. Those who have lost their careers and are now in a much lower paid job or no job at all. Children who have had their education disrupted, and in some cases truncated, so they can support their families because traditional bread winners have lost their jobs.

Many have not been able to say goodbye to cherished family members, hello to new ones, or celebrate myriad other life events. Many life partners are separated either side of our national moat. To all those people we owe our thanks, support and understanding. – Steven Joyce

The international economic response is predicated on the notion that inflation is dead, and massive increases in money supply won’t revive it. It’s a big bet. If the mandarins are right we are likely headed into a period of slow growth and higher asset prices that will cause more political dislocation and risk social unrest. If they are wrong, things could get really ugly. – Steven Joyce

For my old political party there is a major rebuild to look forward to. As someone who had a part in the last such effort I can report it will involve a massive amount of hard work, and listening to the public. There are few short cuts. The principles of individual freedom, choice, free enterprise and personal responsibility will endure, as they do in democracies around the world. The challenge will be applying them successfully to the post-Covid world. – Steven Joyce

The extent to which we can give animals what they need on a farm is pretty good and may well be better than that which wild animals, and even some people, experience. – Dr David Beggs 

The biodiversity able to occur with rangeland farming is so much better than that in cropping. So is it better to produce food for people from something that has prevented wildlife from existing at all or to produce an animal for eventual slaughter and raise it humanely? – Dr David Beggs 

Society has way more anxiety, we’ve basically got a pandemic of anxiety and depression amongst our teenagers, that’s a multifaceted thing but I think the loss of an at home parent in the first 1000 days of life is a big driver. – Nathan Wallis

In other words, “bleeding heart” versions of our history which push the line that everything was lovely in Aotearoa until the colonists arrived, and that they were responsible for depriving Maori of their livelihoods, are telling dubious bits of the story. Maori had killed more Maori between 1810 and 1840 than the total number of Kiwis killed in World Wars One and Two combined. And in the process, they complicated the relationships with settlers when they arrived in substantial numbers between 1840 and 1860. Yes, the wars of the 1860s did terrible damage to what remained of the Maori economy. But not as much as Maori had done to themselves before colonists had even arrived. – Michael Bassett

The thing about grief, big and small, is that it’s ordinary. We carry our losses in our bodies, they say, deep in the tissues of our hips, our shoulders, and each new loss we experience calls up all our previous losses. We can dissolve some of this grief by moving, working it out, stretching it out, talking it out, crying it out, but can’t we also roll it out on a lightly floured countertop, shape it with our hands into something small and delicate and crisp? – Jenn Shapland

It’s very early days and we have a lot to think about – but what we do know is that we want to help people in need. Our goal is to make a difference in the lives of people who really need it – and a win like this allows us to do that. – North Otago Lotto winner

In the Maori worldview there’s this saying: ko nga tahu a o tapuwai inanahi, hei tauira mo apopo, which is the footsteps you lay down in your past create the paving stones of where you stand today.

Those footsteps and that world view are always in front of me. It’s incredible to sit here today and look back and see all of those footsteps and see everyone who joined on those footsteps that made this possible. These paving stones would not exist if a number of things hadn’t happened here in Dunedin. – Ian Taylor

Quotes of the month

Labour and the Greens have always wanted state funding of political parties, but they need to be careful of putting narrow political interest ahead of public interest. . . Major changes to our electoral law need to have broad public support, Labour and the Greens need to remember that.- Nick Smith

The extreme abnormality of his behavior faded into simply Trump being Trump. He developed immunity to condemnation by way of lowered expectations. – James Hamblin

My takeaway is that a large number of people HATE the cultural left (not the econ left) and are willing to put up with almost anything, including incompetence, chaos, corruption and bad policy, to signal their views loud and clear.

— Alex Tabarrok 🛡️ (@ATabarrok) November 4, 2020

Whatever the result of the election, it’s always best to accept that and do so with good grace. Just as it is when someone wins an election, to act in the best interests of their country, and to show good grace in that too. – Judith Collins

The truth is that Trump himself is not America’s problem: he is a symptom of that nation’s problems. –Sir John Key

The challenge for the next President – whoever it is – is to get America’s mojo back, to reduce inequality and to harness the promise of the American dream. The challenge is that instead of trying to go it alone, the next US President again wears the mantle of the leader of the free world not as a burden to be shunned, but as a badge of honour to be celebrated. – Sir John Key

In like fashion, the word nostalgia, the melancholic or bittersweet looking back on the irrecoverable past, is nowadays wielded as a rhetorical weapon, as if the past were nothing but a chamber of horrors in a waxworks museum. Whoever is accused of nostalgia is a person of weak mind and probably of ill-will. The past is another country, where they do everything worse than we do now; we have nothing to learn from it, at least nothing of positive value, and we have only lessons to give it, tut-tutting at its deviation from our present state of complete and final enlightenment.

The fact that today is tomorrow’s past, and that if we teach no respect for history (except for those figures who were direct intellectual forerunners of ourselves), we too shall soon be consigned to that capacious repository, the dustbin of history, does not occur to those who reprehend both conservatism and nostalgia. But surely a person who has reached a certain age without feeling nostalgia has lived a very unfortunate, indeed a wretched, life. – Theodore Dalrymple 

By applying a single rate on the incomes of all taxpayers, the flat tax requires that voters impose a proportional tax increase on themselves while seeking to raise revenue from their high-income neighbors. Such a move, of course, proves less attractive. To be sure, the unlimited ability of the state to enact various transfer programs partially undermines the effectiveness of the flat tax. But progressives want to remove the constraint imposed by the flat tax because they know that people are less willing to raise taxes on others when they have to raise them on themselves. – Richard Epstein

Tolerance is one of those many qualities, such as bravery or originality, that in itself is neither good nor bad, but whose worth depends upon many other considerations. A precondition of tolerance, of course, is disapproval, for there is no need to exercise tolerance of what we approve of or are indifferent to. We can all tolerate what we approve of; it is in the exercise of control over the expression, verbal or in action, of our disapproval that tolerance lies. Such control may shade into stupidity or pusillanimity if it leads to tolerance of what ought not be tolerated; we call intolerant those people who do not accept what they ought to accept. Often our designation reveals as much about us as it reveals about them. – Theodore Dalrymple

As to equality of opportunity, no more horrible concept could be imagined, not only because a total absence of opportunity would be compatible with it, but because, even to try seriously to achieve it, official interference would have to be so great that it would make North Korea look like a libertarian paradise. A society can offer opportunity to almost everyone, but not equality of opportunity, and to aim at the impossible is often to miss the possible. – Theodore Dalrymple

I know that deep black hole that opens up in the middle of your chest and makes you feel like you’re being sucked into it. I know how mean, cruel, and unfair life can be sometimes… but I found the best way through pain, and loss and grief is to find purpose. – Joe Biden

I’m more worried about the tendency of progressive social movements to value their differences above their common goals or to seek economic advantage without working for a more sustainable economic system.  – Christopher Tremewan

At every funeral I’ve ever been to, necessary catharsis is often found in what my Irish-Catholic, rugby-loving family describe as the ‘after match’. Most cultures have evolved practices that, through the breaking of bread and the sharing of stories, pull us out of our isolation and individual grief and back into the collective experience of farewelling a loved one. It provides a kind of temporary, full stop to the profound intensity of loss. Irreverence counters reverence, jokes replace solemnity and food nourishes both body and soul. These communal experiences ground us, reminding us of the legacy of love left behind by the person we have said goodbye to. They exist not as frivolous excuses for a hooley but as a necessary part of moving us through to the next stage. –  Anna Rawhiti-Connell

When equality means equal outcomes, it removes individual effort and requires chopping everyone down to the same level. – Oliver Hartwich

When a society forgets what excellence is, it worships mediocrity. And the only way to notice the misstep is to look at other countries and compare. – Oliver Hartwich

Kiwis have mothballed their ambition. We have forgotten about growing the pie so we can share it. We have given up on excellence in favour of wellbeing, kindness and not rocking the boat. I am convinced this country can do better. But to achieve excellence, we must demand it. From our councils, our national politicians, our schools, our businesses – and, crucially, from ourselves. – Oliver Hartwich

The next question many people ask is what’s the difference between a median house price and an average house price? That’s a very good question which can be answered like this – the median house price is the price of just one house that you cannot afford to buy, whereas the average house price is the price of many houses that you cannot afford to buy.   – James Elliott

New Zealand is a victim of its own success. The low visibility of Covid-19 here means people are less likely to wear masks, scan QR codes, use hand sanitiser, get tested and stay home when sick. We’re stuck in something of a paradox – the better we handle Covid-19, the more our response is jeopardised in the future. – Marc Daalder

When considering whether life is getting better or worse, we need to remember to do the maths. The numbers show it’s not all bad news, and most of it is good news. Just because something is bad today doesn’t mean it was better in the past. We have reason be sceptical, but many more reasons to be optimistic, and especially to be grateful. – Andrew Taberner

I can see a guy hitting the face of one of my men. I’m playing for my country. That’s not respect. – Pablo Matera

Everything is hard in Argentina. At the moment it is one of the toughest times in our country. We wanted to show our people when you fight and work hard you get what you fight for. – Pablo Matera

MPs who are bitter, angry or disappointed need to suck it up and move on. Dwelling on the past few months will do nothing to win the election in 2023. The only way forward is through positivity.   – Monique Poirier

The simple fact is that under current policy settings, micro-economic policies that attempt to artificially boost incomes beyond what businesses and the economy can afford will simply end up driving a bigger wedge between the haves and the have nots in terms of asset prices and wealth, through the mechanism of ever lower interest rates. We are chasing our tails. – Steven Joyce

Our system – and worldwide it is the case – eliminates mavericks. How high does your tolerance for boredom need to be before you are willing to sit in Parliament under Trevor Mallard? How patient (or ambivalent to results) do you need to be to hold a Ministry and work with State sector leaders (all of whom seem to have grey as their favourite colour)? – Alwyn Poole

It’s accepting that while nobody can reasonably demand perfection, these leakages are too often and too many. It’s simply asking that those tasked with designing and overseeing the systems that keep us safe do so to the level whereby they will own any and all failures. Until that time, these cases will continue. There will be spiralling consequences radiating out from the incident and affecting huge numbers of people in and out of New Zealand, and eventually one – maybe this one, maybe the next – will spread further, and kill someone. – Duncan Grieve

The word austerity is already disingenuous, to put it no stronger. The word in this context means the attempt to align government expenditure a little more closely with government income. It certainly does not mean hair shirts and monastic silence in unheated stone-walled rooms. – Theodore Dalrymple

It seemed to me that rather than be overwhelmed by times that try men’s souls, we can still dream of making a better world; that small happinesses, and committed kindnesses, and goodwill to all men can be the yeast that quietly help us all to rise above fear, judgement, grief, and anger, or despair, doubt and despondency during this turn of the wheel. These small happinesses bring us back to the present moment, and anchor us in the goodness of the world. – Valerie Davies

If you do not get enough money to run your business, you haven’t got a business. If you can’t extract the money you need to survive, you go out of business. – Mike Chapman

You can dislike people and books without needing to publicly declare it. People do not need to be publicly punished for every statement you disagree with. Stop burning the books. Stop calling out every little thing. Stop performing virtue and purity and go out and behave like a decent human being. – Ani O’Brien

There is such power in the pages of a book. There is intrigue and excitement and bafflement, ideas and ideals that penetrate minds, even years later, even into adulthood. Books offer views of other worlds, they are windows into strangers’ souls, introducing us to characters who wear different shoes, different skins, different scars. Books are objects of art, too: their smell and their weight and their beautiful, tactile, tangible covers – Sonya Wilson

Details about the increased caring are yet to be revealed but experts predict it will be in line with the prime minister’s previous track record of looking thoughtful and sad whenever questioned about an issue in front of media, and will consist of furrowed brows, worried frowns, and empathic nodding. The furrowing, frowning and nodding, which Treasury refers to as F2N, will increase by one percentage point a year, aggregating each year to an astonishing 9% increase in Net Prime Ministerial Caring, or NPMC, by the end of the decade. –  Danyl Mclauchlan

In her post-cabinet press conference, the prime minister would not be drawn on whether she would care passionately about child poverty but deeply about climate change, or the reverse. The adverb she would use to care about housing affordability was still being decided. “Intensely” and “strongly” are rumoured to be options and Ardern refused to rule them out, declaring, “I’m leaving every option on the table. I will choose a word ending in ly. That is my commitment to you.” – Danyl Mclauchlan

The key to balancing tradeoffs between cooperation and parochialism lies in understanding that not all groups are created equal. Groups with voluntary memberships that allow people to be part of multiple, transient, and overlapping communities—for example, sports fans, chess clubs, or single-issue political organizations—tend to generate widespread cooperation both within and between groups because their members are also part of larger communities. . .  These types of groups allow diverse, large-scale societies to thrive by drawing people with varied beliefs, interests, opinions, and backgrounds together. These between-group connections encourage people to confront each other’s humanity and help to curtail out-group hatred. In contrast, groups that are formed around fixed, unchanging and non-overlapping identities—for example, sex, race, or ethnicity—while fostering tight bonds between their members, will tend to sow division and cultivate hatred between groups. These groups are likely to breed resentment, foment animosity, and promote tribalism.  – Robert Lynch

Nobody knows how history will unfold, but locking people into an unalterable hierarchy of suffering, pitting groups that we were born into against one another, nurturing persecution and offering up an overly simplistic interpretation of history all seem perfectly designed to prepare the field for another cataclysmic event. What will a nation enthralled by tribal identity do when a president refuses to concede regardless of the vote count? And once this process is set in motion, it might just shatter the fragile foundation on which our society rests. A politics based on membership in a particular religious, racial, or social group rather than broader groupings of people with the same political views was a dubious luxury that our species can simply no longer afford. Although E.O. Wilson originally intended “Wonderful theory, wrong species” to be a critique of Marxism, it is just as applicable to critical theory and its progeny—identity politics. – Robert Lynch

They tell us to stop flying; sell the car, ride a bike, stop eating meat, exist on mung beans and kombucha and there they are sipping carbonated water in business class, after stepping out of a taxi or Crown car at the airport.  – Ryan Bridge

For young people growing up in some of New Zealand’s most culturally diverse communities today, the nation is multicultural and looks and feels like them – less homogenous than prevailing attitudes suggest and less mono-cultural than previous generations. – Bronwyn Wood

First, we must stay true to our values. The National Party values of individual freedom and choice, personal responsibility, limited government, competitive enterprise, and equal citizenship and opportunity. They are the values I believe in. They are the values that you believe in. They are New Zealand values. They are the values that have made our country great and the values that our country needs now. – Judith Collins

People will not vote for change without reason. We need to convince them to have high hopes for themselves, to believe a better New Zealand is possible, to expect more from their Government. – Judith Collins

We will expose the government’s wasteful spending and the costs it is putting on businesses, the shackles holding back innovation and entrepreneurship, the closed thinking that hinders progress across so many policy areas, the failure of imagination, the lack of ambition, and the tolerance for bland mediocrity. That mediocrity is robbing too many New Zealanders of the opportunities and choices they deserve. –  Judith Collins

In a crisis, we need to be more than a modified status quo. There are so many areas where New Zealand needs better policy. Our education system is falling backwards, rapidly. More than one-in five-children are leaving our schools without the basic literacy and numeracy skills they need to succeed. Our next generation is learning less than the generation before. – Judith Collins

My fellow members, I believe National is at its best when we speak to the aspirations of New Zealanders, when we voice your hopes and give you reason to believe they can be realised. The belief that hard work should reap reward. That we can deliver our children greater opportunities than we had. That each of us has it within us to shape our own lives for the better if given the choices and responsibility to do so. That the solutions to our worst problems lie not in the hands of an ever–bigger State, but in stronger families and stronger communities. – Judith Collins

We need our leaders to lead. This is an occasion where the nature of leadership is to draw a path, to reassure people about the options that lie ahead, to create both the sense of urgent action but also the sense of a better world. This is not going to happen if people feel alienated and intimidated – they’re not going to participate actively if they don’t see the upside as well as some of the challenges we will face if we don’t move. Leadership is being prepared to stake a position, having gathered some evidence, to then coach and guide and reassure others on a journey. – Rod Carr

The science itself is open to discussion among well-informed scientists. And then the implications of that science for human activity and the impacts that policy change will have on human activity merge from science into judgment. I think we need to be very careful that the pursuit of perfect science doesn’t become the enemy of early action. – Rod Carr

In the agricultural sector, there is no or very little denial of climate change. It’s a long time since I’ve had a farmer [say] that the weather patterns which they are experiencing are similar to the patterns their parents or grandparents experienced if they’d been in the same geographic location for a century. It is warmer in parts, drier in parts, wetter in parts, windier in parts. They are obviously anxious and concerned about how they sustain a viable business if they are unable to continue practices that they are familiar with. In the agricultural sector there is a growing awareness of the need for change, but also a concern about what is the nature of the change that is needed. I think the agricultural sector is highly innovative, I don’t think they’re in denial. For my money, New Zealand should be substantially increasing its investment in agriculture research. – Rod Carr

We hear a lot about structural, aka “institutional”, racism. It falls into the same category as so-called unconscious bias, which can be defined as the bias you have when you didn’t know you had a bias. (So how do you know you have it? Because woke activists tell you. They recognise it even when you can’t.) – Karl du Fresne

New Zealand has to decide what type of place it wants to be: a diverse, harmonious, tolerant, multicultural country with a common interest in prosperity and freedom, or a splintered one in which multiple groups jostle for special treatment on the basis of real or imagined differences of ethnicity, sexual preference, culture, religion, gender or any one of the many other divisive “identities”. I think I know which society most New Zealanders would opt for. – Karl du Fresne

I still look at the fact that [after] two and a half years, traumatised children have been traumatised again by the processes of Oranga Tamariki. You’re re-traumatising all those children just so we’re ‘culturally safe’ now. Where’s the consideration of the trauma of doing that. I think that’s what’s missing from this whole picture. What will this do to those children? – Mark Solomon

Children are real live human beings, they’re not objects. They’re not parcels that we can move around. They have feelings, they have significant ties. Children’s very survival depends on their emotional connections to adults. I don’t want to be disrespectful, but it’s a simplistic belief that culture trumps all else. And so therefore it justifies the removal of these children from where they have been for two and a half years, and the movement to people who at this point in time are from a child’s perspective, strangers. – Nicola Atwool

This suggests to me (not a very original thought) that a free society can exist only where there is some cultural, and not merely a legalistic, understanding of a constitutional order: an acceptance of limits of outrage, for example, if you happen to be fortunate enough to live in a tolerably tolerant society, even when that society is not perfectly just or fair (as no society yet known to man is).

This cultural understanding is easily lost, and indeed seems to be in the process of decline in Western countries, most dangerously among the very class—the intelligentsia—in whom one might have expected or hoped it to be strongest. Our universities are becoming bastions of unfreedom, if my few young academic friends are to be believed, and we are raising up a generation of secular ayatollahs. – Theodore Dalrymple

The attempt to whittle this down to a story about bloodlines undermines the rights of that child to be themselves as a whole person. I will always advocate that the best thing for Māori is, by Māori for Māori, but if a Māori child is happy and loved; supported in their cultural identity and has access to knowledge of their whakapapa, then re-traumising them to rewrite the OT agenda is patronising; it is cynical and smacks of the state tokenising and recolonising these children.  A foster parent

As caregivers we commit to protecting the privacy of the child. We honour this – and know that if we break this trust; we put at jeopardy the secure placements the children we care for have – it is with fear that I tell the story below; but also with anger and most importantly with love. Love for the children that we try to do the best for. The children whom we know better than any social worker. That thrive and flourish in our care. The children whose lives are controlled and manipulated by OT to satisfy a process. To tick a box. I also have another story – but it cannot be told without identifying ourselves or the child and there are too many people who can be hurt by this and I do not feel I have the right to tell that story when it is not mine to tell. I started writing that story a year ago. I felt it needed to be told but I had no voice to tell it with. I think for now it needs to remain untold by me: I still do not have that voice. – A foster parent

I want our voice heard. Our whānau voice and most importantly the voices of the children. I want them to be able to feel they have the right to say what they want and to have that listened to and embedded in the plan that will shape their destinies. Because whatever happens their destinies will be changed and it is not them or the people who know them best that will do the shaping. OT controls that narrative. – A foster parent

It’s important that we act now to protect vulnerable consumers from the tyranny of surveillance capitalism. As the late internet activist Aaron Swartz once wrote, “Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves.” – Trent Smith

In spite and because of

How could so many good people, many of them devout Christians to whom so much of what Donald Trump did, said and stood for should have been anathema,  support him?

Economist Alex Tabarrok has an answer:

My takeaway is that a large number of people HATE the cultural left (not the econ left) and are willing to put up with almost anything, including incompetence, chaos, corruption and bad policy, to signal their views loud and clear.

— Alex Tabarrok 🛡️ (@ATabarrok) November 4, 2020

I think he’s right. At least some voters looked past Trump’s many personal and political failings because their opposition to the left’s cultural warfare was greater.

The alternative they were voting against, wasn’t necessarily policies President-elect Joe Biden was promoting but the divisive behaviour and views of some of his supporters.

They were voting against cancel culture, identity politics and the labeling of anyone who didn’t buy into their beliefs as racist, sexist and whatever other ist the left throw at those who dare to question their world view.

President-elect Joe Biden must understand this and work to bring those who didn’t like Trump but supported at least some of the Trumpism onside.

He started well with a gracious speech in which he offered opponents an olive branch:

. . . All those of you who voted for President Trump, I understand the disappointment tonight. I’ve lost a couple of times myself,” he said, referring to his previous runs for the office.

“But now, let’s give each other a chance,” he said.

Biden has sought to be a foil to Trump’s divisive messaging, telling the audience Saturday that his administration would not be as alienating to those with different political beliefs.

“It’s time to put away the harsh rhetoric,” he said, “lower the temperature, see each other again, listen to each other again, and to make progress.”

Biden has repeatedly said on the campaign trail that he was running as a Democratic candidate but would be “an American president.”

He echoed that sentiment again, talking about Trump supporters: “We have to stop treating our opponents as our enemies. They are not our enemies. They’re Americans.” . . 

The cultural left’s clarion calls to division are not confined to the USA but if Biden can quieten them down there, there might be hope they can be quietened down elsewhere as well.